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Show HN: Web browser to help programmers think clearly

bonsaibrowser.com

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Re: Show HN: Web browser to help programmers think clearly

#161

Post by SixDouble5321 »

leobg wrote: post #16

Downloaded it, installed it, and loving it! The big thing I'm missing most is LastPass. Without access to my passwords, I can see myself falling back to Chrome. In fact, I need to keep Chrome running so I can look up my login names and passwords there in order to copy them over to Bonsai when I'm being asked to log in. If you could support popular password managers inside your browser, that would help a lot!

You can open your lastpass vault in a tab, and use the "bookmarks" in their interface to ensure you are visiting the expected websites.

An authority on the topic suggests users avoid using browser extensions with their password managers:

https://lock.cmpxchg8b.com/passmgrs.html

Re: Show HN: Web browser to help programmers think clearly

#164

Post by eyelidlessness »

crazy_horse wrote: post #135
anigbrowl wrote: post #112

Love it, this is the most innovative thing in the browser space for a long while. It's baffling to me how boring most 'new' browsers are - most propositions are 'like X but with less friction on these 2 or 3 things'. I hate that it's only for Mac so far, but glad to see others are on the way. I've been thinking about picking up a cheap older mac for development work, though, and this is one more reason in favor.

I'm surprised to see you so excited about this. Have you used tiling window managers? What does this and a rofi or similar component not have, or a gnome3 script? Not as convenient, yeah. The big concern I would have if I were these guys is their magic is their UI, apparently, and they've given it away. If they truly have something good, it's some Electron windows inside a gui kit. Not to understate the work, but the…

Speaking as someone who often communicates before considering whether the people I'm speaking to share my background knowledge... this might be a more effective message if you ask "have you tried ____?"

Re: Show HN: Web browser to help programmers think clearly

#166

Post by crazy_horse »

eyelidlessness wrote: post #164
crazy_horse wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprised to see you so excited about this. Have you used tiling window managers? What does this and a rofi or similar component not have, or a gnome3 script? Not as convenient, yeah. The big concern I would have if I were these guys is their magic is their UI, apparently, and they've given it away. If they truly have something good, it's some Electron windows inside a gui kit. Not to understate the work, but the…

Speaking as someone who often communicates before considering whether the people I'm speaking to share my background knowledge... this might be a more effective message if you ask "have you tried ____?"

Sure, I know this sounds like well-actually anyway, but I tried to soften it by not asking "have you not used..."?

On any Ubuntu/debian system this is pretty trivial try using apt install. You've i3 which is an old popular program with a big community. You use it with scripts like dmenu. It's definitely more of a "hacker" setup that your parents probably aren't going to want to use, but if what you are doing is focusing on a few documents, it's hard to beat. It's a lot more complete than floating single windows over your pane of code. The Bonsai implementation is slow in comparison.

There are lots of others like bspwm (even more hardcore), but my favorite anyone can use this tiling window manager is easily pop_os's from System76. When I have to use Windows or Mac and I don't have that functionality it is annoying.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUrvF0Y9AUg

This functionality really should just be built into the OS. The mac equivalent hacks have slowly gotten incorporated into official releases over the years (side by side windows), but they seem to pop up and then die, like Spectacle. If these guys want to do more than just browser documents, what they've got to build is essentially a cross platform tiling window manager. Not easy.

I think the closest you could come to hacking this together is with qtile (py) and you could get pretty close functionality wise.

http://www.qtile.org/

Re: Show HN: Web browser to help programmers think clearly

#167

Post by peterburkimsher »

hyferg wrote: post #17
JasonFruit wrote: post #10

Some of these features would be great built into a window manager. I'd love to be able to handle open windows the way you handle open pages.

What types of things do you run in your OS that you think would be useful to group like this?

Bonsai browser looks great! Especially Spatial Organization.

Is it possible to have nested subfolders?

This could be for browsers (tabs in [project] in [work]). Also in spreadsheets (Excel Sheets inside folders - anyone from Microsoft here?). Also in music (iTunes has playlist folders!). Also in Contacts (people in [social group] in [country]).

The way I imagine the user interface is similar to existing tabs or bookmarks, but with a drop-down menu, and to be able to easily access all sub-items by clicking the folder.

Re: Show HN: Web browser to help programmers think clearly

#168

Post by AnonC »

I don’t know why I’m unable to see a reply link to reply to the OP’s comment here. I visited the website and was excited to see the organization screenshots. However, I didn’t see anything else on the website and I have a bunch of questions.

Is this closed source or open source? Which browser engine and framework is this based on? Can I (or will I be able to in the future) install WebExtensions line in the popular browsers? Is it (or will it be) a paid product? Will it be a paid subscription? Will it start showing ads? What information does the browser collect and send back for telemetry or any other tracking purposes (I couldn’t find a privacy policy)?

If there are pages on the website with answers to these questions and more, please share those. If not, please document these on the website.

Re: Show HN: Web browser to help programmers think clearly

#169

Post by infogulch »

Love the opened-from tracking for tabs and spatial organization, which reminds me of the Promnesia extension [0] that helps you track when you've been to a page in the past and where you came from.

I think there's a huge untapped potential value for users in historical browsing activity that is just wasted by browsers today (well when they're not busy siphoning it off to advertisers). The standard browser history data and ui is so crap at mapping to your intuition about how to find some tab you had open recently that it's basically useless. It was modeled when the primary navigation in a browser was one window with no tabs and you clicked from site to site literally linearly, and this design has never been updated since. Now I have 2-4 windows, with dozens of tabs each, on 4 computing devices, where windows have been open for times ranging from 2 minutes to 2 months, where on each each tab I may switch to it or move it or close it or open new tabs from it at any time. And all that activity is reduced to a single linear 'history' where the order in which items appear is nonsensical no matter what sort order you use. Real browsing activity is no longer linear, modeling it as linear is hostile to the user.

Knowing that you've seen something before but you can't figure out when or how you got there because it's pointless to trawl through thousands of completely unrelated links in history is despair.

[0]: https://github.com/karlicoss/promnesia

Re: Show HN: Web browser to help programmers think clearly

#170

Post by badassiel »

LeftHandPath wrote: post #123
anigbrowl wrote: post #112

Love it, this is the most innovative thing in the browser space for a long while. It's baffling to me how boring most 'new' browsers are - most propositions are 'like X but with less friction on these 2 or 3 things'. I hate that it's only for Mac so far, but glad to see others are on the way. I've been thinking about picking up a cheap older mac for development work, though, and this is one more reason in favor.

I love the spatial organization. I, not even five or six hours ago, had made a note on my iPhone describing something just like it (except where you would get to the spatial organization view by dragging down the bar at the top of the window). My thought was that we (humans) can remember spaces quite well, and certainly much better than we can track a tab's location in an ever-expanding list. IMO, spatial organizatio…

It just so happens I was thinking about spatial org just yesterday, that it would be so nice if I can have 'villages' of tabs on a (geographical) Map. Amazing co-incidence that I woke up to bonsai browser notification!

You might find The Humane Representation of Thought[1] by Bret Victor[2] useful, where he demonstrates by example, how existing tools/software (generally speaking) doesn't utilize all the 'superpowers' that we acquired via evolution.

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[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agOdP2Bmieg

[2]: http://worrydream.com

Edit - grammatical fixes

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