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Text editing hates you too (2019)

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Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#31

Post by bombcar »

zaptheimpaler wrote: post #27
slver wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends how big you think. Dealing with status quo, things like text direction are necessary complication. But at a higher scale it’s purely incidental complexity: you only need one direction for all languages. All languages are linear. No language uses direction to encode meaning. Direction in language is just “stuff starts one place and ends in another”. Balkanization of the encodings is not a good thing. Imagin…

?srekaeps hsilgne-non lla rof sdrawkcab txet lla ekam ot si noitulos ruoy oS

It's not the last time major portions of the world fundamentally changed how they did things to align with the major powers at the time.

Even WITH all the Unicode support that currently exists in the computing world I don't know of a single computer language that isn't based on English in ASCII. I guess you could count APL there (or perl!).

Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#32

Post by crazygringo »

deckard1 wrote: post #25

Regarding the vertical cursor movement, back in the day there was an alternative behavior. You can see this in QuickBASIC/QBasic[1]. Here, Microsoft treated the entire screen as a grid. I always thought that was a great UI. It hides the fact that there are line endings (\n on Unix or \r\n for DOS). And why shouldn't it? That's an implementation detail. And as evident by DOS using CR+LF it goes back to the days where…

Sadly, that's not a possible alternative behavior for a world where proportional fonts exist. It's for monospace only.

Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#33

Post by slver »

bombcar wrote: post #31
zaptheimpaler wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

?srekaeps hsilgne-non lla rof sdrawkcab txet lla ekam ot si noitulos ruoy oS

It's not the last time major portions of the world fundamentally changed how they did things to align with the major powers at the time. Even WITH all the Unicode support that currently exists in the computing world I don't know of a single computer language that isn't based on English in ASCII. I guess you could count APL there (or perl!).

Imagine if Europe was pre-metric system today. Merely proposing unification I'd be instantly downvoted, and called a bigotted racist who doesn't respect the cultural heritage of every nation.

Unfortunately those are the times right now. We, the most adaptable and intelligent species on the planet, have become used to bragging about not having to adapt or know a lot. We sure do have really strong opinions about everything, though.

Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#34

Post by qsort »

geenew wrote: post #23
oblio wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And then we discovered that not only English speakers want to use PCs.

Didn’t extended ASCII cover that and make text terminals usable with non-English character sets? Genuinely curious.

Extended ASCII was actually several different and incompatible encoding, "codepages". It was kind of a solution, but there were major issues that made it much worse than Unicode/utf8:

- Asian languages needed special encodings, 256 characters weren't sufficient.

- It was impossible to work with different languages in the same document, each codepage only covered some character/alphabet.

- There was no 'safe subset': Unicode codepoints 0-127 are exactly ASCII, which means that ASCII is compliant utf8. The same wasn't true at the time.

Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#35

Post by phkahler »

On the emoji color (skintone) modifier... A normal person wants to select their emoji from a set. Only a programmer would allow the user to input a tiny program with a symbol and a color modifier and then interpret it.

If you want to make text editing a little easier, treat every character along with any style applied to it as a single entity. This way you avoid a lot of potential problems like in TFA as well as things like nesting of modifiers that may not be allowed to overlap - output those when all the characters are complete. In other words, don't track tags but generate them as a post-process when storing the data.

Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#36

Post by noofen »

7373737373 wrote: post #9
bombcar wrote: post #4

For people involved with technology I think this is a perfect response to "how hard can it be" - no matter if they're discussing how to keep toilet paper stocked or why cURL can be replaced with five lines of shell script - it emphatically shows how complicated something apparently simple can be once you start diving into it.

This seems to be the ideal occasion to show off my latest pet project: https://icebergcharts.com

This is fantastic. My only wish is to be able to export them as a PNG... maybe add a small watermark so people can find you.

Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#37

Post by crazygringo »

slver wrote: post #29
zaptheimpaler wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

?srekaeps hsilgne-non lla rof sdrawkcab txet lla ekam ot si noitulos ruoy oS

> ?srekaeps hsilgne-non lla rof sdrawkcab txet lla ekam ot si noitulos ruoy oS So you just said all non-English speakers use right-to-left? No, the direction isn't what's confusing me, rather the fact you're trying to score a cheap outrage comment, but actually wrote non-sense no matter which direction you read it. How about maybe educate yourself a little, and rephrase your question to reflect reality, and we can ha…

I'm not who you're responding to, and obviously the commenter should have said "some" non-English speakers rather than "all".

But the main point is still obvious and true: how would you like it if another country was a dominant technological power and we all had to re-learn to read and write English backwards precisely like that to use computers?

No need to get snarky about it. Comments like "maybe educate yourself a little" are against HN guidelines. [1]

Also, Korean is different because the characters represent entire syllables, so legibility isn't impaired as much by direction. CJK scripts have historically been flexible in direction in a way that Latin scripts never have been.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#38

Post by pjc50 »

oblio wrote: post #17
slver wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Things are as hard as we allow them to be. You know, fixed width ascii terminals in text mode sure were much easier in the 80s

And then we discovered that not only English speakers want to use PCs.

Not even just non English speakers, we in en-gb land had enough trouble getting £ to work 100% of the time, which was kind of a basic requirement for business use.

Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#39

Post by deckard1 »

crazygringo wrote: post #32
deckard1 wrote: post #25

Regarding the vertical cursor movement, back in the day there was an alternative behavior. You can see this in QuickBASIC/QBasic[1]. Here, Microsoft treated the entire screen as a grid. I always thought that was a great UI. It hides the fact that there are line endings (\n on Unix or \r\n for DOS). And why shouldn't it? That's an implementation detail. And as evident by DOS using CR+LF it goes back to the days where…

Sadly, that's not a possible alternative behavior for a world where proportional fonts exist. It's for monospace only.

as I said

> Of course, this is not universal and only works with monospace fonts in certain languages.

But even then, monospace didn't go away. Most developers are working with code in monospace right now.

Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#40

Post by bombcar »

slver wrote: post #33
bombcar wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not the last time major portions of the world fundamentally changed how they did things to align with the major powers at the time. Even WITH all the Unicode support that currently exists in the computing world I don't know of a single computer language that isn't based on English in ASCII. I guess you could count APL there (or perl!).

Imagine if Europe was pre-metric system today. Merely proposing unification I'd be instantly downvoted, and called a bigotted racist who doesn't respect the cultural heritage of every nation. Unfortunately those are the times right now. We, the most adaptable and intelligent species on the planet, have become used to bragging about not having to adapt or know a lot. We sure do have really strong opinions about everyt…

I think that's the dividing line - each person decides if it's worth it to learn something new. For example, some people love foreign media so much that they trade fansubs of said media or even learn the language so they can watch.

Someone who wants to program computers will most likely learn functional English, just because of how much content on that subject is in English (the "lingua franca" of computers).

But someone in Mongolia who wants to text his mom has no inclination to learn a whole new language just to handle the limitations of ASCII. And if you want to sell him a phone you'll meet him where he is.

(This doesn't even begin to touch the "it's not fair" aspect that people like to point at.)

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