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Text editing hates you too (2019)

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Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#151

Post by abecedarius »

skybrian wrote: post #126
titzer wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's easy to say "let's go back to the time when things were simple"; it's a lot harder to say "folks in (e.g.) Israel shouldn't be able to type in their native language". Is writing a text editor literally so hard that we can't do it twice (or three, or five times)? There are literally trillions of lines of code in existence now. Instead of making a five hundred thousand line text editor because are terrified of w…

People who work in multiple languages probably wouldn't be too happy with this. (Particularly not with dropping English since it's the most common second language.) This also isn't going to work economically for companies selling consumer apps because they aren't going to want to limit their market to a one country, particularly if it's a small one. There's more money in targeting the world, so programmers just have…

Conceivably we'd be better off with a compound-document standard, like the 90s attempts OLE and OpenDoc but somehow nicer. Then multilanguage documents, with specialized editors, would fall out as one use for compound documents.

Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#152

Post by amake »

kayodelycaon wrote: post #132
maccard wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The number 1 assumption is that all text will meet the format you're expecting it in. Be that an encoding (everyone in the US speaks English, but utf-8 is dangerously compatible with ASCII), or a character range (do we block input of certain characters?) Presentatuon is huge too, How do we render a pasted newline into a single line block? Where do you put the cursor if someone pastes a block of Arabic text into your…

> utf-8 is dangerously compatible with ASCII This. My name is Kayodé Lycaon. Note the é... how many places don’t support it? Some people consider names to be sacred and changing the spelling is more than a little offensive. Even UTF-8 can’t represent all characters in use. I believe there are Japanese names that can’t be represented by its character set. I get it’s technically difficult but so many places treat peopl…

UTF-8 can represent any Unicode code point. If there is a character that it can’t represent, then that’s because that character is not encoded in Unicode; it has nothing to do with UTF-8 itself.

Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#153

Post by jkrubin »

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 brilliant

Ps: I just sent this to everyone I know.

Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#154

Post by danybittel »

akersten wrote: post #138
Oddskar wrote: post #11

Having touched adjacent technologies to this as well, I could not shake the feeling that text editing on the web, and WYSIWYG text editors especially, would be very well served by some sort of common understanding and agreement of output given certain inputs. As alluded to in the article, the devil really is in the details in this domain. When one knows what to look for, most rich text inputs really miss the mark in…

>> the recent trend to start interpreting selection of text + pasting of a link as "turn this text into a link using the URL in the clipboard". It just makes complete sense. Ugh, no no no no no. Modes like this are the opposite of making sense. Highlight something, and press paste - of course it is a replacement of the highlighted text, because that's what pasting does. Now, we want highlighting something and pasting…

I agree, but that is generally not referred to as modes. A mode in UI is, when it switches and the inputs behave different. For example the "Insert" key is a mode. One could argue that Editing and Debugging (of code) are two different modes.

What you (and me) dislike are "assistants". It is when a UI decides upon something. If you take close attention you can see clippy flash up and give a helping hand. /s.

Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#155

Post by iainmerrick »

I think this overstates the general case a bit, although it has some great examples.

Basic text editing is not inherently hard, as the people here citing “ed” point out. Even text editing left-to-right ASCII in mouse-driven WYSIWYG style is not too hard -- I’ve done it, for old Mac apps where there was no good reusable OS widget, and it was tough but tractable.

What is incredibly hard is supporting editing in many different scripts. I think it’s hard for two reasons. First, there’s inherently just a lot of ground to cover -- multiple scripts, multiple encodings, multiple text directions, contextual rendering, emoji. Second, you can’t cleanly separate it into layers, as text input, text selection and text rendering all impact each other (I love the example of Chinese text input messing with vim’s command mode).

If you could just find a way to keep those layers separate it would go back to tough-but-tractable. But from a user’s perspective, having the layers mixed up is (arguably) what makes it easy to use! You don’t need to switch back and forth between different modes to do stuff, it’s all just WYSIWYG. (Although what with emoji selector popups and the like it’s not actually perfectly modeless, like it can be in the left-to-right 8-bit encoding case.)

Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#156

Post by bryanrasmussen »

blake8086 wrote: post #106
oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love that apart from the "Some can avoid it" bit — feels out of place with the rest. Who's "some"? Pithy slogans often come in three parts rather than four; I love the overall message, I think I'd just prefer it with that 25% removed.

You're a genius.

I think this is a funny thing on several levels - one you see the part that doesn't fit so you remove it making you the genius - in this way it's a nice motivational poster level thought.

But you could be a some. But if you were a some it would mean that there was no possibility of actually removing the some from the statement because it actually did describe accurately that there were somes that could avoid it.

So it is sort of a Gödelian joke.

Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#157

Post by oblio »

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…

You do know that the bastion of computerhood, the US, is mostly non metric?

Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#159

Post by wruza »

billforsternz wrote: post #59
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…

I think this feature is called 'virtual space'. I like it too and would always look for it and turn it on if available in any text editor I used. But it's not as common as it once was.

This feature conflicts with whitespace-at-line-end rules, because if your editor truncates ws at eol, it must account for multiline string literals in a generic way, and if it doesn’t, everyone else editing that file has to deal with ················’s scattered randomly all over the text/code/diffs. Especially when “·” renders as as “ ” instead, and pressing the End key turns into a lottery. I can see ways for this mode to remain tempting to someone, but it’s just incompatible with everything beyond that editing session.

Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#160

Post by Oddskar »

akersten wrote: post #138
Oddskar wrote: post #11

Having touched adjacent technologies to this as well, I could not shake the feeling that text editing on the web, and WYSIWYG text editors especially, would be very well served by some sort of common understanding and agreement of output given certain inputs. As alluded to in the article, the devil really is in the details in this domain. When one knows what to look for, most rich text inputs really miss the mark in…

>> the recent trend to start interpreting selection of text + pasting of a link as "turn this text into a link using the URL in the clipboard". It just makes complete sense. Ugh, no no no no no. Modes like this are the opposite of making sense. Highlight something, and press paste - of course it is a replacement of the highlighted text, because that's what pasting does. Now, we want highlighting something and pasting…

If you want to delete the highlighted text, then why not press backspace or delete? Those already have the explicit action you're looking for.

>> Now, we want highlighting something and pasting to contextually mean "insert markup specific to some markup language, after parsing what's on the clipboard and deciding that it looks like another part of that markup language."

Not really sure what you're trying to say. You don't think they do this already? WYSIWYG-editors on the web almost all have normalization and sanitization built in when you paste something, and depending on where you paste the content will get merged with existing rich text blocks.

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