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Text editing hates you too (2019)

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Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#161

Post by chousuke »

patrickdavey wrote: post #128
josephg wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most things in life and programming exist on a trade off curve of goodness vs simplicity. Making the thing better means giving up simplicity. Making it simple means removing features people want. Geniuses invent new ways to get both. Those ideas permanently move the trade off curve outwards. In programming, some abstractions which have done this are: Operating systems (Abstracting away the hardware), Grace Hopper’s i…

I once read a book called "simplicity" by de bono I think it was... He made the point (I think) that you do want simplicity, you don't want simplistic. That is: it should be able to do all the things you want to, but in an easy to use manner. Worth striving for I believe.

"Simple" isn't always easy either.

To me, simplicity means that there's clarity of purpose for each component and how it interfaces with other components. A large system can still be simple if the interactions and interfaces between the different components are reasonably well understood and justifiable. I think thoughtful UI design is how you prevent complexity. The UI for developers and software is the API.

When you start adding features and instead of generalizing you simply (heh) add a special case to allow two unrelated components to communicate, and then another, and another, until the two components become dependent on each other such that neither can do anything without the other; then you have a complex system, and the "UI" for the developer is worse because it's full of seemingly random elements in random places that only do one very specific thing.

Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#162

Post by wruza »

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…

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

I had to reread this 5 or 6 times to get the meaning, not joking. Please no, or at least use custom plugins for that and leave our generic text input alone.

Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#163

Post by wruza »

Oddskar wrote: post #160
akersten wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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…

The problem here is “you can’t quickly make a link in our wysiwyg”. Screwing paste is not a correct answer to that. Let it detect that a clipboard text is a link and tooltip-hint a user that they can combine it with a selection by pressing ctrl-alt-v, or something similar. Nobody is against your easy editing, but not at the cost of a cognitive overload. I wish UI/UX designers read some books on how human mind works or how to do UI/UX at least.

Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#164

Post by patrec »

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #89
leoc wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alan Perlis' old motivational-poster slogan "Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it." has a fair bit going for it.

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.

> Who's "some"?

Charles H. Moore, e.g. -- the 25% pulls its weight.

Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#165

Post by wruza »

phkahler wrote: post #35

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 thin…

I second that. Half of these “issues” arise from the fact that author is a programmer-y person and knows how unichars work. Normal people have no clue and completely no expectations on that matter, and don’t wanna have.

Neither do I. If I’d fuck my emoji up in such way, I’d just expect to backspace it and type it from scratch. No need to spend mythical man-epochs on a trivia nobody really cares of.

Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#166

Post by wruza »

jonnycomputer wrote: post #131

Elsewhere here on HN people are complaining about those scientists who can't seem to replicate their results. But here I'm reading that all those smart programmers can't even handle text selection right. So I guess I just want to say: things get complex, really fast, and a little humility goes a long long way.

Smart people love to solve complexity, but they often forget that “how it should work” is a complex knowledge by itself and the more people know, (1) the less they trust an implementation at hand, and (2) the more likely they have a different opinion. Sometimes you just have to kick the can down the road and accept that nothing and nobody is ideal. Then you get a working system that everyone loves (except chinese).

Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#167

Post by slver »

crazygringo wrote: post #142
slver wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You PoV is understandable, but still do you believe the ongoing long-term pain of this fragmentation is LESS than the short-term pain of unifying? This is why I mentioned the metric system, and what not. Every time throughout history when we decided to unify, the advantages VASTLY, and I mean VASTLY have outweighed the short-term drawbacks. In fact I'd say, one of the biggest test for us as species is that we can ful…

> the advantages VASTLY, and I mean VASTLY have outweighed the short-term drawbacks. Except you're not even including the value of diversity in your argument. "Unity" also leads to groupthink and monocultures which are less resistant to new challenges. Unity comes with costs you're ignoring. Languages aren't just an encoding, but an entire paradigm of thinking. Eradicating linguistic differences eradicates entire per…

Languages aren’t paradigms of thinking. We borrow phrases and concept from each other at a higher level, they’re basically identical, unless you’re isolated on an island and don’t interact with anyone.

For proof, look up the etymology of a random set of words. They come from all over the world.

This is literally pride over encodings. It’s superficial, petty, and ignorance makes it seem profound and important.

Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#168

Post by coldtea »

ratww wrote: post #96
alex_smart wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does that mean that Geniuses would be terrible software engineers, since removing complexity is seldom the right thing to do business-decision wise?

No, it doesn't, and no, it isn't. As much as some people like to pretend it doesn't exist, accidental complexity is a thing, and reducing it is part of our job. Also, there are ways of removing complexity of processes before they are turned into software, but that requires talking with people and agreeing. Not every program has to do everything.

>As much as some people like to pretend it doesn't exist, accidental complexity is a thing

Yes, and it's often the best feature of the software, as far as the sale teams is concerned, because it allows them to sell concultancy fees or because it satisfies the customer by matching 100% it's crappy requirements (which they don't really need).

Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#169

Post by tobr »

dijit wrote: post #56
KineticLensman wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't know of a single computer language that isn't based on English in ASCII https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-English-based_programming_...

I think if you’re reaching for _brainfuck_ as one of the solutions for the prevalence of English in programming; then you’ve probably failed. A few of the languages on the list are designed precisely to be unreadable.

I think if you click a link which points to a very detailed list of programming languages based on non-English languages, then decide to take an example from a different list and suggest that’s what OP was “reaching for”; then you’ve probably failed.

Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#170

Post by billforsternz »

wruza wrote: post #159
billforsternz wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't see why this is so. I like auto removal of trailing space, I don't see why you can't combine that feature and virtual space. Virtual space just means the cursor/caret moves strictly vertically as you press the up/down keys even as you visit lines that are shorter than the current offset from the left margin. If you alight at such a line and start typing text, the editor simply inserts sufficient spaces to extend the shorter line to the current offset before it inserts the text you are entering. If you are entering only spaces, that's fine too but unless you enter something else at some point all the excess space can be trimmed when you leave the line.
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