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Text editing hates you too (2019)

lord.io

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Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#181

Post by PoignardAzur »

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…

I think in general editors should be unsurprising.

If there's a general expectation of "if text is selected, and you do a WRITE_TEXT action, then the selected text is replaced with text"; and if CTRL_V is a WRITE_TEXT action; then doing CTRL_V after selecting text should replace the selected text.

Then again, the above rule already has exceptions; eg writing a parenthesis in some editors will surround the text with parentheses.

Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#182

Post by billforsternz »

Zarel wrote: post #177
billforsternz wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ext…

You're misinterpreting the problem. Auto-removal of trailing space is only possible if the trailing space is meaningless. Many programming languages have meaningful trailing spaces which cannot be removed. The most common example is inside multi-line strings.

Fair enough, I agree that virtual space is not useful or even possible if you can't or don't want auto trimmed trailing space as well. Fortunately there are many workflows and languages where auto-trimmed trailing space is a plus, and these overlap with my areas of interest.

Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#183

Post by SSLy »

exporectomy wrote: post #124
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_...

Can you honestly say you know of AxumLight / Geez#, Al-Khawarizm, Jeem or anything at all that's based on another human language? These are mostly obscure.

I've used AC-Logo in middle school.

Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#184

Post by cztomsik »

asiachick wrote: post #173
slmjkdbtl wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is a ridiculous mischaracterization of what Jonathan Blow was talking about. I watched the full presentation and agree with almost everything he said, but I can't find a part matching the conflict between "Simple text editor Vs. Complicated character encoding scheme / rendering / formatting". How would JB make a text editor that works with any kind of character?

I don't agree with almost anything he said. He doesn't know what he's talking about. He comes from games. I too came from games. I had all the same opinions as him. Then I worked on a browser on a team with hundreds programmers (browsers are huge). The article is a perfect example. He hasn't solved the actual problems being solved so he has no clue why the solutions used are the ones that were chosen. Could some part…

agreed, I respect what he did but some claims are ridiculous and his "clan" of followers only makes it worse.

BTW: would you be willing to chat from time to time? Im doing something similar (hobby, mostly one-man show so far) to browser and I would really could use some help. I dont need any programming but pointing me in the right direction would be awesome.

Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#185

Post by account42 »

slver wrote: post #24
crazygringo wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, things are as hard as they need to be. Fixed-width ASCII terminals didn't work for virtually anyone except English-speaking users. Turns out the entire world needs to use computers. That's a "need". Not "allowing".

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…

> 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”.

I think an interesting example here is Chinese which is traditionally written top-down-right-left but these days is just as if not more commonly written left-right-top-down. There seems to be almost no push for supporting vertical text while its just assumed that RTL is a must, why is that?

Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#186

Post by account42 »

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

I was not aware that english is the only left-to-right language.

Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#187

Post by account42 »

pjc50 wrote: post #38
oblio wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not a basic requirment, just convenient. In the absence of £, GBP works nearly as well.
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