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Ask HN: More “experimental” UIs for editing/writing code?

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Re: Ask HN: More “experimental” UIs for editing/writing code?

#31

Post by krono »

bartimus wrote: post #27

I one time did a project entirely in notepad. Not notepad++. But the standard notepad that comes with Windows. It was a time when I got tired of frameworks and IDE's that come and go and try to offer things more conveniently. Again having to learn about some new kid on the block. Having to depend on 3rd parties. I wanted everything to be vanilla. What's interesting is how this forces you to think carefully about stru…

This setting disables the explorer jumping:

  "explorer.autoReveal": false
And here are some settings you can play with to get that window/instance behaviour under control (default values shown here):

  "window.openFilesInNewWindow": "off",
  "window.openFoldersInNewWindow": "default",
  "window.openWithoutArgumentsInNewWindow": "off",
  "window.restoreWindows": "all",
  "security.workspace.trust.untrustedFiles": "prompt"

Re: Ask HN: More “experimental” UIs for editing/writing code?

#32

Post by fragmede »

If you haven't used Colab/Juypter Notebooks yet, I highly recommend you try it. It's a "notebook" style interface used a lot in data science, and it allows you to run "cells" in arbitrary order if needed. Stylized comments are well supported.

The other interesting interface I've come across is https://gibber.cc/ and https://glicol.org/ which are both music coding environments though they have slightly different UI so are both worth exploring to get a sense. What I imagine is an extension of their approach to make going from a (Python) REPL to working code more seamless. My workflow is often play in a REPL until I get it working, and then try and reconstruct the right order of code back in an editor. There's got to be a better way of going from REPL to code than that, but I've not found it yet.

Re: Ask HN: More “experimental” UIs for editing/writing code?

#34

Post by mikewarot »

PainfullyNormal wrote: post #10

Have you heard of dion? https://media.handmade-seattle.com/dion-systems/ It's still in the category of "inserting text with the keyboard", but the underlying representation of the "program" isn't raw text. The text is just a user interface for a more complicated representation.

I've had an idea like this forever.... they brilliantly handled the UI in a way that I never could resolve successfully. WOW

Watching more, and reading more, to find out they abandoned the idea..... makes me think of Charles Babbage moving on to the Analytical Engine before getting the Difference Engine completed. 8(

Re: Ask HN: More “experimental” UIs for editing/writing code?

#35

Post by paulywog »

I saw this talk, Stop Drawing Dead Fish by Brett Victor, a while back. While I don't think it's the tool you're looking for, he does a great job showing why we may want better tools than we have currently and what they might look like. https://vimeo.com/64895205/description

Re: Ask HN: More “experimental” UIs for editing/writing code?

#37

Post by afloyd »

plan9's ACME is interesting how its mostly traditional except for both the mouse-chords and the part that its also a shell. also a window manager. and a file manager.

at one point there was plans to add graphics capabilities to truly turn it into a window manager but well, those never came to be.

Re: Ask HN: More “experimental” UIs for editing/writing code?

#38

Post by t-3 »

It's not general purpose, but colorforth has a really weird and different editor. Coloring words "types" the word (definition label, compiled, immediate, comment, etc), which allows the language and compiler to be dead simple. It really makes me wonder why modern languages aren't designed with IDEs in mind - instead of loading the syntax with complexity, separate it out into the fancy editor layer! Color/text formatting is probably not the best paradigm, but the potential of editor-first language design hasn't really been explored anywhere near as far as it deserves.

As far as conventional editors go, I'm a big fan of vis. Multiple cursors, structural regex, and vi keybindings are just too nice to give up.

https://github.com/martanne/vis

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