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

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121–130 of 137 posts

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

#121
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't want open source developers to starve, you damn well put your money where your mouth is. High quality open source software is worth paying for. The times when open source software is a niche cottage industry powered by volunteers are long gone. Time is not free, and software does not grow on trees (despite what overprivileged lisp users may claim).

I think lisp users are more for code growing from lists, not trees

In the Smug Lisp Weenie hymn book, it is written

But I think that why only God can make a tree.

For God wrote in Lisp code when he filled the leaves with green.

The fractal flowers and recursive roots:

Also in SICP, trees are all made in lisp.

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

#122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cool. I mostly wanted confirmation that it’s better and not just a good substitute for disabled folks, RSI, etc. I’ll check it out. Does it mesh well with other VSCode functionality? I’m just wondering if you can use it in tandem with a normal keyboard.

Not being a VSCode user myself outside of this context I may not have the best experience to answer the first question, but I don't think it tends to conflict with much except perhaps vim keybindings. As far as using it in tandem with a keyboard, the main issues you might run into are timing. If you happen to be moving the cursor or typing while a voice command is running it could cause issues. You would probably end…

This is great. Thanks. It looks like this really shines for moving the cursor around: every important location in the code has a unique name. I wonder if I could port that functionality to emacs. It would take the place of avy (ace jump).

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

#123
post #24

Here's a nice document with many programming interfaces by Johnathan M. Edwards 1948 Plugboards 1949 Keypunch 1963 Teletype 1970 VT05 1980 Symbolic Lisp 1980 Smalltalk 1986 Boxer 1987 Self 1987 HyperCard 1987 Alice Pascal 1991 Visual Basic 1991 AgentSheets 1994 SK8 1996 Squeak/eToys 2001 Eclipse 2003 Flash MX 2005 Scratch … https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/e/2PACX-1vSPuf3eQ2tlC...

While interesting (thanks a lot for sharing this great resource), it seems to mainly focus on just the UX/UI aspects, while ignoring the input method, they all depend on mouse and/or keyboard. Is there any similar resources for more varied input methods? Like joysticks, custom keyboards, voice or similar?

From the top of my head, I've seen:

    piano-like single hand keyboards 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chorded_keyboard

    light-pen, pen-to-text
    foot pedals
    keyboards with two wheels
    text-to-speech (os native)
    gloves and 2D mocap-like cam capture of sign language
    Neuralink.com

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

#125
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://github.com/dion-systems/metadesk seems to be the repo for their prototype. It seems like it's vaguely similar to SGML but with small but significant differences: instead of blah blah you say a: "blah blah", the node labels can be user data instead of just structure, attribute values are full subtrees instead of just strings, and attributes syntactically precede the node, so you say @foo(bar) baz instead of .

That's not Dion. It's a plain text language for DSLs. This is Dion: https://dion.systems/gallery.html (Those are videos)

I see, thanks. Is there any information about Dion that isn't a video?

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

#127
post #31

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"

Thanks!

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

#128

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…

> I'm now using VS Code. I hate how the file explorer jumps around when closing a tab (because it tries to select whatever other tab becomes visible). VS Code also doesn't allow me to easily open my files in multiple windows. Meanwhile we have browsers that allow us to freely open windows or tabs. I use VSCode with the Vim plugin (it's not perfect: browsing undo/redo tree can lose changes, opening new tabs with `tabe…

Thanks!

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

#129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The syntax complexity will just be moved into a visual layer, it doesn't disappear. You missed the part where our brain is much better prepared to deal with visual complexity than textual. It's like moving the job to a specialized hardware co-processor. Even if the inherent complexity of the task is the same, the environment would allow to do it way more efficiently. And we could also redesign the languages and IDE…

> You missed the part where our brain is much better prepared to deal with visual complexity than textual. Citation needed. Text is also a visual representation of language. If you want symbols instead of letters to represent logic you basically end up with hieroglyph like system, a logographic one.

Visual representation is not logical, it works according to gestalt principles. [1] Visual improvements would not be used to represent the program logic but secondary notation to improve and accelerate understanding. [2]

The metaphor would be using a graphics card for rendering the scene and the CPU for the game logic. Without a graphic card, your rendering options are extremely limited.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gestalt_psychology

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secondary_notation

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

#130
post #24

Here's a nice document with many programming interfaces by Johnathan M. Edwards 1948 Plugboards 1949 Keypunch 1963 Teletype 1970 VT05 1980 Symbolic Lisp 1980 Smalltalk 1986 Boxer 1987 Self 1987 HyperCard 1987 Alice Pascal 1991 Visual Basic 1991 AgentSheets 1994 SK8 1996 Squeak/eToys 2001 Eclipse 2003 Flash MX 2005 Scratch … https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/e/2PACX-1vSPuf3eQ2tlC...

I would love to see a demo of SK8. I've never been able to get it to work in any of the classic mac emulators. If anyone out there has experience with this I think the community would benefit from some videos
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