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Nyxt: The Hacker's Browser

nyxt.atlas.engineer

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Re: Nyxt: The Hacker's Browser

#81

Post by TheRoque »

p-e-w wrote: post #70

Looks like Nyxt, a browser "inspired by Vim", inherits Vim's showstopper bug: Being unusable on many non-US keyboards, at least with the default bindings. The 'switch-buffer-previous' command is bound to C-[, which cannot be pressed e.g. on QWERTZ layouts because the [ character requires AltGr. This is like sending around text files encoded in Windows-1252 and expecting things to just work. Sorry folks, but it turns…

I'm curious about what "decades of UX research" improvements you are talking about, to me everything about the UI for text editors or browsers hasn't improved much in decades. If you have a laptop with just a touchpad, chances are you'll never get better than vim keybindings. Moreover, the keyboard layouts themselves are centuries old.

Re: Nyxt: The Hacker's Browser

#82

Post by RhodesianHunter »

p-e-w wrote: post #79
Eldt wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not going to get a default that suits everyone. Stop being so sensationalist and just rebind them.

What nonsense. Every single modern operating system has bindings that are usable with all keyboard layouts. Having such a default is not only possible, it's the status quo everywhere, except in software designed during the era of the moon landings.

>Every single modern operating system

So something completely unattainable by a small dev team on a startup budget. Great! These are the standards by which we prevent any good things from being created.

Re: Nyxt: The Hacker's Browser

#83

Post by RhodesianHunter »

graderjs wrote: post #33
jug wrote: post #17

Hmm, not sure it's for me (a bit too much hacker) but I'd definitely like a highly customizable, module based browser with a pure shell by default. Something like Visual Studio Code but with less cruft from the get go. I've never thought about it until I saw this! Now I'm really irked about there not being a solid, mature browser based on extensibility. Where the base is basically an address bar and history awareness…

I'm building something similar: WebDriver protocol not WebView tag, more extensible, written in JavaScript, web tech. Get in touch (cris@dosyago.com) if you want to contribute! or check out the project: https://github.com/dosyago/BrowserBoxPro / https://github.com/dosyago/BrowserBOx

>written in JavaScript

Really though? Why

Re: Nyxt: The Hacker's Browser

#84

Post by p-e-w »

RhodesianHunter wrote: post #82
p-e-w wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What nonsense. Every single modern operating system has bindings that are usable with all keyboard layouts. Having such a default is not only possible, it's the status quo everywhere, except in software designed during the era of the moon landings.

>Every single modern operating system So something completely unattainable by a small dev team on a startup budget. Great! These are the standards by which we prevent any good things from being created.

You don't have to "develop" anything, you just have to follow the binding conventions for the platform(s). In practice, this simply means using Ctrl/Cmd+[LETTER/NUMBER] for everything, and the problem is solved.

Re: Nyxt: The Hacker's Browser

#85

Post by graderjs »

RhodesianHunter wrote: post #83
graderjs wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm building something similar: WebDriver protocol not WebView tag, more extensible, written in JavaScript, web tech. Get in touch (cris@dosyago.com) if you want to contribute! or check out the project: https://github.com/dosyago/BrowserBoxPro / https://github.com/dosyago/BrowserBOx

>written in JavaScript Really though? Why

Two main reasons:

While it may not be as technically elegant as using lisp, it greatly increases the count of folks who can contribute and simplifies the code with a single language for both front and back.

Secondly, while, in general terms, JavaScript is not as performant as Java or C++, for asynchronous real time operations, such as mostly used by this application, the event loop in node, a layer over io_uring, is a highly highly efficient method to perform these.

In other words, we get to trade simplicity for raw performance to ease maintainability, and less complex code means less security risk and bugs. In fact, the bottleneck in this application for performance is not JavaScript but network link latency, and the browser and the hardware that runs on.

Re: Nyxt: The Hacker's Browser

#86

Post by p-e-w »

TheRoque wrote: post #81
p-e-w wrote: post #70

Looks like Nyxt, a browser "inspired by Vim", inherits Vim's showstopper bug: Being unusable on many non-US keyboards, at least with the default bindings. The 'switch-buffer-previous' command is bound to C-[, which cannot be pressed e.g. on QWERTZ layouts because the [ character requires AltGr. This is like sending around text files encoded in Windows-1252 and expecting things to just work. Sorry folks, but it turns…

I'm curious about what "decades of UX research" improvements you are talking about, to me everything about the UI for text editors or browsers hasn't improved much in decades. If you have a laptop with just a touchpad, chances are you'll never get better than vim keybindings. Moreover, the keyboard layouts themselves are centuries old.

> I'm curious about what "decades of UX research" improvements you are talking about

Here's the most important one of them: Don't surprise me. Blend in. Look and behave like other programs.

There are 50 applications on my system. Yours is one of them. If all other applications use 'Ctrl+C' for copying text, but your application uses 'y', then your application is the problem.

Re: Nyxt: The Hacker's Browser

#88

Post by graderjs »

culi wrote: post #64
graderjs wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dude! I can't parse your email but like definitely reach out to me: cris@dosyago.com :D ;p

This is a very cool interaction and I hope it turns into something. Would love a place to keep up if anything ever materializes. Here's some other projects you might have inspo or crossover with and some discussions you might find possible collaborators in: Bonsai https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28446147 Mullvad Browser (security oriented FireFox-based) https://mullvad.net/en/browser Browsh (purely text-based br…

Thank you kindly, this is such a good list i want to see if i can add it to our projects README.

Re: Nyxt: The Hacker's Browser

#89

Post by [deleted] »

p-e-w wrote: post #77
muti wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hardly sounds like either a bug or a showstopper when you can rebind any command

When a product is unusable without changing configuration, it absolutely is a bug. Being customizable is great, but being broken by default is not. Besides, the whole point of Vim bindings is supposed to be that they are the same everywhere (muscle memory yadda yadda yadda). When you have to change core bindings to something random to make them work, that whole idea falls apart, and you're probably better off using t…

[deleted]

Re: Nyxt: The Hacker's Browser

#90

Post by dexterdog »

RhodesianHunter wrote: post #80
p-e-w wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When a product is unusable without changing configuration, it absolutely is a bug. Being customizable is great, but being broken by default is not. Besides, the whole point of Vim bindings is supposed to be that they are the same everywhere (muscle memory yadda yadda yadda). When you have to change core bindings to something random to make them work, that whole idea falls apart, and you're probably better off using t…

>When a product is unusable without changing configuration, it absolutely is a bug I don't think that adage applies when the target user is the average VIM user

But the average vim user is jumping to new instances often, so if he has to reconfigure it everywhere he might as well install a different editor with a config.
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