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Nyxt: The Hacker's Browser

nyxt.atlas.engineer

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Re: Nyxt: The Hacker's Browser

#101

Post by akho »

p-e-w wrote: post #86
TheRoque wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But Nyxt (which is modeled on Emacs, not Vim) would blend in for me. I spend most of my time in Emacs and Firefox; I would prefer a browser that blends in.

I don’t know about 50 applications. The rest of the applications I use are more specialized, and have their own shortcut madness. Browsers ate most of the small stuff.

Re: Nyxt: The Hacker's Browser

#102

Post by brabel »

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…

If you have trouble hitting [ how do you ever program anything?

I use multi-language keyboard layouts and switch all the time... when coding (or using "hacker" software like this, which is completely based on emacs [and as far as I know is written in Common Lisp], not vim), just use a layout that makes it easier (in my case, en-AU).

Re: Nyxt: The Hacker's Browser

#103

Post by can16358p »

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…

This!

I've been programmer for about 20 years now and I could never understand why Vi(m) or Emacs exists with those weird bindings which are completely different from pretty much everything else.

I'm not that old, maybe they had their cake in 80s, but perhaps time to move on to something modern which would have modern defaults (if many need to customize there's something wrong with the defaults) that appeal to all keyboards.

Re: Nyxt: The Hacker's Browser

#104

Post by orbital-decay »

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…

A paradigm is something more high-level than a very specific keybind conflict. Mature vim mode addons for browsers are layout-insensitive. How do you think j/k work on non-Latin (e.g. any Cyrillic) layouts? And they do.

That's an oversight of Nyxt in particular.

Re: Nyxt: The Hacker's Browser

#105

Post by p-e-w »

brabel wrote: post #102
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…

If you have trouble hitting [ how do you ever program anything? I use multi-language keyboard layouts and switch all the time... when coding (or using "hacker" software like this, which is completely based on emacs [and as far as I know is written in Common Lisp], not vim), just use a layout that makes it easier (in my case, en-AU).

Entering [ works just fine on QWERTZ: You simply press AltGr+8.

But this doesn't work in shortcuts, e.g. when combined with Ctrl. That is, AltGr+8 generates the character '[', but Ctrl+AltGr+8 is not the same as pressing Ctrl+[ on keyboards that have a dedicated [ key.

This bug is decades old, and every Vim derivative suffers from it.

Re: Nyxt: The Hacker's Browser

#107

Post by sodapopcan »

irishloop wrote: post #99
dexterdog wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I am not sure thats true. vim does give you extra utility in its availability on a wide variety of server-type platforms, but I suspect most vim users are using it actively for development on their local (or docker etc) boxes

Yep, lots of us "Vim as a local IDE" users out here. I haven't "jumped around machines" in years.

Vim is a nugget of battle-tested familiarity in an industry of constant change.

Re: Nyxt: The Hacker's Browser

#108

Post by mattigames »

bharrison wrote: post #97
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…

True, Hackers hate changing settings. Imagine if those precious keystrokes wasted on setting a keyboard layout could instead be utilized usefully. Say, to post some cloying, whiny critique of someone else's work, wherein one might go so far as invoking their diety in the hopes it might stem the tide of what, I guess, must be a massive recent influx of vi(m)-keybinding-based projects.

if Vim had the very same problem for US keyboard layouts it would have never become the standard choice for "hackers" (e.g. in a parallel universe where Vim was created by a Japanese for Japanese keyboards), so yeah, in general hackers hate when their tools don't work out of the box, hackers expect the very basics of any tool to work out of the box, changing settings should be a step to accommodate it to your liking, not to fix basic functionality.

Re: Nyxt: The Hacker's Browser

#109

Post by BeetleB »

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.

You're not wrong about the poor default keybindings. When the effort to fix it on your part is probably less than all the time you've spent complaining about it, chances are you really are not part of the intended user base.

Re: Nyxt: The Hacker's Browser

#110

Post by brabel »

p-e-w wrote: post #105
brabel wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have trouble hitting [ how do you ever program anything? I use multi-language keyboard layouts and switch all the time... when coding (or using "hacker" software like this, which is completely based on emacs [and as far as I know is written in Common Lisp], not vim), just use a layout that makes it easier (in my case, en-AU).

Entering [ works just fine on QWERTZ: You simply press AltGr+8. But this doesn't work in shortcuts, e.g. when combined with Ctrl. That is, AltGr+8 generates the character '[', but Ctrl+AltGr+8 is not the same as pressing Ctrl+[ on keyboards that have a dedicated [ key. This bug is decades old, and every Vim derivative suffers from it.

I use Cmd+[ on MacOS to "go back" on multiple software like IntelliJ, emacs (I probably configured it) and Firefox, so I would say this is a pretty common combo. It's easy to remember, specially given that the mirror, "go forward", is Cmd+]. As I said, even though my first language is not English, I only write code in an English keyboard layout so I've never even considered that [ is "hard to press".

EDIT: the Dr Racket editor even lets you write Lisp using '[' and ']' because they don't require pressing shift like '(' and ')' so are easier to press.

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