Congrats on the launch! Looks good! What's the plan for commercializing it? code visualization is one of those things that sound incredibly useful for developers but actually really hard to sell/get someone to actually buy it.
Show HN: Haystack – an IDE for exploring and editing code on an infinite canvas
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Re: Show HN: Haystack – an IDE for exploring and editing code on an infinite canvas
#82Is it partly inspired by Smalltalk browsers?
I've never used Smalltalk but I've heard of it!
Re: Show HN: Haystack – an IDE for exploring and editing code on an infinite canvas
#83The landing demo really needs to show off the "infinite" part, instead it's just showing that windows in windows are clutter and need manual resizing to fit inside the box. E.g. show how it helps structure clusters of a hundred files all open at the same time, on an infinite canvas, in a way that is quickly traversed?
This is good feedback. The problem we encountered is that everything gets incredibly tiny if you zoom out, but we'll iterate on making the landing demo better.
Re: Show HN: Haystack – an IDE for exploring and editing code on an infinite canvas
#84In order for the canvas to be meaningful, the individual code windows need to be related to each other; eg. like a visual programming language or a notebook, with sockets and connectors. Otherwise, it needs to be more like canva / miro, where the canvas is a rich target to place notes and graphics with the code editor embedded in it. I think iterating on the linear jupyter notebook (eg. make it a graph of executable…
You made some good points!
We do show arrows between related objects (if you CMD+click on symbols, or use the floating toolbar to zoom into a function) and you can traverse the codebase like a graph. Do you feel like that is insufficient? If so, what would you prefer?
Curious about "then zoom out to see all the files arranged together". You can zoom using CMD/CTRL + scrolling. Is this what you want?
Our intent is to go more in the direction of "like a visual programming language or a notebook, with sockets and connectors" and make editing/refactoring easier.
RE AI: that's valid, but we do use it to cut the tedium out of finding the right interface/class to add a method/function to.
Re: Show HN: Haystack – an IDE for exploring and editing code on an infinite canvas
#85Congrats on the launch! Looks good! What's the plan for commercializing it? code visualization is one of those things that sound incredibly useful for developers but actually really hard to sell/get someone to actually buy it.
Good question! We will never gate the visualization itself behind a pay wall. We plan to add helpful features, such as searching your codebase using natural language or automating/improving refactoring, and experiment with gating those behind a paywall.
Re: Show HN: Haystack – an IDE for exploring and editing code on an infinite canvas
#86The landing demo really needs to show off the "infinite" part, instead it's just showing that windows in windows are clutter and need manual resizing to fit inside the box. E.g. show how it helps structure clusters of a hundred files all open at the same time, on an infinite canvas, in a way that is quickly traversed?
Yeah agreed. The demo animation on the front page doesn't look any different than just opening up multiple windows in an IDE. It's only when I watched the YouTube video (which I think many people will not bother with) that I saw what was unique about this.
Re: Show HN: Haystack – an IDE for exploring and editing code on an infinite canvas
#87Is it partly inspired by Smalltalk browsers?
I've never used Smalltalk but I've heard of it!
I tried finding a screenshot which showed what I was thinking. But gosh it's so hard. Here's one, but really low quality https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2F....
I have always opened multiple windows/panes of source code at the same time out of habit. It's a great paradigm.
Haystack looks good. Thanks for sharing.
Re: Show HN: Haystack – an IDE for exploring and editing code on an infinite canvas
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
continue.dev with anthropic's API key https://docs.continue.dev/how-to-use-continue#ask-questions-...
Any idea if there's a way to use this with vim/nvim? It doesn't look like it, but wanted to double check
The copilot plugin for vim does pretty well if you have it. Bummed when it moved to paid but thankfully my org has adopted it
Re: Show HN: Haystack – an IDE for exploring and editing code on an infinite canvas
#89I spent the last five+ years full-time deep diving the infinite canvas UX problem space if you happen to be hiring ;)
We are not but I'm happy to discuss! Feel free to email feedback@haystackeditor.com
Re: Show HN: Haystack – an IDE for exploring and editing code on an infinite canvas
#90In order for the canvas to be meaningful, the individual code windows need to be related to each other; eg. like a visual programming language or a notebook, with sockets and connectors. Otherwise, it needs to be more like canva / miro, where the canvas is a rich target to place notes and graphics with the code editor embedded in it. I think iterating on the linear jupyter notebook (eg. make it a graph of executable…
You made some good points! We do show arrows between related objects (if you CMD+click on symbols, or use the floating toolbar to zoom into a function) and you can traverse the codebase like a graph. Do you feel like that is insufficient? If so, what would you prefer? Curious about "then zoom out to see all the files arranged together". You can zoom using CMD/CTRL + scrolling. Is this what you want? Our intent is to…
Re: AI
If you’ve used any canvas style app you’ll fully appreciate that zooming out and then zooming back in is almost without fail the way people navigate.
Even visual code editors. You’ve used the unreal blueprint editor right?
They do not use search.
Search is for finding canvases not for navigating around them.
Jumping between symbols with a command is what existing editors do. You’re doing your excellent work a disservice by sticking to ways of interacting you can already do in existing editors.
You can just use a normal editor for that.
(The same goes for any kind of AI symbol search; it is maybe valuable, but why would you not just have it an an extension in an existing editor? It’s like the rabbit; why was it not just an android app? -> no reason. The AI in it was not meaningfully linked to the functionality of the device)
Re: zoom out.
Ohhhh… that’s lovely. That’s what I wanted. You should put that in your demo.
I tried scrolling and cmd-+ but that zooms the entire ui.
That’s a super power. You should make it more obvious you can do that.