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Show HN: Haystack – an IDE for exploring and editing code on an infinite canvas

haystackeditor.com

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Re: Show HN: Haystack – an IDE for exploring and editing code on an infinite canvas

#151

Post by fisian »

wokwokwok wrote: post #80

In 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…

+1 for expanding jupyter notebooks to non linear layouts. While trying out some code I would love to be able to explore multiple "trains of thought" (without having to move code in and out from normal python files).

Re: Show HN: Haystack – an IDE for exploring and editing code on an infinite canvas

#152

Post by ryukoposting »

Interesting. It reminds me of the text editor Sam, in a weird way. A very, very evolved descendant of Sam, at least.

I love seeing software design that throws out convention and tries something new. This might not end up being for everyone, but if it's for someone, then it's helpful. The fact that it's based on VS Code means I could potentially use it for all of my professional work.

Re: Show HN: Haystack – an IDE for exploring and editing code on an infinite canvas

#153

Post by fao_ »

azhenley wrote: post #147

I published a paper comparing navigation time with a canvas-based editor (Code Bubbles) vs. traditional tab-based editor (Eclipe) vs. a carousel-based editor (Patchworks, a tool I designed). We found the canvas provided too much freedom. https://austinhenley.com/pubs/Henley2014CHI_Patchworks.pdf

Interesting! Patchworks somewhat mirrors how I setup my Doom Emacs, with 4 - 6 panes of code, across multiple workspaces (which can be flipped between via SPC TAB (number)

Re: Show HN: Haystack – an IDE for exploring and editing code on an infinite canvas

#154

Post by v3ss0n »

Very good work! What we would actually more helpful is a Window manager that acts like that instead of an IDE. That would be very useful for overall experience. Ideally window should be left to window managers. What would be more powerful is force directed graph of windows.

Re: Show HN: Haystack – an IDE for exploring and editing code on an infinite canvas

#155

Post by Version467 »

xwowsersx wrote: post #74
karolist wrote: post #61

Earlier 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

Doesn't exist yet, but it seems like they are working on it. https://github.com/continuedev/continue/issues/917#issuecomm...

Re: Show HN: Haystack – an IDE for exploring and editing code on an infinite canvas

#156

Post by nilslindemann »

In general, the issue is that we can not NAVIGATE INTO sections in files, but just can FOLD THEM AWAY. Also, a system of linking to sections is missed.

Some tools can do that however:

On Windows I use Code Browser – https://github.com/nilslindemann/Code_Browser_49 – It has its bugs, but I still love it very much. Does not work decent on Linuxes (Newer versions do, but miss features)

Leo is another editor, but it annoys me in many ways. It is just not polished enough.

Nice to have another contestant now.

Re: Show HN: Haystack – an IDE for exploring and editing code on an infinite canvas

#157

Post by heresie-dabord »

azhenley wrote: post #147

I published a paper comparing navigation time with a canvas-based editor (Code Bubbles) vs. traditional tab-based editor (Eclipe) vs. a carousel-based editor (Patchworks, a tool I designed). We found the canvas provided too much freedom. https://austinhenley.com/pubs/Henley2014CHI_Patchworks.pdf

Tantalising research!

Is the source-code for the Patchwork editor publically available?

Re: Show HN: Haystack – an IDE for exploring and editing code on an infinite canvas

#158

Post by sensanaty »

This is really cool! I like the fact that when you navigate to a method/declaration/whatever, it only contains the relevant snippet, rather than opening a secondary tab with the whole file scrolled to where the definition is.

I often end up in a situation where I keep losing track of whatever method I'm reading since I need to compare where a method is called vs its definition, which is frustrating. I like that I can just "pin" the method to the side, and can glance at it without accidentally switching to scrolling through the whole file in the pinned view.

I tried it out for a bit and I found it a bit too mouse-centric unfortunately, and I quickly ended up in a situation where I had way too many floating windows to manage, especially once I got into checking out methods inside of other methods. It would be nice to have an arrow or line to keep track of what the "parent" window is so that it's easier to build a sort of flowchart.

Regardless of my personal issues with it, hope you succeed with this! It's great to see alternative ways of thinking in this space, as I often feel things could be better but it's also hard to imagine how.

Re: Show HN: Haystack – an IDE for exploring and editing code on an infinite canvas

#159

Post by jacobsimon »

azhenley wrote: post #147

I published a paper comparing navigation time with a canvas-based editor (Code Bubbles) vs. traditional tab-based editor (Eclipe) vs. a carousel-based editor (Patchworks, a tool I designed). We found the canvas provided too much freedom. https://austinhenley.com/pubs/Henley2014CHI_Patchworks.pdf

This is cool - I haven’t really thought much about the spatial organization of my IDE before. Reflecting on it now, I realize I don’t even use the tabs in VS Code anymore because I have way too many files open. I just look at one file at a time, and when I need to switch I use Cmd-P to search or jump between recent files. Works well but requires me to keep the names of files/directories in my head all the time.

Re: Show HN: Haystack – an IDE for exploring and editing code on an infinite canvas

#160

Post by tarruda »

20after4 wrote: post #112

This looks really interesting and well thought out. Nonetheless, I feel like the OS window manager should provide this kind of experience, with appropriate hooks so that an IDE can implement this sort of experience with native windows. I really liked using PaperWM¹ for a while, however, I'm still waiting for it to get more stable. Another system that is sort of similar to this concept, Pipeworld² (part of the Arcan p…

Not related to the main thread, but I want to mention that as a display server, Arcan is superior to everything else out there (x11, Wayland and whatever proprietary software is used in Mac/windows).

To make things even more impressive, it is:

- Also a game engine

- Also a multimedia Framework/Library

- Implemented over the course of many years as a side project of a single programmer.

It is one of the most impressive projects I've seen (if not the most impressive) and the dev is a true genius of software design and hard work.

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