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Launch HN: Haystack (YC S24) – Visualize and edit code on an infinite canvas

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Re: Launch HN: Haystack (YC S24) – Visualize and edit code on an infinite canvas

#83

Post by neonsunset »

akshaysg wrote: post #47
999900000999 wrote: post #39

Very awesome! I want this for C# and Python! Are their any technical challenges there? I would love to use this with Unity.

For C# unfortunately we're missing a lot of features because the VS Code ecosystem itself lacks them (I think this is due to them being unique to Visual Studio). In most cases, except grabbing incoming/outgoing calls, Haystack should just work. For Python, it should work just fine!

There are multiple ways to go about this in .NET - the instrumentation for the networking stack is not missing:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/fundamentals/networ...

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/fundamentals/networ...

It is, however, not dependent on VS Code and exists standalone, so it requires integration work if there's custom tooling at play. It is what most vendor SDKs that offer observability do.

There are CLI tools which consume the EventSource events and the EventPipe itself which can be used to access them in and out of process: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/diagnostics/ev...

EventPipe/EventSource and DiagnosticPort are very powerful APIs however that cover much deeper instrumentation scenarios, so they are going to require writing a connector for the product that wants to integrate with them. There is already an implementation in shared code that is used by e.g. dotnet-trace which can be found here https://github.com/dotnet/diagnostics/tree/main/src/Microsof... but it can be a bit convoluted to read through.

Re: Launch HN: Haystack (YC S24) – Visualize and edit code on an infinite canvas

#86

Post by akshaysg »

observationist wrote: post #82

Screenshots. Show - don't tell, especially if you're making claims about visualization!

Do you mean in the GitHub repo? Happy to add more images/gifs to the repo! It's a fairly recent addition and the website does a much better job of showcasing the product!

Re: Launch HN: Haystack (YC S24) – Visualize and edit code on an infinite canvas

#87

Post by ocean_moist »

akshaysg wrote: post #10
ocean_moist wrote: post #6

This feels helpful as I have to hold less stuff in my mind, but the UI is way too mouse dependent right now. You guys should make some shortcuts and somehow make it “tiling” like a window manager (dwm), so you don’t have to manually resize windows.

We actually do try to make the canvas as keyboard navigable as possible. There are a list of keyboard bindings in the "Keybindings and Help" button on the bottom right. In terms of manually resizing, we actually do try to tile in the viewport. May I know what's causing you to resize it so I can fix it?

Sorry, I was just going off the demo. Maybe demo the keybinds briefly.

If you get a demo of someone editing stuff super quickly using only keybinds I think it would look pretty cool.

Right now I don’t know if the value prop is strong enough for me to switch editors and remodel/relearn all my keybinds. This is like a 10-15% improvement not a 1.5x or 2x improvement.

An extension would probably help onboard users.

Re: Launch HN: Haystack (YC S24) – Visualize and edit code on an infinite canvas

#88

Post by threecheese »

This is great and I can’t wait to try it. I’ve been coding for a few decades, and have always been good at “keeping the program in my head”. However, in life I am very bad at this and have failed at just about everything that’s not programming, and based on a recent diagnosis I’ve learned a lot about ADHD, autism, and “visual learners” for whom abstract mental models are difficult to internalize without some visual anchor. Anyway, this has led me to use more visual tools - like Miro and Heptabase - and the lessened cognitive load is nothing less than stunning. I hope this model of human/machine interface is beneficial to everyone, and not just those who are broken, but coming from one of the latter I appreciate what you are doing here.
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