Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: Infinite horizontal arrays of text editors

zeminary.com

11–20 of 48 posts

Re: Show HN: Infinite horizontal arrays of text editors

#11

For comparison, Google Docs launched tabs in October of last year which is also for editing e.g. a chapter at a time: https://support.google.com/docs/answer/15499791?hl=en

The most offensive part of Tabs to me:

> If you download or print from Google Docs, you'll only download or print the active tab. If you want to download or print all tabs at once, you can do it from Google Drive

This is multiple documents, barely/mildly organized. I have yet to see someone use these tabs at work though, so maybe everyone is rejecting them as poorly implemented organization. What am I missing about Tabs?

"document-based workflows" are a good idea[0] but I think this is a terrible execution of it.

[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20040625150625/https://www.edwar....

Re: Show HN: Infinite horizontal arrays of text editors

#12
post #11

For comparison, Google Docs launched tabs in October of last year which is also for editing e.g. a chapter at a time: https://support.google.com/docs/answer/15499791?hl=en

The most offensive part of Tabs to me: > If you download or print from Google Docs, you'll only download or print the active tab. If you want to download or print all tabs at once, you can do it from Google Drive This is multiple documents, barely/mildly organized. I have yet to see someone use these tabs at work though, so maybe everyone is rejecting them as poorly implemented organization. What am I missing about T…

The hamfisted attempts to ram new features into docs/excel recently have made me wince. It's like (read: it's because) they're afraid to change the winning formula, so any new feature is buried in some submenu and is treated as a 2nd class citizen throughout. They then try to surface these new features via a suggestions pane which is doomed to irritate users because it feels like you're doing something complicated when you try and use it, and half the time it causes standard functionality to not work as you'd expect.

Re: Show HN: Infinite horizontal arrays of text editors

#13
post #11

For comparison, Google Docs launched tabs in October of last year which is also for editing e.g. a chapter at a time: https://support.google.com/docs/answer/15499791?hl=en

The most offensive part of Tabs to me: > If you download or print from Google Docs, you'll only download or print the active tab. If you want to download or print all tabs at once, you can do it from Google Drive This is multiple documents, barely/mildly organized. I have yet to see someone use these tabs at work though, so maybe everyone is rejecting them as poorly implemented organization. What am I missing about T…

Tabs are great for simple, project doc stuff like separating long running actions lists from meeting notes

Re: Show HN: Infinite horizontal arrays of text editors

#15
This is exactly how I want my UIs to look - it's like a breath of fresh air. And I love that I can run this from an html file held locally. I'm not going to be writing any books but I think this could work well for some of my note-taking workflows.

load, save and save as all cause JS errors like `window.showSaveFilePicker is not a function`. I am using Brave (Chrome compatible things tend to work in Brave).

Re: Show HN: Infinite horizontal arrays of text editors

#16

I like this very much. Can it be run totally local to the disk? Also, I am having trouble searching. I enter a term and hit enter and it just goes to a new line. In terms of editors, find and replace functionality is very important, IMO. Thanks for sharing!

I found that SEARCH returns the file # that the search pattern is in. Hope that helps.

Re: Show HN: Infinite horizontal arrays of text editors

#17
post #11

For comparison, Google Docs launched tabs in October of last year which is also for editing e.g. a chapter at a time: https://support.google.com/docs/answer/15499791?hl=en

The most offensive part of Tabs to me: > If you download or print from Google Docs, you'll only download or print the active tab. If you want to download or print all tabs at once, you can do it from Google Drive This is multiple documents, barely/mildly organized. I have yet to see someone use these tabs at work though, so maybe everyone is rejecting them as poorly implemented organization. What am I missing about T…

"Offensive" seems a bit harsh, no?

It's the same concept as tabs in Sheets/Excel, which I've never heard anybody complain about. It's a nice UX to be able to focus on one thing rather than deal with scrolling. E.g. one tab for agenda items, another for meeting notes, another for action items assigned to people.

But also for things like chapters, where a document is just too long for scrolling otherwise.

And the reality is that probably 99% of Docs never get printed or downloaded/converted. If an org uses Google, everything usually just stays a Doc, except occasionally when dealing with external folks. (I do find it a bit weird that you have to go to Drive to print/convert all tabs at once, but it's not exactly difficult. Still, I hope that will get fixed at some point.)

Re: Show HN: Infinite horizontal arrays of text editors

#18
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most offensive part of Tabs to me: > If you download or print from Google Docs, you'll only download or print the active tab. If you want to download or print all tabs at once, you can do it from Google Drive This is multiple documents, barely/mildly organized. I have yet to see someone use these tabs at work though, so maybe everyone is rejecting them as poorly implemented organization. What am I missing about T…

The hamfisted attempts to ram new features into docs/excel recently have made me wince. It's like (read: it's because) they're afraid to change the winning formula, so any new feature is buried in some submenu and is treated as a 2nd class citizen throughout. They then try to surface these new features via a suggestions pane which is doomed to irritate users because it feels like you're doing something complicated wh…

It's crazy to me, half the people on HN complain about Docs being stagnant and not adding enough new features, and then the other half complain about too many new features? It's like there's no winning.

FYI, tabs are not "buried in some submenu", they're shown on every new document. They're not "treated as a 2nd class citizen throughout", they're an obvious "1st class" feature.

Re: Show HN: Infinite horizontal arrays of text editors

#19
This is so great. I'm already envisioning all the ways I can put this to use. The only way I could think to improve it is a desktop app, and maybe some fusion with Heynote style features or keyboard shortcuts. This could be so great for short-term local notes or long form writing. Good job!
Post reply on HN