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Show HN: Infinite horizontal arrays of text editors

zeminary.com

21–30 of 48 posts

Re: Show HN: Infinite horizontal arrays of text editors

#21

What's with matrix? https://zeminary.com/matrix/app.html

I made it to write one poem, & to learn how to code with HTML & CSS & JS. There's one kinda practical usecase though. You can take notes either freeform or of different types for each paragraph of an essay, where each column is maybe notes of the same type. But you have to constantly resize rows to accommodate changes in paragraph length. It's very clunky. The only reason I haven't deleted it is because my dad likes it. I can't imagine why anyone else would though. It used to have autoresize but it just created wasted space. But without it you have to scroll individual editors.

Re: Show HN: Infinite horizontal arrays of text editors

#22
post #5

Neat! Almost reminds me of the Acme editor. How does this compare to the sibling project https://zeminary.com/matrix/app.html ?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43012397

It was an experiment. I realized it was too clunky, but I also realized that it would've worked really well as just a single row. It took alot of thinking to realize that though. I spent a lot of time imagining more complex systems before realizing that a single row worked best. I imagined things like a kanban for writing but with twists, with inspirations from Gingko. https://gingkowriter.com/

Re: Show HN: Infinite horizontal arrays of text editors

#24

I don't see an obvious undo button, but upon switching to a keyboard with ctrl (I'm on mobile currently) ctrl-Z does it.

Yeah, it's not meant to be used on mobile. The way it's designed makes it basically desktop only.

Also, the undo only works within editors. It doesn't work across editors. It takes some time getting used to, but I think this way is actually better. I was frequently alternating between taking notes & writing the chapter, & I didn't want to have to undo the work on my chapter in the process of undoing the work on my notes. So I just took out the global undo. It reduced LoC by alot & improved UX.

Re: Show HN: Infinite horizontal arrays of text editors

#25

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).

Thanks. One thing I kept thinking while making this was, I don't want to create an MVP, I want to create the simplest & most complete way to learn how to do & then do powerful work.

It only works on Chrome & Edge. I haven't tested it on Firefox, Safari, etc.

Re: Show HN: Infinite horizontal arrays of text editors

#26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks man. Tell your friends about it if you can. Doesn't seem like it's getting alot of traction on this website.

I really like the way the toolbar pops up when you select text.

Thanks. Yeah, I especially like how it saves space & makes for a very calm & uncluttered UI.

Re: Show HN: Infinite horizontal arrays of text editors

#28

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!

You just type whatever, then the list underneath will filter out anything that doesn't have the search terms either in the title or text. You don't need to ENTER. You shouldn't ENTER.

Search & replace is very important. I'll implement that in the future.

It can be used on desktop as long as you have an internet connection. If you look at the source code you'll see it sources some CDN files. I'm planning on taking it totally offline.

Re: Show HN: Infinite horizontal arrays of text editors

#29
post #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!

Thanks. & here are some ideas. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43012478 & some more ideas. You can also work out an outline or timeline or table of characters & settings & objects in the editors to the right. You can also get your editors to write their overarching feedback & questions in the editors to the right. I also designed this for screenwriting so you can get more ideas by reading up on how screenwriters do their work. It's clunky to format to standards acceptable to the industry, but the industry standards seem pointless & counterproductive, so it's maybe good to be forced to focus on content over form.

About the second point. In Word, you can easily get feedback for specific paragraphs by just writing around or underneath those paragraphs, or for the whole by just writing in another document & keeping that document open in another window or in the same window. But you can't easily get feedback for specific chapters, & you can't do any of these things while easily keeping chapter-specific notes always in view. This among other reasons is why this app is maybe more powerful than Microsoft Word, Google Docs, Obsidian, etc. It balances notetaking & reflection & writing. Microsoft Word & Google Docs focus too much on writing, & have very little capability in the other 2. Obsidian focuses too much on notetaking, & has very little capability in the other 2. None of them integrate all 3.

About reflection. With Word, the moment you make changes to the document, all the stuff written to the side goes out of sync. So it's best just to write in sequence. So Word has no advantage there.

Re: Show HN: Infinite horizontal arrays of text editors

#30

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!

You just type whatever, then the list underneath will filter out anything that doesn't have the search terms either in the title or text. You don't need to ENTER. You shouldn't ENTER. Search & replace is very important. I'll implement that in the future. It can be used on desktop as long as you have an internet connection. If you look at the source code you'll see it sources some CDN files. I'm planning on taking it…

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