Show HN: Tritium – The Legal IDE in Rust

I like the idea! I wish I could use git / PRs to do rounds of edits on legal documents instead of whatever Word’s track changes is.

Speaking of, could we start using version control for keeping track of laws and updating old laws? It seems to me like a much better system than randomly burying in a new law that it strikes out some text from an old law.

Ha, I had the same thought a while back along a slightly different vector (legal-adjacent technical writing). I ended up writing a blog post of my wishlist of features Word has that static site generators like Hugo don't appear to, yet. [1]

I think there's a lot of money to be made in this arena, especially given that LLMs are much easier to integrate with plain text files than with Word documents.

[1]: https://hiandrewquinn.github.io/til-site/posts/things-word-h...

When I went back to college to finish my degree, some of my classes used online textbooks from a couple different systems. Most had a simple link to a glossary for key terms, but some took it a bit farther and had a nice pop-over widget. The nice ones also had the ability for you to highlight and annotate passages for your own notes. It's less fun though, if you're like me and have a hard time reading long-form content on a laptop or phone. I ended up getting one of those eink Android tablets to make it easier for me to get through the reading.

Shame is that monetization around them is even more exploitative than normal textbooks. You don't own them, so you can't keep or resell them once you're done, and you typically lose access to it about a week after the class ends. Many courses also issue assignments and grades through the e-textbook, so you're forced to buy it at a price they decide. Fortunately work reimbursed mine.

If you want people to use it on the web: do not under any circumstances use the pure-canvas approach. You must use real DOM, or it will be an endless frustration that turns many people away. I’ve written about the problems quite a few times, look through https://hn.algolia.com/?type=comment&query=chrismorgan+pure+... if you’re interested. If you’re not intending it to be used via the web, don’t worry.

But it’s a general principle: the more you are implementing from scratch, the more of a mess you’re likely to be in. As one example, at IME is completely broken, completely preventing a lot of non-English usage. Even my Compose key is broken: the key sequence `Compose - >` should produce →, but instead produces “Compose->”. This is the first time I’ve seen the Compose key turn into the word “Compose”!

For serious desktop-style applications, I honestly recommend that you not use plain-Rust GUI just yet. It is definitely steadily getting there, and I’m very optimistic that there will be at least two reasonable choices available within three years, but it’s still not where I’d want it to be for an app like this yet. Web browsers are, unfortunately, typically the pragmatic choice, even for desktop-only apps.

Actually I’m based in the UK and can say corporate law practice is nearly identical. Thanks for sharing!