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Show HN: Tritium – The Legal IDE in Rust

tritium.legal

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Re: Show HN: Tritium – The Legal IDE in Rust

#91

Post by piker »

anduril22 wrote: post #85

Former attorney, now dev - sorry but hard pass on this. Lawyers (especially those in big law) hate using Google Docs because it’s too dissimilar to Word.. This is leaps and bounds different. The Steve Jobs mantra of customers not knowing what they want applies in a consumer scenario, not an enterprise / business scenario (where lost time / retraining = dollars lost). I wish developers would think more as users and no…

It's not for everybody, but it's already being used by lawyers, and I'm one myself and want it. Appreciate it's not for you!

Re: Show HN: Tritium – The Legal IDE in Rust

#92

Post by piker »

vorpalclub wrote: post #79

Just a thought: I think it would be neat if you could include one of Mathew Butterick’s fonts ( https://matthewbutterick.com/ ), as a fellow lawyer/software developer. I don’t know how practical that is, but it’s a smallish club and they are very pretty fonts.

Thanks so much for the idea. You may already know this, but fonts are actually little pieces of software subject to their own licensing terms. For that reason, Tritium (like most word processors, I believe) relies on the system fonts available for rendering. Those are already owned by the user. I'll reach out to Matthew and see if there's any possibility for collaboration.

Re: Show HN: Tritium – The Legal IDE in Rust

#93

Post by wiseowise »

piker wrote: post #89
chrismorgan wrote: post #88

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 gene…

It’s a great point. This uses the canvas element only because it’s rendering in the browser. But this is really a desktop application, so the canvas element doesn't come up as a concept outside of WASM. Your main contention seems to be that nobody other than web browser implementers can render and edit text, and thus we should be limited to the set of applications that can run on the DOM and leverage the web browser’…

> but it requires shipping an entire web browser

That’s a moot point and completely irrelevant for 99.99% people.

Re: Show HN: Tritium – The Legal IDE in Rust

#94

Post by PhilipRoman »

philsnow wrote: post #45
blacksmith_tb wrote: post #18

It's a catchy name, though ironically tritium is not legal in the US, generally[1] (for "frivolous purposes"). Guess this is serious software! 1: https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/10/30.19

I pine for a DSL for legal documents, both because it’s tedious and tiresome to parse prose like this: > Except for persons who manufacture, process, produce, or initially transfer for sale or distribution self-luminous products containing tritium, krypton-85, or promethium-147, and except as provided in paragraph (c) of this section, any person is exempt from the requirements for a license set forth in section 81 of…

One thing I would really like to see is the mathematical and/or notation with the tall single curly bracket (with nesting, when appropriate).

I've seen a bulleted list being used for both conjunctions and disjunctions within the same document and in both cases it was not obvious from context (it was related to conditions for receiving funding)

Re: Show HN: Tritium – The Legal IDE in Rust

#95

Post by piker »

wiseowise wrote: post #93
piker wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a great point. This uses the canvas element only because it’s rendering in the browser. But this is really a desktop application, so the canvas element doesn't come up as a concept outside of WASM. Your main contention seems to be that nobody other than web browser implementers can render and edit text, and thus we should be limited to the set of applications that can run on the DOM and leverage the web browser’…

> but it requires shipping an entire web browser That’s a moot point and completely irrelevant for 99.99% people.

Perhaps that is an accurate percentage, but lawyers are in that .01%. If you're competing with Microsoft Word on performance you'd better be stupid fast and lightweight. Transactional lawyers routinely have dozens of Word documents and PDFs open at a time. Not long-term viable with something like Electron.

Re: Show HN: Tritium – The Legal IDE in Rust

#96

Post by dtj1123 »

One thought regarding footnotes. I often find myself searching in the reverse direction, i.e. I have a footnote, where is the superscript to which it belongs?. This is quite difficult to do by eye, so perhaps some goto reference type functionality could be useful in this case.

Re: Show HN: Tritium – The Legal IDE in Rust

#97

Post by gamblor956 »

There have been Word add-ons that do all of this for a while now, specifically targeted at lawyers.

Why would a law firm give up Word for this? That's your competition and unlike techies they're not going to waste time on an MVP, they want and need a finished product.

Re: Show HN: Tritium – The Legal IDE in Rust

#98

Post by gamblor956 »

b0a04gl wrote: post #75

> "Finally got sick of diffing contracts in Word and emailing PDFs back and forth" this is the actual iceberg. forget ai clause generators and buzzwords, 99 percent of the pain is version chaos. localfirst editor is cool and imagine pairing that with proper gitstyle branching across teams. redlines you can merge without manually eyeball.

Word has offered redline merging for over several decades...

There's a reason it's still the standard in the legal industry.

The funny thing is that Word has tons of functionality that techies aren't aware of because they don't actually use it so they keep building products around features Word has had for years. And then they wonder why their startup failed to get any traction.

Re: Show HN: Tritium – The Legal IDE in Rust

#100

Post by piker »

dtj1123 wrote: post #96

One thought regarding footnotes. I often find myself searching in the reverse direction, i.e. I have a footnote, where is the superscript to which it belongs?. This is quite difficult to do by eye, so perhaps some goto reference type functionality could be useful in this case.

Great idea! Definitely coming.
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