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Show HN: Tritium – The Legal IDE in Rust

tritium.legal

131–140 of 171 posts

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

#131
I'm excited for the prospect of lawyers running Linux as their daily driver

This does not benefit your customers in any way.

It does not benefit their clients, either.

And brain activity around it is a distraction from what your business does.

At best.

Good luck.

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

#132
post #89

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’…

Build it on Makepad, who are building the UI framework (blew me away first time I saw it in action). Leaves you to build the app.

https://makepad.nl

https://github.com/makepad/makepad

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

#133
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

VS Code, the aforementioned very performant Electron-based IDE, would like to differ

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

#134
post #89

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’…

I for one appreciate the "no html" approach.

That being said, if this is truly a desktop application, why waste time making it run in a browser? If the point is to have a preview, put the time into making some good short videos that can go into a preview page.

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

#135

I'm excited for the prospect of lawyers running Linux as their daily driver This does not benefit your customers in any way. It does not benefit their clients, either. And brain activity around it is a distraction from what your business does. At best. Good luck.

That's a fair take at surface level, but building a cross-platform application does allow for a broader class of contributors who can also dogfood the product.

I'll have to do another write-up about it sometime, but a lot of Tritium's automated tests are written in docx files. So building for Linux as an afterthought allows an employee to develop from their preferred platform (if it's Linux) while still getting the full experience. Also there is something quite informing about discovering differences between platforms that help you to better understand the capabilities of each.

I also do believe one day we'll see, e.g., crypto startups' lawyers using Linux. And they'll be happy Tritium customers :)

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

#136
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Isn't word really slow and also implemented as a web browser currently?

Word for Windows is fast and native. Word for Mac is slow, but still native.

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

#137
post #133
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

VS Code, the aforementioned very performant Electron-based IDE, would like to differ

I'm not sure I agree it's "very performant", but nonetheless I do love it. (Compare it to Zed, for example.)

In any event, VS code is only required to render text in a single font, with very few layout concerns, styling, run-level formatting, etc. that require re-flowing across multiple of pages, etc. And each of those is text files measuring in the bytes. Tritium, by contrast, has to hold and operate on PDFs and Word documents each with very complicated layout and rendering logic and measuring in the kbs.

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

#138
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’…

I for one appreciate the "no html" approach. That being said, if this is truly a desktop application, why waste time making it run in a browser? If the point is to have a preview, put the time into making some good short videos that can go into a preview page.

Because it's cool to get your hands on something before diving in. Also it allows users in walled off corporate environments to preview it without having to jump through thousands of hours of infosec hurdles.

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

#139

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…

The way this app is architected with Rust and egui, they can write code once and deploy a GPU accelerated app across all major operating systems and the browser, without having to ship a web browser with their application. That's a strong draw for developers. I think it's important to ship products like this, even if some users are frustrated, because that frustration will breed innovation. Since they said it's meant to be desktop only, I think what they're doing is fine, as the web is just an added bonus.

The approach they've taken can create frustration, but it can also be seamless for users and create joy. For instance, I got to try out their app without any setup on my part, and then I can download it and it works exactly the same on my Windows and my Mac machines, because it's the same codebase for all three platforms. That kind of story was the holy grail of UI tooling for many years, and I think we should keep going down that path to improve it, despite frustrations along the way.

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

#140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No attorney who is flummoxed by this UX is going to touch an AI product in any meaningful way. Making legal tools for lawyers who would otherwise be using cuneiform tablets or the dictation pool is a waste of conversation. Looking similar to the tools a seventy five year old lawyer uses is like making an F1 car that would look familiar to Jackie Stewart: yeah, it’d probably help him adapt, but not enough to be compet…

It's not about being flummoxed, it's about being annoyed enough not to give it a chance How much less adoption would Rust have gotten if it looked like OCaml instead of C++? Its adopters are not stupid, they could have figured out alien syntax if they were already convinced of the benefit. But selling someone on an entirely new substrate for their professional work is a huge ask. You need to make it as immediately-pa…

As much as I wish the world to be different, I've heard so much whining about the Ada language's not-C-likeness that I tend to agree with you.
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