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The Emacsification of Software

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Re: The Emacsification of Software

#21

Post by RickS »

I agree, experience this, love it, etc.

The "0% product hunt, 100% show and tell" bit is one of the benefits of an ecosystem with painfully high upfront entry costs.

Does anyone know of an active forum of any kind (discord, reddit, phpbb, mailing list, whatever) for people who are building personal applications like this for love of the game, which takes hardline stances about desirable vs undesirable motives and behaviors, and enforces high entry/participation costs in exchange for unusually low quantities of transient grifters and self-interested status seeking by day-old accounts?

Re: The Emacsification of Software

#22

Post by applfanboysbgon »

tptacek wrote: post #19
applfanboysbgon wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a reason we're not reading monospaced here Legacy decisions as a remnant from a time when taking more space on paper cost pages and therefore resources, remaining as a default from centuries of inertia in how text is printed?

No, prose set in monospace is harder to read. The "legacy" is monospace! We went way out of our way to to get proportional typesetting working. But seriously: you do you. There are people who code in proportional typefaces and they're as baffling to me as you are right now. Let a thousand Markdown viewers bloom.

> The "legacy" is monospace! We went way out of our way to to get proportional typesetting working.

The legacy is proportional, at least in Latin script and its ancestors. Handwriting was proportional, of course, and so was Gutenberg's printing press. Books and newspapers have virtually always been printed in proportional type.

In Chinese and Japanese, monospace is legacy in both handwriting and print... and also still universally used today. All Chinese and Japanese text is monospaced by default. Billions of people are getting by just fine reading monospaced prose.

I don't really know where this conception that monospaced is somehow objectively harder to read is coming from. Actually, this is the first I've ever heard of the complaint. I can't help but wonder if you've been subjected to some very bad monospaced fonts in prose or something.

Re: The Emacsification of Software

#23

Post by [deleted] »

jsw97 wrote: post #11
j2kun wrote: post #9

> You want a good Markdown viewer more than you think you do. > monospaced and thus fatiguing to read. Monospaced text is fine. I don't see how people who read code (and code comments) all day care that strongly about this. Plaintext is king

There is a real use case for a viewer if you have a lot of formulas. Yes you can read the raw latex but you go cross-eyed after a while. Maybe I am a softie though.

[deleted]

Re: The Emacsification of Software

#24

Post by tptacek »

ElevenLathe wrote: post #5
empath75 wrote: post #3

I love this and I have a handful of tools like this that I built for myself (I had claude write me a TUI crossplane kcl function renderer, for example -- something whose total addressable audience in the world is probably 20 people). "Content creation for an audience of one" is really the revolutionary change that is happening right now because of AI. Disposable apps, disposable books, disposable movies, disposable m…

I'm with you on purpose-built disposable tools, but who wants to read a disposable book, or watch a disposable movie?

Not me. I'm enthralled by what this moment promises for building software, but I'm yicked out the same way everyone else is by generative art.

Re: The Emacsification of Software

#25

Post by dogleash »

> Suddenly, I realized: a good Markdown viewer was a dumb thing to waste time looking for. It’s 2026. I can just have one extruded for me.

If this is the starting thought, I don't know how you wrap back around to publishing and advertising the generated code.

Either you create the best possible mac markdown viewer and should share it as that, orthogonal to any statement of AI use. Or you're just adding to the noise of tools available online. Where other people should ignore your work, and go slopcode their own markdown viewer.

Re: The Emacsification of Software

#26

Post by mrob »

applfanboysbgon wrote: post #22
tptacek wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, prose set in monospace is harder to read. The "legacy" is monospace! We went way out of our way to to get proportional typesetting working. But seriously: you do you. There are people who code in proportional typefaces and they're as baffling to me as you are right now. Let a thousand Markdown viewers bloom.

> The "legacy" is monospace! We went way out of our way to to get proportional typesetting working. The legacy is proportional, at least in Latin script and its ancestors. Handwriting was proportional, of course, and so was Gutenberg's printing press. Books and newspapers have virtually always been printed in proportional type. In Chinese and Japanese, monospace is legacy in both handwriting and print... and also sti…

Monospace text is objectively less dense, which means you have to move your eyes more. Every eye movement is an opportunity for error. Monospace text only makes sense when seeing exact character counts matters (which it often does in computer code).

Re: The Emacsification of Software

#28

Post by applfanboysbgon »

mrob wrote: post #26
applfanboysbgon wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The "legacy" is monospace! We went way out of our way to to get proportional typesetting working. The legacy is proportional, at least in Latin script and its ancestors. Handwriting was proportional, of course, and so was Gutenberg's printing press. Books and newspapers have virtually always been printed in proportional type. In Chinese and Japanese, monospace is legacy in both handwriting and print... and also sti…

Monospace text is objectively less dense, which means you have to move your eyes more. Every eye movement is an opportunity for error. Monospace text only makes sense when seeing exact character counts matters (which it often does in computer code).

One could argue that less density, as well as standardised widths, significantly reduces opportunity for error compared to cluttered text that is constantly varying how it is displayed. Perhaps moving your eyes more increases opportunity for error by 10% but easier-to-parse characters decreases the opportunity for error by 20%?

Re: The Emacsification of Software

#30

Post by tptacek »

dogleash wrote: post #25

> Suddenly, I realized: a good Markdown viewer was a dumb thing to waste time looking for. It’s 2026. I can just have one extruded for me. If this is the starting thought, I don't know how you wrap back around to publishing and advertising the generated code. Either you create the best possible mac markdown viewer and should share it as that, orthogonal to any statement of AI use. Or you're just adding to the noise o…

The post talks about this.
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