That's a great idea! Would love to see a lightweight version of this as a VScode extension only to browse through the code.
Show HN: Haystack – an IDE for exploring and editing code on an infinite canvas
121–130 of 227 posts
Re: Show HN: Haystack – an IDE for exploring and editing code on an infinite canvas
#122[deleted]
Re: Show HN: Haystack – an IDE for exploring and editing code on an infinite canvas
#123Is it partly inspired by Smalltalk browsers?
Yes, that was my first thought too. The concept is similar. Get rid if the source-files and put every function/method in its own "editor". However, as far as I remember navigation to/from callers was not possible in Smalltalk.
It was, even in the ancient original Smalltalk-80.
Re: Show HN: Haystack – an IDE for exploring and editing code on an infinite canvas
#124Background colour control needed!
Re: Show HN: Haystack – an IDE for exploring and editing code on an infinite canvas
#125Namespace conflict, and yes it does matter. Just as "mamba" was an anaconda package manager re-implementation before it got commandeered by the LLM research crowd, now Haystack is being stolen away from Deepset: https://github.com/deepset-ai/haystack https://haystack.deepset.ai/
And this is on top of it being stolen away from the rightful owners: hay farmers.
They don't make stacks anymore; these days we have balers (and rollers) and therefore move the food (over km) to the livestock rather than the livestock (over m) to the food.
Re: Show HN: Haystack – an IDE for exploring and editing code on an infinite canvas
#126I'm not sure about the AI features but the concept of working with code on a canvas and having some sort of flowchart UI has been a dream of mine for some time. I mainly do data processing and draw lots of flowcharts for communicating pipelines and also for myself. Having a development UI which goes in that direction somewhat would be great for handling unwieldy codebases written by non-CS folk.
It would be awesome if we can sketch diagrams and code in the same canvas! This would make visual documentation much easier.
Re: Show HN: Haystack – an IDE for exploring and editing code on an infinite canvas
#127It would be amazing if you could add notes or draw on the canvas in the unfilled spots but this is a pretty cool idea
Re: Show HN: Haystack – an IDE for exploring and editing code on an infinite canvas
#128Is it partly inspired by Smalltalk browsers?
Yes, that was my first thought too. The concept is similar. Get rid if the source-files and put every function/method in its own "editor". However, as far as I remember navigation to/from callers was not possible in Smalltalk.
You don't have to get rid of files; while the Smalltalk image was great and offer some advantages, there has been Smalltalks that worked on files and Lisp showed that you can have still have a working image with files.
> navigation to/from callers was not possible in Smalltalk
You can navigate implementations and references to symbols, which mostly work like how unannotated dynamic languages (like Ruby, Python) would work.
There would be false positives; but it isn't as bad as it sounds unless you look up common symbols like `#value` and `#value:`.
In some Smalltalk environments and some extensions, you could narrow them by scope, like look up references to this symbol within that package. I think Dolphin did that.
Re: Show HN: Haystack – an IDE for exploring and editing code on an infinite canvas
#129I'm not sure about the AI features but the concept of working with code on a canvas and having some sort of flowchart UI has been a dream of mine for some time. I mainly do data processing and draw lots of flowcharts for communicating pipelines and also for myself. Having a development UI which goes in that direction somewhat would be great for handling unwieldy codebases written by non-CS folk.
Is a tool like LabView what you have in mind? https://www.ni.com/en/shop/labview.html
Yeah kind of. I have worked with LabView and liked the flowchart UI for handling lab instruments, but for somewhat complex algorithms it got unwieldy really fast.
I have the feeling LabView is a good tool for designing control panels and visual tools in general ("front-end"). It is less suited for implementing back-end algorithms. I guess I wish for a similar tool which can also handle the back-end (in the context of my data processing job).
The problem is that I don't know myself what UI I would actually want for a "canvas-based editor". Some mixture between a visual flowchart and being able to edit code in each box? I'm obviously not the first person to think about it and it seems to be a non-trivial problem.
Re: Show HN: Haystack – an IDE for exploring and editing code on an infinite canvas
#130Interesting, some notes:
- obsidian has similar feature called "Canvas", perhaps look at their work flow.
- For me this is uselles as a standalone tool. I need it as Idea plugin.
- creating layouts is the part I hate. Perhaps some AI that takes Git patches, or bug fixes and creates layout based on that.
- sharing layouts needs to be super easy
- integrate Git history as another dimensions. Diff and blame N notations in editor.
- there are data (git commits) that you can use to train AI.
- integrate debuging as another dimension
- integrate data from profiler...