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Developer wrote 25k lines of Neovim plugin code using phone and touchscreen

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Re: Developer wrote 25k lines of Neovim plugin code using phone and touchscreen

#131

Post by mckn1ght »

CoastalCoder wrote: post #116
ongytenes wrote: post #102

I been writing programs for over 50 years and I shuddered at the thought of doing it on a phone. My first thought, he must be a masochist. Then I thought he might not had anything better to work on. I'm a touch typist who doesn't need to look at the keyboard why typing. Given my cataracts and tiny screen and tiny keyboard, it is torture to type on my phone.

> I'm a touch typist who doesn't need to look at the keyboard why typing. :)

I’m a touch typist as well but use a combination of swype/dictation on mobile and pretty much all my writing there looks like this. I will bang out a message, then have to painstakingly edit all the mistakes. It’s an annoying downgrade in communication experience.

Re: Developer wrote 25k lines of Neovim plugin code using phone and touchscreen

#133

Post by zachlatta »

We are doing a fundraiser for him to get a laptop here: https://hcb.hackclub.com/donations/start/oxy2dev-laptop

Transparent ledger of donations: https://hcb.hackclub.com/oxy2dev-laptop/transactions

We need about $500 more USD to get him an M1 MacBook Air (they are more expensive in Bangladesh, where he is based).

GitHub thread with details: https://github.com/OXY2DEV/markview.nvim/issues/218. Here is a Reddit comment from the author showing this is the official fundraiser: https://old.reddit.com/r/neovim/comments/1h7vhmg/bro_been_de...

Re: Developer wrote 25k lines of Neovim plugin code using phone and touchscreen

#134

Post by autoexec »

barosl wrote: post #94
sharperguy wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you use a special keyboard app too, or just the default one?

Just the default one. I tried some alternative keyboards and they are better in some ways but in the end the default keyboard was enough. Termius provides input of some special keys (e.g. Ctrl, Alt, Esc, Tab, Home, End) so that's another reason why the default keyboard is enough.

Be sure to check the privacy policy on your default keyboard. I've been burned by that before. The default keyboard on my last galaxy phone was sending every single keystroke to a third party and checking their privacy policy showed they used that data for things like market research, guessing at my level of education, building a psychological profile, detecting my interests, etc. and that they in turn shared that data with others.

I switched to AnySoftKeyboard and although the auto-correct/spellcheck is way worse (understandable since they're not collecting every word everyone's typing) the customization and terminal mode are great. I'd occasionally code on my phone in termux (the largest program written on that device was only around 2000 lines) and it did the job.

Re: Developer wrote 25k lines of Neovim plugin code using phone and touchscreen

#135

Post by isoprophlex »

zachlatta wrote: post #133

We are doing a fundraiser for him to get a laptop here: https://hcb.hackclub.com/donations/start/oxy2dev-laptop Transparent ledger of donations: https://hcb.hackclub.com/oxy2dev-laptop/transactions We need about $500 more USD to get him an M1 MacBook Air (they are more expensive in Bangladesh, where he is based). GitHub thread with details: https://github.com/OXY2DEV/markview.nvim/issues/218 . Here is a Reddit commen…

From my spoiled western perspective it seems surprisingly difficult to either just send him the money or have a laptop delivered to him. I wouldnt have guessed that upfront...

Re: Developer wrote 25k lines of Neovim plugin code using phone and touchscreen

#136

Post by cesarb »

uludag wrote: post #110

This is actually a surprisingly depressing post. It makes me question all the assumptions I have about dev UX. If my dev tooling was taken away, the saas products I depend on shut down, slack replaced by email, keyboard with phone, etc. would I eventually adapt to such a situation? Would my productivity cut be only marginal? I sure hope the case is that this developer is just a genius, as I'd like to think we as devs…

> If my dev tooling was taken away, the saas products I depend on shut down, slack replaced by email, keyboard with phone, etc. would I eventually adapt to such a situation?

As others have noted, plenty of us have developed on computers where the display had merely 25 lines and 80 columns of characters, or less, and no Internet connection at all. Not intermittent connection, complete absence of connection. Exchanging data meant physically carrying disks, which contained as little as 360 kilobytes (or less).

That developer's phone is probably thousands of times more powerful than what we had back then, and has the luxury of a nearly permanent network connection to a huge amount of even more powerful computers. The only real limitation, other than arbitrary operating system restrictions, is the very small screen size and tiny keyboard size. Give that phone an external USB or Bluetooth keyboard and mouse, and a way to connect to a television as an external monitor, and it becomes close enough to a desktop PC.

Re: Developer wrote 25k lines of Neovim plugin code using phone and touchscreen

#137

Post by wordofx »

isoprophlex wrote: post #135
zachlatta wrote: post #133

We are doing a fundraiser for him to get a laptop here: https://hcb.hackclub.com/donations/start/oxy2dev-laptop Transparent ledger of donations: https://hcb.hackclub.com/oxy2dev-laptop/transactions We need about $500 more USD to get him an M1 MacBook Air (they are more expensive in Bangladesh, where he is based). GitHub thread with details: https://github.com/OXY2DEV/markview.nvim/issues/218 . Here is a Reddit commen…

From my spoiled western perspective it seems surprisingly difficult to either just send him the money or have a laptop delivered to him. I wouldnt have guessed that upfront...

He doesn’t want one sent to him because he believes customs will hold it until bribed.

Re: Developer wrote 25k lines of Neovim plugin code using phone and touchscreen

#138

Post by awongh »

rochak wrote: post #25
nstart wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's a kid from Bangladesh who is studying and isn't even in uni yet. He's mentioned on reddit that his parents are doing the classical asian parent thing of pushing him to become a doctor or engineer and right now he's busy studying for the medical entry exam. If he doesn't get through that he might consider a computer science thing. So basically the whole neovim plugin is a side quest at the moment. Always boggles…

Oh man, if this is true, I truly salute his dedication for pushing through and contributing to open source. Not many, despite having all the means available to them, have the drive to "just do it". markview.nvim is a great plugin that does one thing and does it well. Edit: Seems like there is an open issue [1] to get him a PC to code on. Just one more reason why I love the community. [1]: https://github.com/OXY2DEV/m…

It's always a refreshing reminder of my privilege seeing how many barriers certain people have to just buying/receiving a computer- shipping into a country, dealing with getting money into a country, using a credit card, etc.

Also, a lot of people say the world is getting worse, but computers and the internet are slowly but surely spreading to many people who wouldn't have had access even 5 years ago.

Re: Developer wrote 25k lines of Neovim plugin code using phone and touchscreen

#139

Post by wordofx »

bionsystem wrote: post #118
theden wrote: post #52

I've done development on a Nokia n900, but with an external keyboard — can't imagine using an on-screen keyboard, or even a tiny physical one! Funny thing is, I don't know if some high sec work envs are much better, where developers have to nest remote through machines (of different OSes) just to get a terminal...

We work exclusively on remote VMs that have no internet access. Well writing the stuff is fine through PuTTY (with tmux+vim), some other guys use RDP with VSCode but it is extremely laggy and I hate it. Some tasks can be annoying. $job before that I would remotely connect to clients machines through various ways. Most would be a webpage with some terminal emulation in JS, or some web-based RDP (to a Linux or a Window…

> We work exclusively on remote VMs that have no internet access.

Is this some kind of developer dominatrix fetish or something where people get off punishing themselves.

“You’ve been a bad boy! You used AI! No Internet for you”

Re: Developer wrote 25k lines of Neovim plugin code using phone and touchscreen

#140

Post by temporarara »

bmicraft wrote: post #128
ongytenes wrote: post #102

I been writing programs for over 50 years and I shuddered at the thought of doing it on a phone. My first thought, he must be a masochist. Then I thought he might not had anything better to work on. I'm a touch typist who doesn't need to look at the keyboard why typing. Given my cataracts and tiny screen and tiny keyboard, it is torture to type on my phone.

I can literally type on my phone without looking at the keys with an acceptable amount of erros. Might be a skill issue?

If you've got big fingers you need quite a lot of skills to type on your phone even when you are looking.
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