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Nyxt: The Hacker's Browser

nyxt.atlas.engineer

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Re: Nyxt: The Hacker's Browser

#151

Post by astrange »

cryptonector wrote: post #133
can16358p wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This! I've been programmer for about 20 years now and I could never understand why Vi(m) or Emacs exists with those weird bindings which are completely different from pretty much everything else. I'm not that old, maybe they had their cake in 80s, but perhaps time to move on to something modern which would have modern defaults (if many need to customize there's something wrong with the defaults) that appeal to all ke…

Modal editing exists because the mouse didn't exist then, and it continues to exist because modal editing is very powerful because you get to be in a mode where you type commands for cursor movements, textual transformations, etc., which allows power users to be very productive.

I don't think I've ever seen evidence that emacs users actually need to be very productive in their text editor even if it works.

Though it might not work - the original Mac user research found that keyboards make users think they're faster, but don't actually make them faster, because of time blindness.

Re: Nyxt: The Hacker's Browser

#152

Post by dagurp »

yosito wrote: post #124

I just want a WebKit-based browser where everything can be controlled by a prominent LLM prompt box. No more clicking through constantly changing menus or trying to remember rarely-used vim shortcuts, just tell it what you want to do. Bonus if it supports continuous voice input.

Use Vivaldi then. Just press F2 and you can type any command in the browser. You can also use it to search your history and bookmarks and do basic arithmetic.

You can also combine commands into so called command chains.

Re: Nyxt: The Hacker's Browser

#153

Post by dagurp »

noisy_boy wrote: post #54

Since we are on the topic of hackers browsers, does anyone know if Firefox can be made to split pane (both for seeing the same page side by side and also doing it for two different pages)? Having done that with file browsers and IDEs, I wonder how come it wasn't a main feature? Nobody needed to compare pages side by side?

Vivaldi does this out of the box

Re: Nyxt: The Hacker's Browser

#154

Post by thepostman0 »

linmob wrote: post #119
p-e-w wrote: post #70

Looks like Nyxt, a browser "inspired by Vim", inherits Vim's showstopper bug: Being unusable on many non-US keyboards, at least with the default bindings. The 'switch-buffer-previous' command is bound to C-[, which cannot be pressed e.g. on QWERTZ layouts because the [ character requires AltGr. This is like sending around text files encoded in Windows-1252 and expecting things to just work. Sorry folks, but it turns…

Honestly, as a fellow QWERTZ-native, QWERTZ is generally a terrible layout for doing any programming in languages that go beyond round brackets. Instead have all these umlauts you rarely need, even in normal writing, right there - just a bad tradeoff. One might even argue that it's terrible for some other keyboard shortcuts, as they stop making sense: E.g., when Ctrl+Z is undo and Ctrl+X is redo, that makes perfect s…

Talking of rarely need, most 105-key boards have numeric pads that are dust covered. TKL layouts are the future and they have an additional fn modifier, maybe there's room here to add another purpose to it.

Re: Nyxt: The Hacker's Browser

#155

Post by akho »

deafpolygon wrote: post #93
throwawayadvsec wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what kind of "hacker" use windows as a main OS though? windows is only for gaming and testing the software you ship

What about Windows that makes it unsuitable? In fact, the majority of "hacking" and the proliferation of "hacking culture" over the history has been done on Windows - not any flavor of UNIX like many would have you believe. Don't gatekeep.

What’s a “hacking culture”?

Re: Nyxt: The Hacker's Browser

#156

Post by wuiheerfoj »

croes wrote: post #136
linmob wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, as a fellow QWERTZ-native, QWERTZ is generally a terrible layout for doing any programming in languages that go beyond round brackets. Instead have all these umlauts you rarely need, even in normal writing, right there - just a bad tradeoff. One might even argue that it's terrible for some other keyboard shortcuts, as they stop making sense: E.g., when Ctrl+Z is undo and Ctrl+X is redo, that makes perfect s…

Do you know how often I need umlauts if I want a proper variable name?

Not sure what language you speak, but in German umlauts can always be replaced with an ‚e‘ suffix. Having written codebases in German, I’ve never seen anybody actually use special chars in a var names! (probably a carryover from the pre-UTF-8 dark ages)

Re: Nyxt: The Hacker's Browser

#157

Post by noisy_boy »

easrng wrote: post #66
elashri wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually the had official extension[1] that did that in the past but I don't remember and can't find why it is no longer available. [1] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/uncategorized/its-a-new-firefox-...

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/side-view/

Thanks - this is useful indeed but it is sort of a hobbled view - I don't have access to the extensions I have installed in the side view. E.g. the main view shows the page in dark mode via dark reader but the side view doesn't have access to the extension so it has white background which is very jarring (better than nothing though). I wish they allowed a full-on split - almost like having two browser windows (with a common menu/bookmarks bar that acts upon the "active" pane).

Re: Nyxt: The Hacker's Browser

#158

Post by zelphirkalt »

p-e-w wrote: post #105
brabel wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have trouble hitting [ how do you ever program anything? I use multi-language keyboard layouts and switch all the time... when coding (or using "hacker" software like this, which is completely based on emacs [and as far as I know is written in Common Lisp], not vim), just use a layout that makes it easier (in my case, en-AU).

Entering [ works just fine on QWERTZ: You simply press AltGr+8. But this doesn't work in shortcuts, e.g. when combined with Ctrl. That is, AltGr+8 generates the character '[', but Ctrl+AltGr+8 is not the same as pressing Ctrl+[ on keyboards that have a dedicated [ key. This bug is decades old, and every Vim derivative suffers from it.

All the time while reading this thread I could not remember an issue like that from the time I used Vim/NeoVim. Perhaps it somehow did not affect me? At least in Emacs that works exactly like it should.

Re: Nyxt: The Hacker's Browser

#159

Post by wuiheerfoj »

doctor_eval wrote: post #127
p-e-w wrote: post #70

Looks like Nyxt, a browser "inspired by Vim", inherits Vim's showstopper bug: Being unusable on many non-US keyboards, at least with the default bindings. The 'switch-buffer-previous' command is bound to C-[, which cannot be pressed e.g. on QWERTZ layouts because the [ character requires AltGr. This is like sending around text files encoded in Windows-1252 and expecting things to just work. Sorry folks, but it turns…

> Sorry folks, but it turns out that the creators of Vi(m) didn't actually invent the ultimate UI paradigm half a century ago I have been thinking the same for years. Some guys at work used to add Vim bindings to their IDE and I just didn’t understand it. I used VI back in the day when the choice was vi or ed. It worked well given the constraints of a Wyse60 or VT100. But I was happy to leave it behind for X windows,…

> Some guys at work used to add Vim bindings to their IDE and I just didn’t understand it.

I‘m one of these guys.

I’m used to its text editing hotkeys from years of using it, but when jumping between a bunch of languages/environments it’s a lot easier to leverage the ‚integrated‘ nature of a lot IDEs (in my case Jetbrains).

Having to find, configure and remember how to use a bunch of different debuggers, linters, codegen tools and other tools manually is a pain

Re: Nyxt: The Hacker's Browser

#160

Post by gsinclair »

p-e-w wrote: post #86
TheRoque wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious about what "decades of UX research" improvements you are talking about, to me everything about the UI for text editors or browsers hasn't improved much in decades. If you have a laptop with just a touchpad, chances are you'll never get better than vim keybindings. Moreover, the keyboard layouts themselves are centuries old.

> I'm curious about what "decades of UX research" improvements you are talking about Here's the most important one of them: Don't surprise me. Blend in. Look and behave like other programs. There are 50 applications on my system. Yours is one of them. If all other applications use 'Ctrl+C' for copying text, but your application uses 'y', then your application is the problem.

That would be a problem if vim was installed front and centre on everybody’s computer and they were all expected to use it. That is not the case. You choose to use it, so you either accept, or better yet, embrace that y=copy, or you choose to use something else.

Trying to objectively describe vim as a problem by invoking UX research is very funny.

The end result of that logic is to rule out modal editors altogether.

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