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Launch HN: Haystack (YC S24) – Visualize and edit code on an infinite canvas

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Re: Launch HN: Haystack (YC S24) – Visualize and edit code on an infinite canvas

#41

Post by graerg »

akshaysg wrote: post #10
ocean_moist wrote: post #6

This feels helpful as I have to hold less stuff in my mind, but the UI is way too mouse dependent right now. You guys should make some shortcuts and somehow make it “tiling” like a window manager (dwm), so you don’t have to manually resize windows.

We actually do try to make the canvas as keyboard navigable as possible. There are a list of keyboard bindings in the "Keybindings and Help" button on the bottom right. In terms of manually resizing, we actually do try to tile in the viewport. May I know what's causing you to resize it so I can fix it?

In this vein, do you know what the experience has been like for users that use the vim vscode plugin? I see that it's trivial to carry over extensions and whatnot, but is the experience still "good" trying to use both?

Re: Launch HN: Haystack (YC S24) – Visualize and edit code on an infinite canvas

#42

Post by hansonkd »

faramarz wrote: post #27

Very cool. I imagined my organizations entire codebase being mapped like this and across different frameworks and languages. I don’t know if I missed this in the video or if it’s not yet possible, but that’s a lot of manual work, so instead of connecting the nodes, give a simple bot to run in the repo folder to automate the visualization. It’s super cool and I’m adding to my watch list. If I were you, i’d target ente…

that would be interesting if you could "link" across API calls to different services.

Re: Launch HN: Haystack (YC S24) – Visualize and edit code on an infinite canvas

#43

Post by necovek »

ivanjermakov wrote: post #7

Interesting, for me this is exactly the opposite of efficient code navigation. LSP + keyboard-driven interface is miles ahead in terms of efficiency and speed. I respect the effort of breaking into less researched lands though. Congrats on the launch, I'm sure some will find this tool useful.

I actually like keyboard-driven interface + spatial layout, I just don't have a large enough monitor (I've been hoping for 40"+ 8k monitors for years). But having multiple files open that smartly refocus and rearrange as you ESC-. (Emacs shortcut to jump to implementation of a thing under cursor) would be wonderful: if smart "arrows" are drawn between file boxes, that'd be sweet as well.

The hard bit is making that to be "smart" and not annoying with things moving that you still need.

Re: Launch HN: Haystack (YC S24) – Visualize and edit code on an infinite canvas

#44

Post by fragmede »

bhy wrote: post #5
akshaysg wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're going to make a "Haystack-lite" extension in the future! I understand the pain here. We chose to go with a VS-code fork so we could maximize the canvas features. I am curious if you would find the "canvas" view distracting when it's on a sidebar as opposed to the main editor?

Thinking about it, a sidebar "canvas" could be more useful comparing to the main editor to me: * when reading code, I found I jump back and forth the call stack quite often, a visualization of this could help with this navigation, especially with some properly designed shortcut keys. * I mostly code on MacBook so screen real estate is precious. The canvas as main editor looks like waste a lot of screen space. But the…

I think part of what makes this work is that ultrawidescreen monitors aren't as impossibly expensive as they once were, so screen real estate can be spent and your spacial reasoning can take over. It might just not work well on a laptop screen.

Re: Launch HN: Haystack (YC S24) – Visualize and edit code on an infinite canvas

#45

Post by akshaysg »

graerg wrote: post #41
akshaysg wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We actually do try to make the canvas as keyboard navigable as possible. There are a list of keyboard bindings in the "Keybindings and Help" button on the bottom right. In terms of manually resizing, we actually do try to tile in the viewport. May I know what's causing you to resize it so I can fix it?

In this vein, do you know what the experience has been like for users that use the vim vscode plugin? I see that it's trivial to carry over extensions and whatnot, but is the experience still "good" trying to use both?

I use the Vim VS Code plugin! It mostly works, but I'm not going to lie: there are a couple of bugs e.g. when you go to definition the Vim selection gets confused because in most cases you get placed into a symbol editor.

I am happy to fix any bugs here. I am the only person I know who uses the Vim plugin in Haystack, so I haven't prioritized fixing the bugs I encounter.

Re: Launch HN: Haystack (YC S24) – Visualize and edit code on an infinite canvas

#46

Post by akshaysg »

hansonkd wrote: post #42
faramarz wrote: post #27

Very cool. I imagined my organizations entire codebase being mapped like this and across different frameworks and languages. I don’t know if I missed this in the video or if it’s not yet possible, but that’s a lot of manual work, so instead of connecting the nodes, give a simple bot to run in the repo folder to automate the visualization. It’s super cool and I’m adding to my watch list. If I were you, i’d target ente…

that would be interesting if you could "link" across API calls to different services.

Most likely we would either have to get the user to do this (we plan to add this as a feature) or use AI to understand when disconnected code (from the LSP standpoint) is indeed connected.

This is a top user request though!

Re: Launch HN: Haystack (YC S24) – Visualize and edit code on an infinite canvas

#47

Post by akshaysg »

999900000999 wrote: post #39

Very awesome! I want this for C# and Python! Are their any technical challenges there? I would love to use this with Unity.

For C# unfortunately we're missing a lot of features because the VS Code ecosystem itself lacks them (I think this is due to them being unique to Visual Studio). In most cases, except grabbing incoming/outgoing calls, Haystack should just work.

For Python, it should work just fine!

Re: Launch HN: Haystack (YC S24) – Visualize and edit code on an infinite canvas

#48

Post by akshaysg »

hyggetrold wrote: post #38

Does this project take any inspiration from Light Table? Potential feature request - take the visualization beyond 2D. Really complex systems are usually an intricate graph (polite way of saying ball of yarn) and just visualizing in the 2D plane doesn't seem to cut it in my experience. I would love to have something like concentric spheres of visualization - boundary services on the outer layer, core/domain services…

A lot of people mentioned Light Table, but I didn't know about it until post-launch!

It's interesting that you mention a more 3D view. We were ideating on this, but it's really hard to get right in a way that the user can understand. This is definitely part of our vision for the future though!

EDIT: Deleted the bit about my speculation regarding Light Table since it's false.

Re: Launch HN: Haystack (YC S24) – Visualize and edit code on an infinite canvas

#49

Post by 999900000999 »

akshaysg wrote: post #47
999900000999 wrote: post #39

Very awesome! I want this for C# and Python! Are their any technical challenges there? I would love to use this with Unity.

For C# unfortunately we're missing a lot of features because the VS Code ecosystem itself lacks them (I think this is due to them being unique to Visual Studio). In most cases, except grabbing incoming/outgoing calls, Haystack should just work. For Python, it should work just fine!

Can I still do the cool visualization ?

I'll experiment with this over the weekend and I might share it with my game dev friends!

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