Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

4coder editor is now fully open source

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 108 posts

Re: 4coder editor is now fully open source

#52

Post by typon »

098799 wrote: post #16

I wonder how do people come to a decision that it's a good idea to start their own text editor when vim and emacs exist. For this one my guess is the author is a c/c++ developer and wanted to have their editor cusomizable in their desired language. Would that be enough? It's also not a common thing for projects like that not to start as FOSS.

Both are dead in the water architecturally if you want to use a text editor that can render fonts and other graphics at 60 fps on a normal desktop.

Re: 4coder editor is now fully open source

#53

Post by paskozdilar »

Nicksil wrote: post #48
paskozdilar wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hm. It was either removed, or I haven't seen the title properly. Still, the argument is the same - a person is posting an article on a news site for the sole purpose of other people seeing (consuming) it. I consider it basic decency to create a good presentation when you're showing something in people's news feed.

>Still, the argument is the same - a person is posting an article on a news site for the sole purpose of other people seeing (consuming) it. >I consider it basic decency to create a good presentation when you're showing something in people's news feed. The individual posting the article may not be the owner of the code base thus making it impossible for the poster to alter the presentation. If the owner of the code b…

> The individual posting the article may not be the owner of the code base

Good point, I didn't consider that.

The point of view I'm coming from is that while it's impossible to put all possible information in a README (and such level of detail would probably make it even less readable, like Whitehead and Russel's Principia Mathematica) - there are some things that are reasonable to expect on any kind of public repository (I assume it's a public repository because of the README's public-facing style - "Welcome to the 4coder code base. [...] In this readme you will find: [...]"), such as "what is the purpose of this program".

I know nobody owes anything to nobody, and such criticism might be seen as rude - since we're basically criticizing volunteers - but consider the fact that feedback is a major part of how we figure out our mistakes. If someone is posting their work online, it would be reasonable to assume that they care about their work and want to make it better. Without (constructive) criticism, they would never receive the feedback required for improving. Praise is pleasant and should be given when it's due, but criticism is also useful information.

Re: 4coder editor is now fully open source

#57

Post by masukomi »

capableweb wrote: post #10
bitva77 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love (not) these posts that assume we know what it is.

I love people who think everything has to be aimed for their consumption. Some things are aimed at a group of people, and written with that in mind. Someone closing a project/stopping maintenance of something, usually write directly to the group of users of the software. To expect everything to contain information about everything someone could not know, means everything would have to be extremely verbose. We have se…

I love people who think that they have any semblance of an idea of who will see or read their stuff. It's so pre-Gutenberg of them. ;)

You don't have to write your things FOR EVERYONE but it isn't unreasonable to suggest that folks are going to link to random projects on github and that other folks may end up on said project through unexpected means, and with no context, or with unexpected context. It probably follows that that _maybe_ spending the time to write _one sentence_ to describe WTF you're looking if you want ANYONE to consume it isn't unreasonable.

Re: 4coder editor is now fully open source

#58

Post by _gabe_ »

maccard wrote: post #49
_gabe_ wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Side note: it's funny how formerly closed-source projects always open up to have tons of spaghetti code and bad design planning. I was curious after you said this, so I took a look at the 4coder source. It looks like very straightforward code. The files are clearly marked so you know exactly what they do, the APIs look simple and reasonable, and they have clearly marked folders containing all platform specific code…

> : I would just like to add that I saw the author left several comments about the state of the code in the Readme that imply the code is very unstable. I dunno, I'm looking at their "4coder_base_types.h" header [0] and redefining basic types and builtin keywords for personal preference (yeah I know, static is overloaded) is a serious eyebrow raiser. [0] https://github.com/Dion-Systems/4coder/blob/62fe17699a99f7d2...

You can just hover over the keyword with an IDE and instantly see that it's just a typedef for static. There's nothing wrong with doing something like this, especially since it wasn't meant to be OSS and more of a personal project until now. In addition, i32 is not an ambiguous typedef. It's way clearer that this is a 32 bit integer than `int` is.

Finally, big libraries do this as well. Freetype is notorious for typedefing weird stuff like FTPos and all that. It's just one way to model the domain language in the code, and that's fine by me. If the big open source libraries can do it, what's wrong with a small one doing it too?

Re: 4coder editor is now fully open source

#59

Post by alpaca128 »

098799 wrote: post #16

I wonder how do people come to a decision that it's a good idea to start their own text editor when vim and emacs exist. For this one my guess is the author is a c/c++ developer and wanted to have their editor cusomizable in their desired language. Would that be enough? It's also not a common thing for projects like that not to start as FOSS.

    - Fun
    - Learning new things
    - No decades old quirks & constraints through backwards compatibility
    - Same concept with fresh ideas & multithreading
A lot of good reasons imho, which is why I'm also tinkering with my own little editor. In the worst case I'll have learned a ton and have a small collection of useful libraries. Some innovation in modal editing after 30 years might be nice.

Re: 4coder editor is now fully open source

#60

Post by badsectoracula »

maccard wrote: post #49
_gabe_ wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Side note: it's funny how formerly closed-source projects always open up to have tons of spaghetti code and bad design planning. I was curious after you said this, so I took a look at the 4coder source. It looks like very straightforward code. The files are clearly marked so you know exactly what they do, the APIs look simple and reasonable, and they have clearly marked folders containing all platform specific code…

> : I would just like to add that I saw the author left several comments about the state of the code in the Readme that imply the code is very unstable. I dunno, I'm looking at their "4coder_base_types.h" header [0] and redefining basic types and builtin keywords for personal preference (yeah I know, static is overloaded) is a serious eyebrow raiser. [0] https://github.com/Dion-Systems/4coder/blob/62fe17699a99f7d2...

The types bit is incredibly common, i think pretty much all codebases i've worked on professionally did that.

The keywords bit isn't that common, though it could be related to some custom script (e.g. having the editor parsing the "function" keywords) or doc generator.

Post reply on HN