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

IDEs we had 30 years ago and lost (2023)

blogsystem5.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

511–520 of 607 posts

Re: IDEs we had 30 years ago and lost (2023)

#511

Post by lproven »

robenkleene wrote: post #245
disqard wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sci-fi author Robert Sawyer (who has won Hugo and Nebula awards) is a big fan of Wordstar -- he uses it to write his books. I highly recommend reading this: https://www.sfwriter.com/wordstar.htm

This useful, but it also seems like a very comparable feature set to editors like Emacs and Vim. So I'd still love to hear from someone who has the background to do a direct comparison, especially if they prefer WordStar.

> So I'd still love to hear from someone who has the background to do a direct comparison

Can do.

> especially if they prefer WordStar.

I don't. I dislike both WS and Vi.

Vi (and its variants, I am covering all of them here) is a Unix tool. In the 1980s, Unix was big and expensive, and usually ran on boxes so expensive they had to be shared. So, mainly found in academia and research.

WordStar is a CP/M tool which became for a while took that dominance to DOS.

It ran on affordable standalone microcomputers you owned and didn't have to share with anyone else.

What they share is that they are designed for keyboards before things like cursor keys, Insert/Overtype, PageUp/PageDown, Home/End were added. They do not assume theys; they expect just letters, a few shift/meta/ctrl type keys, and nothing else.

So, they redefine all these functions with letters and letter combinations.

So, cryptic, idiosyncratic, hard to learn, but once you learned, fast and powerful. Touch-typists loved them, because your fingers stayed on the home row and you never needed to reach off the alpha-block and into the extra keys. (The ones that are a different colour on the classic IBM Model F and Model M keyboard.)

Vi is the Unix flavour of touch-typist's UI, for those from universities and research and maybe big rich corporations.

WordStar is the DOS flavour of touch-typist's UI, for those who bought or built their own computers and installed and ran their own software on inexpensive machines.

In its time, WS keys were everywhere in DOS. The cracks started showing when WordPerfect took the DOS wordprocessing crown, with its even weirder function-key driven UI, which really favoured the Model F layout (f-keys down the side) and contained built-in copy protection in the form of colourful keyboard templates.

Then IBM CUA came along and mostly swept that away. I was there and using DOS then and I much prefer CUA.

Same functional role, but different commercial markets.

Re: IDEs we had 30 years ago and lost (2023)

#512

Post by marssaxman »

skydhash wrote: post #468
marssaxman wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not following you; how does that question relate?

All the keybindings you mentioned are commands accessible with M-x. The thing with Emacs is that a chord is always attached to a keymap. The global keymap is always accessible while all the others are accessible through a keybind in another keymap, recursively. So the only thing you need to know are those commands. And that's the main appeal of Emacs, to have commands that augment text editing. One of the most powerf…

Thank you for your helpful reply. I'm afraid I don't have enough familiarity with emacs to quite follow your explanation - I didn't actually write the bit of emacs-speak in my previous message, and I don't know what its terms mean. I just asked ChatGPT to invent something one emacs user might plausibly say to another!

It has always sounded like emacs is extraordinarily powerful and configurable, and that must be great for people who want to do extraordinary things with their text editor. There was a time when I enjoyed tinkering with my environment more, but these days I prefer simple, ordinary tools I can easily understand. I don't really want to think about the tools at all, but focus on the task I'm doing with them. I'm content to let emacs be something other people appreciate.

Re: IDEs we had 30 years ago and lost (2023)

#514

Post by jagged-chisel »

nec4b wrote: post #471
constantcrying wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Is there a 2D accelerated GUI that can help me do the same? Of course. Just mount it through ssh and use whatever file manager you already have. It is very silly to switch tools just because the machine is somewhere else. Switching tools just to accommodate the machine being remote is just bizarre to me. You even said that you used mc mostly for remote machines. What is the point of that? Now you have to use at leas…

You seem to have very strong feelings when other people have different preferences then you. Why would use words like bizarre, delusional and total waste, when discussing such trivial matters. >> Why? Do you think that is reasonable at all, when something as simple as just mounting over ssh exists? In short yes. I use it mostly on remote machines and on my desktop Linux machine. Before that I used Norton Commander on…

And a remote command over SSH isn’t going to incur the network delay multiplied by every file you want to touch.

Re: IDEs we had 30 years ago and lost (2023)

#515

Post by ChromaticPanic »

EasyMark wrote: post #430
ranger_danger wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find Qt Creator to be quite comparable to the experience I remember with e.g. VB6. Have you tried it?

Yeah if you know c++ decently, you can whip up a basic app pretty quickly.

Works with python too, you can build a desktop UI for your app in an hour

Re: IDEs we had 30 years ago and lost (2023)

#517

Post by throw-the-towel »

int_19h wrote: post #406
sheepscreek wrote: post #357

> Visual Basic was the pinnacle of graphics programming I am still shocked how no tool since has managed to come even close to VB. You could easily develop a moderately complex GUI application that felt snappy in an afternoon. C# with WinForms is the second closest to that. All other iterations since have not been designed with individual developers in mind, sadly. A powerful developing alternative to this paradigm c…

Delphi was superior to VB even back in the day, and is still around, as is Lazarus. C# WinForms is actually closest to that, not to VB - and is also still around.

It's not surprising, Delphi and C# design were both led by the same person, Anders Hejlsberg. (He then went on to design Typescript.)

Re: IDEs we had 30 years ago and lost (2023)

#518

Post by lproven »

int_19h wrote: post #414
pjmlp wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course it could, it is essentially dead, because hardly anyone still does X remoting, and Wayland doesn't support it.

Ironically these days the built-in "remote desktop" feature in Gnome is literally RDP.

Not really ironic. The GNOME team are mostly paid by the same company as the Wayland team (and the Flatpak team and the OStree team and the systemd team) and that team wants to replace X.org with its own new tool.

Re: IDEs we had 30 years ago and lost (2023)

#519

Post by lproven »

internet_points wrote: post #316
mickeyp wrote: post #25

The knocks against Emacs feel unwarranted. It has plenty of colour; it has mouse support, even in the terminal, but not all terminals support it, so it's optional. It also runs in a GUI with, you know, image support and whatnot. You can rail against its defaults, but do not make misleading claims.

Yeah, the menu bar thing just makes no sense. Here's what a completely uncustomized emacs looks like: https://i.imgur.com/0vFsd3p.png If you for whatever reason absolutely need to run it in the terminal, then you'll have to either learn that F10 toggles the menu bar, but then it still looks like a real menu bar that you can navigate with the arrows and enter: https://i.imgur.com/ETA2Qhs.png (or you can `M-x xterm-mou…

> Here's what a completely uncustomized emacs looks like

I think that the key thing you're missing here is that the contents of the menu matter as well as the visual presentation.

Emacs's menus, in my (very) limited experience, expose a very strange hodgepodge of Emacs concepts and terms in a very odd grouping that presumably makes some kind of sense for Emacs folks.

I am not an Emacs person. I use CUA interfaces everywhere. This determines and specifies the names of the menus, which ones have (...) meaning that they lead to a dialog box, which ones have (->) which means they lead to a submenu, and they have standard options in standard places.

The Emacs ones are just... weird random noise, in a random layout, that makes no sense to me, and the few parts that are vaguely recognisable make little to no sense.

It's not just the presentation. Users of menu-driven tools need the presentation and the content and the organisation of the content.

Re: IDEs we had 30 years ago and lost (2023)

#520

Post by lproven »

qiller wrote: post #300

Loved Borland IDE at the time. I still miss Ctrl-KB/KK (IIRC?) style selections from time to time. These days Far Manager (via far2l) or MC kind of scratch the itch for quick TUI edits.

As other commenters have noted, the name for the Ctrl+Kx UI is the WordStar keystrokes.
Post reply on HN