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Write thin to write fast

breckyunits.com

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Re: Write thin to write fast

#81

Post by rwl »

coliveira wrote: post #61

I always wanted to have a text editor capable of writing several columns of text side by side. This way, I could have a large file split into several columns with easy visualization. Editors like vim can split the screen vertically, but they're not great at keeping these columns in sync for the same file. This could be similar to the text flow option you'd find in desktop publishing software.

Emacs' follow-mode does what you're looking for, I think:

https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Fo...

Re: Write thin to write fast

#82

Post by techbio »

Poet William Carlos Williams famously wrote on prescription pads[1] and the constraint was defining in his work's simplicity.

I'm not sold (ahem) that the New York Times newspaper chose columns strictly for the purpose of reading speed.

[1]https://collections.library.yale.edu/catalog/11870008

EDIT: I've recently been printing text on a thermal printer ribbon and editing with scissors. As the author writes, and as I write less, weight this accordingly.

Re: Write thin to write fast

#83

Post by taeric »

Feels to me that this is basically pushing to keep your writing as rapid as your talking.

To a large extent, I think this is probably right. Helps if you work in the pauses and the general quirks of your speech into the text.

Probably up in the air on whether or not this is a good idea or not. I'm sure a lot has to do with you are talking to and why.

Also note, this is not "as rapid as your thinking." Such that, I'm sure your mileage varies depending on how you read. (Do you have an inner voice, for example.)

Re: Write thin to write fast

#84

Post by hollasch »

I highly recommend Bill Hill's _The Magic of Reading_, and excellent document on the art of typesetting and why we have various typographic conventions (hundreds of years old now) and why they work. I had so many profound realizations from this paper.

https://nreilingh.github.io/The-Magic-of-Reading/

Re: Write thin to write fast

#85

Post by taeric »

joncp wrote: post #32

On a related note: At one point I switched to working exclusively on a laptop and after a while realized that the smaller screen had forced me to write better code. I wrote smaller methods, made smaller files, kept my concepts together, the whole nine yards. I even wrote better tests since that helped me keep my work small. It didn't last; I'm writing this on a 27" monitor, but I think that has more to do with bad la…

I push back on the mantra that smaller methods are always better.

Yes, they usually have less responsibility, by virtue of being smaller. However, sometimes it is best to just get a larger task done in a function. You can have parts of it logically called out, without having to use the languages features for function declaration.

Re: Write thin to write fast

#86

Post by supersrdjan »

Interesting take. On hackernews I also learned about an approach called "ventilated prose" or writing with "semantic line breaks." That is, when you write, say in vim or emacs, you put one clause per line. Then when you are done, you can use pandoc or something similar to convert what you wrote into standard prose. But the artificial line breaks, which results in thin lines, make it easier to edit, and also easier to comprehend diffs if you use git to track changes.

Re: Write thin to write fast

#88

Post by telotortium »

It would be cool if you could automatically do this in a browser, by essentially telling the browser to render a very long screen and then split it into however many columns fit on your screen (imagine taking a screenshot of your window, going down a page, taking another screenshot, and so on, and then putting these screenshots side by side).

Questions:

- Are there Ebook readers that can show many pages at once?

- Can you get this effect in an editor (Emacs/Vim/VSCode) so that you can review a long code file without scrolling too much?

Re: Write thin to write fast

#89

Post by y4mi »

telotortium wrote: post #88

It would be cool if you could automatically do this in a browser, by essentially telling the browser to render a very long screen and then split it into however many columns fit on your screen (imagine taking a screenshot of your window, going down a page, taking another screenshot, and so on, and then putting these screenshots side by side). Questions: - Are there Ebook readers that can show many pages at once? - Ca…

thats actually super easy if i didn't misunderstand you

    .col-style {
        columns: 250px;
        height: 100vh;
    }
    
 everything in here will be in columns of 250px width and the scroll bar will be going to the right instead of the bottom
try it out on the linked articles element :) (you'll also have to remove the margins on that page however, as they're using negative values)

Re: Write thin to write fast

#90

Post by forgotmypw17 »

I do this sort of thing quite often, more often than not:

    my $foo = GetFoo();
    my $bar = GetBar($foo);
    my $baz = GetBaz($bar);
As opposed to this:

    my $baz = GetBaz(GetBar(GetFoo()));
It takes a smidgen longer to write, but is much easier to read and understand when I'm looking at it 2 days later.
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