[HN Gopher] Text Editing Hates You Too (2019)
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Text Editing Hates You Too (2019)
Author : airstrike
Score : 78 points
Date : 2024-12-03 19:48 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (lord.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (lord.io)
| urbandw311er wrote:
| I enjoyed this. The part explaining the need to store a line
| affinity bit for carets was not something I've ever considered
| before.
| joshmarinacci wrote:
| A new abstraction would be greatly beneficial.
| zsjkadj wrote:
| That was insightful.
| dsego wrote:
| Do we actually need text editing support all conceivable edge
| cases? I guess I don't care how the cursor behaves as long as
| it's mostly predictable and consistent. Users would adapt, I must
| not use or care about skinned emojis much (seems like a fad
| anyway), but I use sublime text and wouldn't really care how it
| handles them at all.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| I agree. Specifically, emojis are not text and I don't really
| care what edge cases they introduce. It's neat if someone wants
| to put the work in, but that's not the meat of "text editing"
| and isn't really worth worrying about.
| samatman wrote:
| Emoji are text in all the ways that matter to a programmer.
| There are codepoints in Unicode which aren't textual, but
| emoji are not among them.
|
| Emoji don't introduce any edge cases of their own. If your
| software can't join a skin tone to a thumbs up, it also will
| fall apart on composing many scripts used by hundreds of
| millions of people.
|
| So if you really want to get all kids-these-days about emoji,
| go ahead, but support Unicode properly. You'll get correct
| emoji handling as a consequence of that anyway, and you can
| still signal whatever message you're intending to send here
| about yourself in some other way.
| keybored wrote:
| That doesn't change anything as long as there are scripts
| that use the same building blocks that emojis use.
| duped wrote:
| Emoji is just the easiest way to present these problems to an
| English-reading audience. For the several billion people
| reading and writing non-latin scripts where the "edge cases"
| are important for legibility/correctness, yes, we need text
| editors that can handle them.
| dsego wrote:
| I'm proposing it can be done at one layer above or in a
| different abstraction. There seems to be a point of
| diminishing returns, I mean if your text editor doesn't
| handle knotted cords from the inca empire why even bother.
| biwills wrote:
| I'd say it's less about covering all edge cases and more about
| showing that text editors are insanely complex, and it doesn't
| take long to find edge cases that text editors with 10s/100s of
| millions of users have.
| tajpulo wrote:
| And which blocks of Unicode exactly would you exclude from
| support and what complexity reduction do you exactly expect
| from it?
|
| In my experience, the complexity comes from the reality of how
| we write in different writing systems. I think this is
| inevitable.
| yen223 wrote:
| Even if you could pretend that everything is ASCII, text
| editing is still a very complex subject once you get into the
| weeds. You could probably write a book just on handling text
| overflow
| Analemma_ wrote:
| Someday I want to write a lengthy essay on the software-
| specific variant of the "Seeing Like a State" problem where
| certain programmers-- angry that the Real World is actually
| quite complicated-- demand that the world be made simpler to
| accommodate their wishes for an easier job and cleaner code
| architecture. This comment is a great example of this
| phenomenon, as are stupid proposals like "abolish time zones
| and make everyone live on UTC because I don't like writing
| time-and-date code".
| dsego wrote:
| But why not make the world simpler? Eg. let's simplify those
| writing systems that are causing issues. Not everything needs
| to be encoded as text strings. Good thing you mention UTC,
| because guess what, time zones are a simplification, real
| local time is on a continuous spectrum.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| Because that's authoritarian and ghoulish? The thought of
| forcibly changing (or eliminating) a writing system that
| may have been in use by millions of people for centuries
| with no issues, to satisfy the demands of a bunch of web
| developers who don't want to add some more if-else branches
| to their text rendering code, gives me the heebie-jeebies.
| And it wouldn't even save most programmers any effort: for
| 99.9% of us, this stuff is all abstracted away by libraries
| anyway.
|
| I suspect you might be over-indexing on the specific
| example of emojis and skin tone modifiers that the article
| used, but on the Unicode implementation level that's just
| the same modifier characters that several real languages
| need to use to be encoded properly. It's not a useless
| frivolity.
| dsego wrote:
| Not sure why writing systems couldn't be improved and
| simplified for the digital age. It would reduce software
| complexity and be more efficient and economical.
| biwills wrote:
| This reminds me of Marijn Haverbeke's, the author of CodeMirror
| and Prosemirror, blog post about making the first version of
| CodeMirror
|
| https://codemirror.net/1/story.html
| valtism wrote:
| Even "simple" interfaces-popovers, date pickers-inevitably become
| spiralling fractals of complexity, each layer folding into
| another the longer you look at them. Text editing would be
| crazier, even more so than what is described here.
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _Text editing hates you too (2019)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27236874 - May 2021 (182
| comments)
|
| _Text Editing Hates You Too_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21384158 - Oct 2019 (282
| comments)
| airstrike wrote:
| Related related:
|
| _Text rendering hates you (2019)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36478892 - June 2023 (119
| comments)
|
| _Text Rendering Hates You (2019)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30330144 - Feb 2022 (154
| comments)
|
| _Text Rendering Hates You_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21105625 - May 2019 (170
| comments)
| keybored wrote:
| I want to learn the stenography input method (like Plover). Time
| would be the biggest factor as I'm sure there are enough good-
| enough keyboards that aren't much more expensive than some fancy
| mechanical keyboard.
|
| Imagine if programmers were stenographers and computing wasn't
| born/grew up in an age with slow teletypes. Maybe most computer
| code would be keyword/word-heavy (because that's what stenography
| is good at) instead of symbol.. heavy.
| smitelli wrote:
| If some developer out there has adopted a stenography keyboard,
| I suspect they write Java code with it.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| I think actual stenography, like court transcribers use,
| wouldn't be a great fit for programming, because it is designed
| specifically around the use case of spoken English (or
| whatever), and relies on shorthand for phonemes to achieve
| speedups. It doesn't really have allowances for punctuation and
| other things that are specific to programming syntax.
|
| But there's been a steady increase in the popularity of chorded
| keyboards with a small number of keys, which is kind of like
| stenography but probably more suitable to writing code. I don't
| really like them myself (I prefer a 60% keyboard with macros
| and layer modifiers over memorizing a bunch of chords), but
| some people swear by them. I assume there are projects to do it
| in software as well if you don't want a fancy new keyboard. I'd
| look in that direction if you want to check this out.
| mattpallissard wrote:
| > For extra credit, you can try to figure out what's going on
| here:
|
| I've spent a few minutes staring at this section and still
| haven't figured it out. Anyone smarter than I care to shed some
| light?
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