[HN Gopher] Show HN: Infinite horizontal arrays of text editors
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Show HN: Infinite horizontal arrays of text editors
I made this app to write books chapter by chapter, while taking &
browsing through temporary notes for each chapter. The leftmost
sidebar is the list of chapters. The sidebar to the right of that
is the list of editors in the current chapter. The UI & UX are a
bit weird, but they have a basic logic to them.
Author : tsydenzhap
Score : 57 points
Date : 2025-02-10 01:25 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (zeminary.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (zeminary.com)
| jmercouris wrote:
| What a very novel UI! I like it a lot! It makes a lot of sense
| for people to cascade files left to right, especially when people
| have more widescreen monitors.
| tsydenzhap wrote:
| Thanks man. Tell your friends about it if you can. Doesn't seem
| like it's getting alot of traction on this website.
| UltraSane wrote:
| I really like the way the toolbar pops up when you select
| text.
| tsydenzhap wrote:
| Thanks. Yeah, I especially like how it saves space & makes
| for a very calm & uncluttered UI.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| I like this very much.
|
| Can it be run totally local to the disk?
|
| Also, I am having trouble searching. I enter a term and hit enter
| and it just goes to a new line.
|
| In terms of editors, find and replace functionality is very
| important, IMO.
|
| Thanks for sharing!
| catapart wrote:
| For local-only functionality: Worked for me. In firefox, even!
|
| I downloaded the html file and then ran it from my desktop.
| Functionality didn't seem to be changed by it.
| I_complete_me wrote:
| I found that SEARCH returns the file # that the search pattern
| is in. Hope that helps.
| tsydenzhap wrote:
| You just type whatever, then the list underneath will filter
| out anything that doesn't have the search terms either in the
| title or text. You don't need to ENTER. You shouldn't ENTER.
|
| Search & replace is very important. I'll implement that in the
| future.
|
| It can be used on desktop as long as you have an internet
| connection. If you look at the source code you'll see it
| sources some CDN files. I'm planning on taking it totally
| offline.
| tsydenzhap wrote:
| I thought about it & decided against it. It'd be buggy,
| complicated, & undoable. People should just manually search &
| replace things. There's even a first level search to help
| people get started.
| wonger_ wrote:
| Neat! Almost reminds me of the Acme editor.
|
| How does this compare to the sibling project
| https://zeminary.com/matrix/app.html?
| tsydenzhap wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43012397
|
| It was an experiment. I realized it was too clunky, but I also
| realized that it would've worked really well as just a single
| row. It took alot of thinking to realize that though. I spent a
| lot of time imagining more complex systems before realizing
| that a single row worked best. I imagined things like a kanban
| for writing but with twists, with inspirations from Gingko.
| https://gingkowriter.com/
| math0ne wrote:
| Really cool, any chance you will release the source code?
|
| Also what to m and d do?
| throwecommerce wrote:
| click-and-drag m to move, d to delete (after confirmation)
| tsydenzhap wrote:
| I'll make a Github in a few days after I clean up the source
| code.
| crazygringo wrote:
| For comparison, Google Docs launched tabs in October of last year
| which is also for editing e.g. a chapter at a time:
|
| https://support.google.com/docs/answer/15499791?hl=en
| codemac wrote:
| The most offensive part of Tabs to me:
|
| > _If you download or print from Google Docs, you 'll only
| download or print the active tab. If you want to download or
| print all tabs at once, you can do it from Google Drive_
|
| This is multiple documents, barely/mildly organized. I have yet
| to see someone use these tabs at work though, so maybe everyone
| is rejecting them as poorly implemented organization. What am I
| missing about Tabs?
|
| "document-based workflows" are a good idea[0] but I think this
| is a terrible execution of it.
|
| [0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20040625150625/https://www.edw
| ar....
| stuartjohnson12 wrote:
| The hamfisted attempts to ram new features into docs/excel
| recently have made me wince. It's like (read: it's because)
| they're afraid to change the winning formula, so any new
| feature is buried in some submenu and is treated as a 2nd
| class citizen throughout. They then try to surface these new
| features via a suggestions pane which is doomed to irritate
| users because it feels like you're doing something
| complicated when you try and use it, and half the time it
| causes standard functionality to not work as you'd expect.
| crazygringo wrote:
| It's crazy to me, half the people on HN complain about Docs
| being stagnant and not adding enough new features, and then
| the other half complain about _too many_ new features? It
| 's like there's no winning.
|
| FYI, tabs are not "buried in some submenu", they're shown
| on every new document. They're not "treated as a 2nd class
| citizen throughout", they're an obvious "1st class"
| feature.
| bckr wrote:
| Tabs are great for simple, project doc stuff like separating
| long running actions lists from meeting notes
| crazygringo wrote:
| "Offensive" seems a bit harsh, no?
|
| It's the same concept as tabs in Sheets/Excel, which I've
| never heard anybody complain about. It's a nice UX to be able
| to focus on one thing rather than deal with scrolling. E.g.
| one tab for agenda items, another for meeting notes, another
| for action items assigned to people.
|
| But also for things like chapters, where a document is just
| too long for scrolling otherwise.
|
| And the reality is that probably 99% of Docs never get
| printed or downloaded/converted. If an org uses Google,
| everything usually just stays a Doc, except occasionally when
| dealing with external folks. (I do find it a bit weird that
| you have to go to Drive to print/convert all tabs at once,
| but it's not exactly difficult. Still, I hope that will get
| fixed at some point.)
| randomcatuser wrote:
| What's with matrix? https://zeminary.com/matrix/app.html
| tsydenzhap wrote:
| I made it to write one poem, & to learn how to code with HTML &
| CSS & JS. There's one kinda practical usecase though. You can
| take notes either freeform or of different types for each
| paragraph of an essay, where each column is maybe notes of the
| same type. But you have to constantly resize rows to
| accommodate changes in paragraph length. It's very clunky. The
| only reason I haven't deleted it is because my dad likes it. I
| can't imagine why anyone else would though. It used to have
| autoresize but it just created wasted space. But without it you
| have to scroll individual editors.
| jefc1111 wrote:
| This is exactly how I want my UIs to look - it's like a breath of
| fresh air. And I love that I can run this from an html file held
| locally. I'm not going to be writing any books but I think this
| could work well for some of my note-taking workflows.
|
| load, save and save as all cause JS errors like
| `window.showSaveFilePicker is not a function`. I am using Brave
| (Chrome compatible things tend to work in Brave).
| tsydenzhap wrote:
| Thanks. One thing I kept thinking while making this was, I
| don't want to create an MVP, I want to create the simplest &
| most complete way to learn how to do & then do powerful work.
|
| It only works on Chrome & Edge. I haven't tested it on Firefox,
| Safari, etc.
| Tallain wrote:
| This is so great. I'm already envisioning all the ways I can put
| this to use. The only way I could think to improve it is a
| desktop app, and maybe some fusion with Heynote style features or
| keyboard shortcuts. This could be so great for short-term local
| notes or long form writing. Good job!
| tsydenzhap wrote:
| Thanks. & here are some ideas.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43012478 & some more
| ideas. You can also work out an outline or timeline or table of
| characters & settings & objects in the editors to the right.
| You can also get your editors to write their overarching
| feedback & questions in the editors to the right. I also
| designed this for screenwriting so you can get more ideas by
| reading up on how screenwriters do their work. It's clunky to
| format to standards acceptable to the industry, but the
| industry standards seem pointless & counterproductive, so it's
| maybe good to be forced to focus on content over form.
|
| About the second point. In Word, you can easily get feedback
| for specific paragraphs by just writing around or underneath
| those paragraphs, or for the whole by just writing in another
| document & keeping that document open in another window or in
| the same window. But you can't easily get feedback for specific
| chapters, & you can't do any of these things while easily
| keeping chapter-specific notes always in view. This among other
| reasons is why this app is maybe more powerful than Microsoft
| Word, Google Docs, Obsidian, etc. It balances notetaking &
| reflection & writing. Microsoft Word & Google Docs focus too
| much on writing, & have very little capability in the other 2.
| Obsidian focuses too much on notetaking, & has very little
| capability in the other 2. None of them integrate all 3.
|
| About reflection. With Word, the moment you make changes to the
| document, all the stuff written to the side goes out of sync.
| So it's best just to write in sequence. So Word has no
| advantage there.
| tsydenzhap wrote:
| (I deleted what I wrote in that link. Here it is.) The
| leftmost editor is used to write the section (or chapter), &
| the rest are used to take notes for that section, or to keep
| old versions of that section as reference, or to work out
| different ways of writing a subsection, etc. (& this seems
| hubristic, but I think this app might actually be a watershed
| moment in UI & UX & software development history. There's
| nothing out there that lets you juggle contexts nearly as
| seamlessly. Microsoft Word & Obsidian have alot of lines of
| code & hours behind them, but in terms of how much they
| empower me to write & think, they're far inferior to this
| app. & if you look at the html, you'll see it's only 750
| lines of code, of which only 670 lines are actually used. So
| it's also extremely maintainable & forkable.)
| kazinator wrote:
| I don't see an obvious undo button, but upon switching to a
| keyboard with ctrl (I'm on mobile currently) ctrl-Z does it.
| tsydenzhap wrote:
| Yeah, it's not meant to be used on mobile. The way it's
| designed makes it basically desktop only.
|
| Also, the undo only works within editors. It doesn't work
| across editors. It takes some time getting used to, but I think
| this way is actually better. I was frequently alternating
| between taking notes & writing the chapter, & I didn't want to
| have to undo the work on my chapter in the process of undoing
| the work on my notes. So I just took out the global undo. It
| reduced LoC by alot & improved UX.
| pizza wrote:
| This is going to be incredibly useful for a lot of people!
| tsydenzhap wrote:
| Thanks. Spread the good word.
| exclipy wrote:
| Reminds me of CQ2
|
| https://cq2.co/blog/the-best-way-to-have-complex-discussions
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40277547
| knubie wrote:
| Reminds me also of Andy Matuschak's "working notes" project.[0]
| This kind of UI feels very natural. I've often thought about
| how this kind of UI might work in a browser, e.g. wrt
| tabs/history.
|
| [0] https://notes.andymatuschak.org/About_these_notes
| tsydenzhap wrote:
| I browsed that website for a few days about a year or two
| before writing this app a year ago. This app is kind of an
| inversion where the focus is not on reading but on writing.
| nbbaier wrote:
| This is immediately what I thought of too. I wish the notes
| would stack like in Andy's site
| tsydenzhap wrote:
| I thought of that, but then I realized you'd run out of
| space very quickly. Stacking links to the notes in the
| second sidebar is better.
| pmontra wrote:
| It kind of works on Firefox Android. I can't use m to move
| windows and there is no shift key but the core functionality
| works.
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