Irenes (many)we gave in to the urge to start writing a text editor https://code.irenes.space/ivy
(it doesn't edit anything yet)
this is our first time using the Rust
smol library, which seems quite nice. pleasingly, there isn't some big war between the authors of different rust async runtimes; rather, roughly the same group of authors wrote first tokio, then async-std, then most recently smol. this last one refactors the whole thing into a bunch of tiny, loosely-coupled libraries; smol itself is just a shorthand to import a few of those libraries at once. so that's pretty neat.thus far we have two direct dependencies and 35 transitive ones, which we're pretty pleased with, that seems nice and small to us
we have partially-implemented versions of the hjkl commands pushed, now. it's time to add an abstraction we've been really looking forward to, a helper that handles movement commands...
so in case you're keeping track of how long a project of ours can exist before we feel the need to use async closures, the answer is about three hours, 40 minutes
neat. we found and fixed a bug in our function that iterates through the file and keeps track of byte offsets to each line. it wasn't properly handling empty lines.
... see, finding a bug like that feels like progress to us because it demonstrates that the abstraction is doing the things we think it is, and when it fails it was just a minor tweak needed
like it makes us more confident of the approach than we were before
(we are way over-read on text editor implementation strategies, like in our body's early 20s our system read dozens of papers about it, so it's not like we really need more confidence, but hey)
(we're going to eventually use a buffer gap, but right this moment it's just a single consecutive buffer)
we definitely want to eventually support files larger than can fit in memory (so, like, in the hundreds of gigs)
not soon, but eventually
though it may be easier to get that into the architecture early on, rather than retrofitting it.. hm. well, we'll chew on that
technology has advanced since the last time we seriously tried writing an editor, and we clearly do not need to support files larger than 2^64 bytes, so we won't try to :)
(for you young ones: pointers used to be 32-bit!!! in fact, they used to be smaller, but by the time we were learning languages that use pointers, they were 32-bit)
(these days, unless you're on a microcontroller, you can take whatever size a pointer is on the platform and safely assume you will never need to describe a size or offset of anything that won't fit in it. that was not always true.)
not gonna lie, the continued progress seen at https://code.irenes.space/ivy/log/ feels really good
when we were young, jumping into a new project for a day or a week used to be really easy. we can do it for work just fine, but in recent years we've really struggled to channel intrinsic motivation for this sort of thing long enough to actually get anywhere
... which is fine; our habits are kind of time-oblivious, in the sense that we have a lot of dissociative memory stuff going on so we manage our tasks in ways that make forward progress regardless. there are projects we've finished in bursts of a couple hours every few months
but it's really nice to be properly deep in something
yay it can scroll through a file now
still doesn't do any actual editing, but it's starting to look quite solid as far as the viewing goes
we paid really close attention to what gets redrawn when. some of you may remember that conversation the other week about how terminal programs used to be good with screen readers because there was a natural efficiency need to only redraw things under active change, and then everyone stopped paying attention to that.
when our thing is more mature we're for sure planning to test how it feels out loud.
the esoteric programmer@ireneista the terminal programs were good with screenreaders bit is only halfway true. The only terminal apps which were really good with screenreaders were designed in such a way that the new stuff got appended to the end of the buffer. A new menu option is selected? append to end. Something about a progress bar changed? clear and write the value again, or, you guessed it, append to end. The reason why tty apps aren't very accessible with screenreaders now is that they use unicode block characters for drawing more intricate shapes, also even if they only redraw what changed, they treat the whole terminal like a screen where they can put a character anywhere, which makes the screenreader often read the whole thing. Console/tty specific screenreaders like the speakup kernel module and fenrir or tdsr, have sofisticated heuristics to somewhat deal with this, but it's quite difficult to make a complicated TTY app accessible to screenreaders
@esoteric_programmer that definitely makes sense. we specifically heard it worked okay in the context of parser-based interactive fiction, where the entire game is pretty much a transcript that only gets appended to, so that would fit with what you're saying.
@ireneista yeah, look at irssi for example, a lot of the interactions there are based on append to end, For a menu based tool, the thing that generates a kernel configuration file from menu options is accessible, but that's because of the same strategy. For something esoteric AF that doesn't work out of the box, archinstall is a good showcase, but here comes a heuristic of espeakup, speakup+ctrl+8 triggers a mode called highlight tracking, which manages to make sense of the stuff somewhat, I haven't looked into the espeakup code yet to see how that actually works, and considering that tty mode is going away soon enough...O well, sad
@esoteric_programmer hmmm, yes we see