Hacker News Reader

HNHacker News

Top New Best Ask Show Jobs

Comment by qznc | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

qznc·

> annotations - not just "comments"

What kind of annotations would not make sense as comments?

View on HN

Annotations as what you scribble in the margin of an article or on a page in a book.

Comments are inline with the code. Annotations are aside, and serve both as visual anchors and as "aside" notes.

Is it something like this? http://gitplex.pmease.com/demo/android-framework-base/files?...

You may also put annotations on any diffs: http://gitplex.pmease.com/demo/android-framework-base/commit...

I'm thinking in terms of what I'd do if the code was printed out on paper.

http://imgur.com/KMCBMjA

The trouble with that is, how on earth do you get the annotations to apply across revisions? Or would you be OK with them only applying to a given revision and then ... what, disappearing? Or going into a 'floating bucket' of annotations for the entire file?

I'd be fine with them sticking to particular lines of code[0] and disappearing if those lines were changed. This is not something I'd like to commit into codebase, it's for exploration / preparing work.

[0] - "smart stick" can be implemented by remembering not just the line in file, but also the contents of that line and a (fuzzy) context.

Interesting. In these terms, it could probably just be a totally separate, general-purpose 'text file annotation' tool with git support (but not a requirement).

Upsource has sticky comments that survive code changes well.

Sticky comment is actually another form of git blame, and will be available in future versions of GitPlex.

Discussions about the code perhaps.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com