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Comment by thangalin | Hacker News Reader

My free and open-source KeenWrite text editor is comparable to GhostWriter:

https://github.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite#features

What sets KeenWrite apart is the ability to use (externally-defined) variables within the prose, shown in this older demo video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_dFd6UhdV8

Also, variables work in diagrams, R expressions, and TeX equations. For example, take a look at the following screenshot:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite/maste...

The palette is defined in one spot, allowing colours to be used by both diagrams and typesetting the final PDF. Further, character names can be assigned and referenced within both the prose and diagrams. Also, the variables are interpolated, which allows variables to be defined in terms of other variables.

Are there any other text editors that have interpolated variable references? (I looked, but didn't find any, so started developing my own text editor.)

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Been seeing this a lot lately: someone posts a project or a company to HN, then immediately below it, the top comment negs OP and then goes on to explain how their project is better.

Is this not the epitome of douchebaggery?

It’s relevant context

Sure, but is it something that members of a supposedly good, supportive community should be doing to each other?

You mean leaving comments about highly related products/software/whatever with a different feature-set and approach? That sounds... perfect.

It can spark all sorts of discussions and ideas about the decisions and tradeoffs made in both projects. All aspects of this - from the ideas themselves to the community response to them - can be very valuable to the original creators of both. It can also give the original creator more information about what's been done and how. Searching for similar stuff when you lack a very well-defined term can be annoyingly difficult.

And it has what I think should be obvious value to the readers and commenters who are interested in originally posted product. Other similar projects may well serve any interested readers better than what was originally posted. Again, searching for this stuff can be difficult. Do you really want to remove this chance to discover a better-fitting product/project/whatever from all the readers?

I see no problem with people posting similar projects. With the usual caveats of civility that apply to literally every other comment as well, these stand to be highly productive comments.

I'm sure you're thinking of the more emotional aspects of this, and even here I disagree. The only situation I can think of where a poster is better off no even hearing about alternatives is if their main motivation is receiving praise on HN. And in that case, hopefully the situation will make it easier for them to realize that is what they are doing, and give them the opportunity to decide if that's something they want to continue doing.

You are right in that tone and intent matters. I think there is nothing wrong in principle in mentioning related work though. It can be done in a non-douchy way.

Calling someone a douchebag is surely a productive means of steering the community to good, considerate feedback.

Strongly worded insinuations, sure, but that is not name-calling.

Kanye West hops on stage at the MTV Music Awards, steals the mic from "Best Female Music Video" winner Taylor Swift, and proceeds to tell the audience why he thought Beyonce should have won instead. It was an outrageous act widely panned as 'douchey'.

Is this example much different?

ps- Besides, a good community calls a spade a spade

> ps- Besides, a good community calls a spade a spade

Exactly why every single reply to your comment has explained why you're wrong.

It is not. HN isn't a place that guarantees advertising or publicity. Readers and commenters will click on this thread thinking "is there a better way of writing markdown" or "I wonder if I should be using a different editor" which makes all editors relevant information.

And honestly, if I see an advertisement _without_ any criticism, it sounds too good to be true to me. Seeing a comparison between these editors is going to provide a thousand times better information then just people talking about one or saying "hm, that looks interesting, I'll check it out sometime".

Criticism, sure. But upstaging? That is something I would find seriously deflating. Enough so that it suppresses a lot of interest I might have to post my own Show HN one day -- why bother if some other schmuck is going to upstage me and drive discussion towards their work?

Historically, friendly competition was seen as a chance for inspiration from each others.

> Is this not the epitome of douchebaggery?

Not whatsoever. It's on-topic and allows the community to discover other related, competing projects.

This is beautiful. Well done.

>Are there any other text editors that have interpolated variable references?

The closest I can think of are Frescobaldi's snippets[1], vim's `!read`, or spreadsheets. Maybe light table [2]? I haven't seen anything exactly like what you've made

[1] https://www.frescobaldi.org/uguide#help_snippet_edit_help

[2] http://lighttable.com/

> Are there any other text editors that have interpolated variable references?

I made my own markup language a while back that sort of has that feature (http://breuleux.github.io/quaint/syntax.html#variables). The variables can be defined inline or imported from a JSON file or whatever. It does reparse the whole thing on every change, so I'm not sure it scales very well. The language should be amenable to incremental parsing, though, I just haven't had time to tackle that issue. It's far more extensible and far better than Markdown IMO, but I suppose I'm biased.

> Are there any other text editors that have interpolated variable references?

Maybe Leo? I'm not sure if it qualifies as a (plain) text editor, but then maybe neither does keenwrite.

http://leoeditor.com/

Or you could pair markdown with m4 - but I wouldn't really recommend it.

Most people get this kind of logic from their CMS or publishing platform. Jekyll, hugo, wordpress, 11ty, etc. all have various external state stores (yaml files, JSON, CSV, calling a graphql API, etc.) that you can query and interpolate or insert data into your document using a bevy of different template languages. Check out Gatsby or even Next.js for something that's really pushing the boundaries of static + data-driven content.

Not an editor, but asciidoc(tor) has variables. You can also define variables in one file and import them into multiple other files in order to DRY.

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