Comment by yellowapple | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yellowapple | Hacker News Reader

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Neat idea, though as I was playing around with it I noticed right away that the following seems to be impossible (or else very non-obvious) via Aftertext:

"How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?"

I tried

    How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?
    italics wood
    italics wood

which only seemed to italicize the first "wood", and

    How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?
    italics wood wood

which obviously failed because it can't find the substring "wood wood". And of course neither of these would match the "wood" in either of the "woodchuck" instances, so no italicization there, either.

It starts getting clunky but I added some new keywords to handle the multiple hits scenarios: match and matchAll. Demo:

https://try.scroll.pub/#scroll%0A%20aftertext%0A%20%20How%20...

  aftertext
  How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?
  italics [-6:-3,10:13,23:26,43:46]

That looks very inflexible for later edits, marking characters or words means a potentially cumbersome recounting if something is reworded or just if a typo is fixed.

Also, I get the second and subsequent number issue are the three locations to highlight, but what instruction does the first, -6:-3, give to the formatter in your example?

Not a big fan of byte/rune counting. Maybe regex. Maybe more verbosity, like:

  aftertext
    How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?
    context How much wood
      italics wood
    context could a woodchuck
      italics wood
    context a woodchuck could
      italics wood
    context chuck wood
      italics wood

This is horrific, imagine changing your text and having to update the indices

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