Hacker News Reader

Comment by JasonFruit | Hacker News Reader

I don't get what problem that image shows. (I'm design-blind.)

It doesn't show a problem. It shows using the technique in the linked article to get a border without the background colour showing on both sides of the line.

Could you please share more of your editor? Is it for personal usage only?

The github repo [1] is wildly out of date, and it probably won't even run on other peoples systems at the moment as one of my experiments with it is to keep the editor itself as tiny as possible and leverage other tools for as much as possible. As such, it relies on bspwm for multi-window support, and on rofi for file-selection, theme selection etc., and helper scripts not in the repo. It's currently smaller than my Emacs config used to be...

More so than the editor, which I'm kinda treating as my config more than a finished app, I'm gradually splitting functionality into a bunch of gems so that the editor itself will feel even more like just configuration...

Here's another screenshot [2] showing part of the integration with Rouge for syntax-highlighting, and showing how it's rendering comments by recursing into Rouge's Markdown mode, which again recurses into Rouge's Ruby mode. The "LayeredLexer" class it shows is used to enable that.

EDIT: It's my main editor, by the way, and it persists open buffers, and shares them between the user interfaces using Drb. Currently I have 1969 buffers open...

[1] https://github.com/vidarh/re

[2] https://imgur.com/a/1mTLAPs

Thanks for the elaborate explanation! Ps what do you mean by perstisting the open buffers, are they at any time in sync with a file, or are the buffers shared via another mechanism?

The editor is client-server using Drb (I'm considering changing the use of Drb; Drb is very easy to get running but you get little control over the interface; it's a bit too good at being transparent)

Originally I did it as a quick way of ensuring I didn't lose data when I started using it, as Drb will forward exceptions as well, so the backend just won't crash, so as long as you don't do anything which corrupts the buffers you're good. Instead the frontend may crash (and throw me into a Pry repl, where I can query the backend and make sure I can recover the buffers), and I can just restart the frontend on the same buffer and keep working. (In practice it mostly crashes when I am using it to edit itself)

As an extra precaution I made it serialise all the open buffers to disk regularly. So I can just shut down my machine and next time I open all the buffers are still there (like Emacs etc. it'll warn me if the file has been edited since the buffer was opened).

Eventually this also gave me multi-frame support "for free" in that splitting the buffer vertically or horizontally just spawns a new instance of the editor and attaches to the same buffer (and then you can open whatever you want in it)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com