 The text editor I use is not smart enough to locate and understand function definitions yet, so I waste a bunch of time going up and down between the definition and where I'm calling the routines. Until today I had no way to scroll to a definition without moving the cursor. Which meant that each time I jumped to a definition, I had to jump back. Each day I'd run this through my head "Would I spend more time implementing a scroll-to for markers, than the amount of time I save..?" 21 comments
@smellsofbikes I think I might be more like your co-worker, I tend to delay it until it's absolutely ridicule. For example, I've been coding without undo for 2 years now, and each month, I'm saying to myself that I'll add it next week, it has been two years of this now. I tend to work around the shortcomings of my own projects, for which I have near infinite patience, but I would never take this sort of abuse from something I hadn't made haha @smellsofbikes Today was a bit special, I got burned by the lack of the feature I needed to temporarily see the definition, and lost a bunch of work. Left has no undo, but it can quickly rename buffers, so I tend to just "stash" copies of the things I'm working on in temporary files. The problem that happened was that when I mouse2 on a word, it copies the selection into a buffer, and it overwrote what I had stashed.. I lost more time with my misclick than I spent implementing scroll-to nav.  @neauoire This sounds like you've made a chainsaw, and I admire that, especially in that you're actually USING it. @smellsofbikes the whole ecosystem is a chainsaw, it's a self-modifying programming language. It's a chainsaw with little guns for blades. But I love it, I wouldn't want to build programs any other way.  @maxime_andre @smellsofbikes I don't feel tired, maybe I just forgot how it was to program using real languages. @neauoire The latter is an important point: when we know the trick of making it work, we put up with its weirdness. ("That's CHARM.") @neauoire Oh, no, it's like praising an old car's patina. Charm as euphemism for trouble. Yesterday, I was going on about how I wanted this round-about way of having quick access to definitions without scrolling, sort of like an IDE. Talking about it gave me the motivation to stop procrastinating on this and just implement the darn thing. Left is now able to locate symbol definitions and its methods and members, and draw them inline.
[DATA EXPUNGED]
:cooldog: Improved Left further, by adding different looks for routines, buffers and methods. This is getting pretty comfy. I've allocated myself about 100 bytes of implementation space for this whole set of features, and I still have a few bytes left to do things with..  @flbr the editor, including the font, is 11.8kb, it's fun to see the code and assembled data side-by-side to see how small it really is: |
Gregory's Server
@neauoire Do you have a sort of mental threshold of "if I have to do this task X times it's worth automating"? It's obviously dependent on how hard it is to automate, but it'd be interesting to hear where your cutoff is.
(I start hankering for automating at 3x, my coworker would go two years, at least, refusing to automate something complex he has to do weekly.)