May I recommend... understanding Emacs's patterns
Posted by misterchiply@reddit | programming | View on Reddit | 8 comments
This is my sideshow in Sacha Chua's May Emacs Carnival. Enjoy!
eeriemyxi@reddit
Cool homepage, if it wasn't vibecoded.
misterchiply@reddit (OP)
Thanks! It’s funny, the graph was more useful when I only had a few posts. I’ve gone down this same road so many times before, but the graph is quickly becoming untamable as I’m adding more posts. I’m experimenting with different layouts, filtering options, and interactions, but I feel like I’m failing to prove the hypothesis that knowledge graphs like this can be useful interactive artifacts. Time will tell!
Annual_Pudding1125@reddit
Sort of embarrassing that the page is vibecoded *and* is broken. I'm sure you could do better.
misterchiply@reddit (OP)
Can you elaborate on both claims? I’m truly nit be rhetorical, I keen on the constructive criticism
wd40bomber7@reddit
The fact that scrolling doesn't work unless your cursor is directly over the text in the center of the screen is extremely obnoxious. Not rendering a normal scroll bar because this is some kind of weird one page app was just icing on the cake. I tried to read for a few minutes but kept running into other frustrations. It's *really* not hard to make a usable blog these days. Just about anything would be better than whatever this is...
misterchiply@reddit (OP)
You are right to mention the scroll experience - other users pointed this out as well, and I've been working on fixing it. The fix for this is live now, and you can scroll the document regardless of where your cursor is.
Other user's also railed against the lack of a progress bar, so I fixed that too. The progress indicator at the top of the page is effectively a scroll bar now. You can hover over it to see the name of the section at each point in the article, click to jump to that exact point in the article, and you can click and drag to 'scrub', kind of like how you would on a YouTube video. The YouTube scrubbing / progress indicator with 'chapters' is what I'm trying to emulate there.
Hopefully this improves the experience, and hopefully I haven't scared you off for good :). Thank you for taking the time to provide these tips!
Physical-Compote4594@reddit
Ha ha, you refer to CLIM as well. I know a bit about that...
misterchiply@reddit (OP)
I'd been learning about the early development of lisp and lisp machines in prep for a chat with some lisp legends on a podcast yesterday. It was really eye opening to learn about dynamic windows and the presentation-types that descended from that in CLIM. It's an experience that has sort of gotten retrofitted onto Emacs over the years, first by Bob Weiner with Hyperbole in the early 90's, and more recently in 2021 by Omar Antolin with Embark. I've been using emacs for \~10 years, and it's been amazing to view modern usage patterns through the lens of these earlier strokes of genius in framworks like CLIM. BTW, there is an emulator available online today called McCLIM!