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Comment by elaus | Hacker News Reader

It only took him two hours after the feature request was posted until the change went live. I guess that kind of speed is only possible if you're a solo developer that takes full responsibility for his product and who is product owner, dev-op, UX expert and QA all in one person.

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Notably he was also answering other questions in the AMA, so it possibly only took him 2 minutes. It is not a difficult feature to implement anyhow, it probably went like this:

    vim tools/Text.js
    self.addEventListener('click', function (e) {
      if (e.detail === 3) {
        self.selectAll();
      }
    });
    :wq
    git add tools/Text.js
    git commit -m "Add triple click select all"
    git push origin master
    Done.

Neat, I didn't know about detail on mouseclick events :)

The main view is a canvas. Regardless, my hunch is event delegation would be more performant.

Almost ... but I use Notepad++ instead of Vim. And I had to implement the search for the first and the last character in a line according to the layout. It took me about 10 minutes :)

This is super interesting :). Just curious, why don't you use a more advanced code editor than Notepad++?

Thanks :) I already discussed it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15924664

I'm always amazed when people ship cool software with what I judge to be crappy, obsolete, or even downright dangerous processes/practices. Yet even though I (by my own judgement) use superior processes and practices (VSCode + Git + CI pipelines, etc.), I haven't shipped anything nearly as cool.

A few others that come to mind are KeePass/Dwarf Fortress (no formal VCS), and GRRM (uses WordStar 4.0 in DOS)

He could have done this just as fast using GIT + CI. VSCode would have likely slowed him down with indexing, and he already knows where all his files are so there wouldn't be any gains from hopping around function declarations with the click of a mouse

Although you didn't pinpoint a single process that was inferior, knowing when to break processes is part of the experience.

Maybe you spend too much time on processes, getting things right, and less time on actually shipping something useful?

I kind of put vscode in the same category as notepad++. Actually, as a text editor, I think N++ has some nice features that vscode doesn't (like macros, I think).

VSCode definitely has macros :) I don't think there's much that notepad++ has but VSC doesn't

Ah, I checked there seems to be an extension that lets you write macros in a JSON file: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=geddski....

But there seems to have been no movement on this request for a functional macro feature: https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/4490

Cool project. Playing around with it now and I love what I see. Must have been very fun learning about how to implement image filters and such along the way.

Any particular reason you choose Notepad++ over a full-featured IDE for a project of this scope?

And because it's a webapp the user accesses the new feature by clicking "refresh."

Compare that to building binaries for all supported platforms, testing, publishing, dripping down into Debian & Ubuntu, someone on Ubuntu-Based-Distro-#1377 reporting a dependency problem, someone old Debian complaining that their compiler is choking on a gl library under armv7l, etc.

In the same vein, someone says it's not working for them in WinXP IE 8

Unless the user is using IE11. A perhaps not-so-modern but still a mainstream and typically supported browser. But if you're going to specify "old Debian" I think it would be fair to expect it to work on "old browsers" as well. But I think it would be silly to expect it to work in IE 5 anymore than some modern programs working in some old flavor of a Debian distro with outdated libraries.

At some point, like people do with dated web browsers, developers need to tell users they need to update as the developer won't be supporting such outdated software anymore.

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