Crossword.el – download and play crossword puzzles in Emacs | Hacker News Reader

Crossword.el – download and play crossword puzzles in Emacs

github.com

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If you have to ask "why emacs" this is probably not for you!

VSCode is on its last legs!

Most of my emacs hacking I find time to do in my free time amounts to work related org-mode extensions.

I love seeing stuff like this. Emacs is the true bicycle for the mind.

... so, in this metaphor, your mind is a fish?

Is there a online library of puz files?

There is https://crosswordlinks.substack.com/ for a daily newsletter with all the usuals (including info if they offer a .puz) and https://crosswordfiend.com/download/ with direct downloads of the same.

I get that this is cool and all, but why Emacs? Why not just use a text-based library and have it as a standalone app?

Emacs is a text-based library for applications like this. So why not emacs?

It’s huge and hard to distribute. This should be a web app, plain and simple. It would get 10,000 times as many users.

Is a /s missing here?

> It's huge and hard to distribute.

That's why it's distributed with every mainstream OS (except for Windows if you don't use WSL) and many OSes outside the mainstream so frequently.

> This should be a web app, plain and simple.

Do we really need YACPWA (Yet Another Crossword Puzzle Web App)? Someone had an itch, scratched it, and distributed it.

> It would get 10,000 times as many users.

And?

Making a large profit and growing 100X every month is very hard with an emacs package. You must understand that the only reason to develop software is to make an obscene amount of money?

They should pivot this package to crosswords as a service and ensure growth, maybe seek some funding while they are at it.

If big fat electron apps are to become the standard, users who are content with older, more stable, slimmer software will have to be brutally mocked online. We've seen this technique used here on this site as a way to help market such diverse technologies as Rust, VSCode, Wayland, and System D.

The author's focus is pretty clearly not to get as many users as possible. What's wrong with that?

What are you talking about, this is a package for Emacs, which already is a web app: https://beepb00p.xyz/cloudmacs.html

i guess that there should also be a multi-region and multi-az kubernetes cluster to pre-render puzzles server side, right ?

and a highly-scalable distributed nosql database to store puzzles at a webscale level, also.

and don't forget a planet-scale, anycast-enabled cdn to deliver puzzles with low latencies.

Lol

Emacs is meant to really be a text-editor. I'm all for utilizing Emacs and Vim to do unique things, like ledgers and time tracking, since those are essentially markup formats for text editing. However, crosswords just seems more or less like playing games in Vim. It is cool and all, like I said, but it seems much better suited for at least a semi-interactive text-based CLI app.

I applaud the developer regardless, but I personally would be much more keen on using this if it was standalone and not dependent on Emacs.

Crosswords are grid based word games. A text editor displays text in a grid. It seems like a great fit to me.

Not necessarily. Acme displays variable-width fonts just fine.

However, Emacs is not just a text editor, so it shouldn't be judged solely as a text editor.

Emacs also can display proportional fonts fine. But it's proficiency with fixed-width fonts seems most relevant for crosswords.

> Emacs is meant to really be a text-editor.

That’s where you’re wrong, kiddo. ;-P emacs is an interactive Lisp environment that incidentally ok at editing text. I remember someone making the argument that Emacs is a great application platform, because it provides an extremely consistent API across all operating systems.

Emacs is the last remaining original era Lisp Machine actually. Symbolics died, Xerox Parc's defunct, etc. But emacs lives on.

One could do that, too

https://github.com/thisisparker/cursewords

>but why Emacs?

Because the author could, of course. Where's your hacker spirit?

Again, I applaud them for their efforts. I think it is cool. However, it would also be cool to have a standalone crossword app that uses an ncurses-type of library to play crosswords in the console without relying on Emacs. That is all I was saying. I'm not criticizing the author that what they did isn't neat.

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