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Comment by flixic | Hacker News Reader

I almost wish it was Electron based. A bunch of things made the usage almost impossible.

- MacOS has handy text navigation shortcuts: alt-arrow to go back a word, alt+shift+arrow to select a word, etc. These don't work, and I'm too used to them to stop using.

- I'm using Colemak keyboard layout (L key inserts letter "i"), but keyboard shortcuts don't respect it. So in my mind I have to press Cmd + U ("u" is mapped to I key) to make text Italic. Again, this broke my usual habbits.

- Common MacOS shortcuts (even Cmd + Q to quit) don't work.

I like the ideas behind this editor, but now I hope someone ports it to HTML + JavaScript, so it works keeping all the OS-provided affordances.

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Yes, its operation on MacOS needs some attention.

In fact I've created the notepad as a demo project for Sciter SDK (https://sciter.com). The same as Sciter Notes: https://notes.sciter.com

It is just that at some point someone asked me to make distribution so I've created that web site.

Another question was to understand: donation-ware, is it a sustainable solution. Apparently it is not - donation does not even cover sums asked by Apple for allowance to develop software for their platform.

> alt-arrow to go back a word, alt+shift+arrow to select a word, etc. These don't work, and I'm too used to them to stop using.

Will sadly make it unusable for me. Thanks for saving me the time.

If someone wants to take care about this html-notepad - please let me know.

I don't mind if it will be commercial product or not - I'll help anyway.

As I said - it can be ported to new Sciter (it uses JS now) as it is - relatively easy.

Just drop me a message at https://sciter.com/contact_us/

Tangential, but for the pain of alternate keyboard layouts, I've found it easiest to use a keyboard that allows remapping of keys in hardware to alternate layouts (sends the 'wrong' keycode when you press a key). It's a bit of a hack, but it works much better than equivalent software hacks.

System having "both views" -- software view (where "i" might be on key L) and hardware view (of physical key placements) -- is very useful. For example, when using Colemak on Windows, I can play using WASD physical keys, but many games correctly name them WARS.

This feels a bit like the old reddit post about how now one would ever use Dropbox because you can just roll your own FTP server. Good points though on OS tracked features.

For anyone who might be interested in the referenced comment above:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

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