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MS Paint IDE

ms-paint-i.de

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Is this more of a...

"Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should."

or a

"We choose to go to the Moon not because it is easy but because it is hard."

situation?

Yes.

Lol. Looks more like the first option to me, but I also feel that there is something very very special about these kind of efforts and people who don’t mind spending their time and energy on things like this, precisely because of the fact that the world is filled with the ‘useful-or-not’ types. In fact, I feel we need a lot more of these ‘do-I-find-it-personally-interesting-or-not’ types, so that the rest of us can keep riding the ‘whether-or-not’ bandwagon and when that one off ‘interesting-or-not’ turns out to be useful, in ways we didn’t foresee, we can ask them to join us.

> if they should

I hear crypto is a good place for this attitude, these days. I actually got an email from a recruiter describing the product as React for smart contracts.

What a time to be alive!

Demonstration of skills demonstrated with a fun example. I'm assuming there is image->Text translation, process automation + functional demo, and UI design.

Digging into the github page it appears a custom OCR solution was created. I wonder if anyone has forked/used this in cool places.

finally we can get a fix for https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5508110/why-is-this-prog...

haha, that's really good thread

It's funny, but the OP probably overplayed their hand. No newbie is going to figure out how to install three compilers. ;)

Legendary. Please scroll to the comments of the top answer if you haven’t. There’s another “MS Paint IDE” there

Some past threads:

MS Paint IDE - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24290834 - Aug 2020 (9 comments)

MS Paint IDE - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17958021 - Sept 2018 (34 comments)

Coding in MS Paint - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6589881 - Oct 2013 (4 comments)

While this is satire, it does raise the question:...

Is it time to consider what benefits more advanced file formats for source code could offer?

Like in this case for example, the image format could allow doodles, notes, and diagrams to be in the margins of the code...

I loved how TempleOS embedded 3D sprites right into the source code!

This man was really smart...

Not only that but you could print the 3D shapes to the terminal and copy/paste them in to other files.

https://youtu.be/mBgIBF9Y6PE?t=485

"We have graphics in the source-code"

Rest in peace Terry.

I've not seen his livestreams before, but this lived up to expectations. Within two minutes he's gone from demoing some innovative tech to calling people the n-word and spouting conspiracies about the CIA.

YouTube is asking me to provide my ID or credit card to view this -- apparently it's an EU thing ;( Even though I'm pretty sure I watched this video multiple times and have it saved.

It’s so they can feed your info to the CIA.

They already have everything thru my GMail though. I'm more bothered by the fact that for the last 15 (?) years all I had to do was log in and now suddenly it's not enough -- for videos I've already viewed.

That's incredible. I can't imagine how much time it would take one person to make all of that from bare metal.

"I went to a real school and not a CIA brainwashing place"

It's really something to see him demoing something genuinely very impressive while screaming conspiracies.

That is IDE's job because images can just be embedded in markdown comments... Version controlling non-text comments seems to be an unsolved problem though.

An interesting thing to do would be to represent the syntax tree in something other than text so everyone can apply their preferred format.

I read your comment like "This is so crazy, it just might work!"

This is the type of wild stuff I come to HN for... will I ever use it? No. Is it amazing? Eff yes.

If you already have a lot of Java stuff on your resume, why not add it for a bit of humor?

Of course, you'd have to at least get it working and play around.

For reference:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24290834

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17958021

I’m glad to see this continue blowing up! Love you RubbaBoy <3

Thanks for the support as always <3 Glad people still find enjoyment in this cursed project

Is this meant to be some sort of amusing tool in the spirit of "because we can" or is there a genuine practical purpose to it?

No general purpose. I know the guy who made this and the hype actually started on a Minecraft forum for developers where there were a lot of Eclipse vs. IntelliJ arguments. It was a hilarious addition to any “What is the best IDE?” threads! He became quite interested in OCR and thought this would be a fun project and thus MS Paint IDE was born!

>Can read, parse, and highlight code from purely image files

>Finding and replacing of text from image files

These two features actually seem pretty useful. There's been more than one time i've found code as an image or something it would have been nice to be able to copy.

To be honest, it's come up enough that i've wanted to be able to copy text directly from an image I've wondered if such a tool existed. Never enough to actually go look for one, I'm sure many exist, but enough that i've thought about it at least.

There’s an app called Memos on iOS that has that capability. It’s great for searching images for text, for example I use it to take photos of my receipts, menus, screenshots, and entirely it’s on device and nearly instant (with 40k images). I’m sure other apps exist for various platforms and in the same niche. Looks like iOS 15 is adding text selection to their photos tool so if there’s a phone number visible it’s selectable and interactive.

Not totally related, but enough that I’ll give a shout out to tabula. It can ocr tabular data from a pdf. I’m not affiliated but I really need to get my company to contribute $$$ to the project. For now I’ll namecheck them.

https://tabula.technology/

My curiosity is piqued, but I also found it hard to navigate this web site. How do I see screenshots? When I clicked "Info" on the Theming section I was taken back to the top of the home page

(Firefox, Android.)

Skimming through the demo video on the homepage is rewarding.

I'm also on Firefox (Focus) on Android. I found the GitHub link at the bottom of the page: https://github.com/MSPaintIDE/MSPaintIDE . It has screenshots and a video of usage.

Scroll down.

The video where he does search&replace on the images using OCR shows how much effort went into this. Just wild, haha.

It feels like there is a kernel of something realllly cool here but I can't quite tell what it is.

I think the whole idea is cool! It doesn't have to be useful to be cool, in fact some of the coolest projects are eminently unuseful.

I think this is an awesome resume project. They've built an IDE (which is impressive by itself), and then they've got this whole parsing code from OCR thing on top that's not necessarily useful but man is it cool. The fact that it shows a good sense of humor is just icing on the cake.

Like, search and replace on pictures of code contained in PNG files... Just amazing.

Ah I am in no way trying to be dismissive - this is really cool by itself, and it feels like there may be applications of this that would be highly useful at the same time.

That was essentially the goal with this in the end, I was able to talk to red hat developers about the actual IDE part, do a ton of research on the custom OCR, learn about the Google Assistant API, and a ton of more stuff. I'm glad you enjoy the project, I dumped way more time than I probably should have in this silly thing, but it should pay off when I start looking for jobs in the field lol

mspaint is still one of those things I instantly reach for when I've got a framebuffer on my clipboard and I quickly need to make edits for pasting into email/issue/etc.

Almost everyone else on my team uses some other fancy bullshit that is probably better in every way, but I have found deep comfort in the simplicity & speed of this ancient application.

My preference for mspaint is probably out of habit from working for a megacorp that disallowed installing of any third party applications on work computers. It was the most accessible option on any computer in the org.

You call screenshots framebuffers?

It's the most accessible on any corporate computer, but also fast to start and fast to use.

I use Greenshot to capture images, but its image editor cannot move rasterized bitmap around... so I still need to go to MS Paint or equivalent.

Interestingly, the Paint 3D that now ships with Windows, is a strangely unfocused app.

It wants to include the poly mesh as a basic data type, like text, bitmaps.

The ecosystem just is not there.

Paint.net is free and gives you photoshop-ish functionality with a more mspaint type of UI. You would probably like it. https://getpaint.net

Same. I use the crap out of MSPaint and Paint.net when I know I will be doing a bit more.

Simple, fast, does just enough.

There is another basic reason and that is bitmaps and text are still crazy useful for basic communications.

I started out using both of those early on in 8 bit land. Still dominant today.

In that sense, MSPaint makes sense as a basic OS tool.

MS Paint's convenience and simplicity is underrated. I end up subconsciously using it more often than I think I do. Screenshot pastes, quick edits to blur out stuff before sharing etc.

> Screenshot pastes

This is a failure of Windows's screenshot tool though, in my opinion. I find this incredibly clunky. On Plasma/KDE, pressing "print screen" takes a screenshot of the complete screen, and a dialog opens and offers you to copy the screenshot into the clipboard, to save it in a file or to open / edit it with the tool of your choice. You can also take another screenshot of the entire screen, or a window, or an area that you can draw with the mouse, with a delay or not.

On other environments, the screenshot is automatically saved in a file without interaction. I'm not a huge fan but this is what you end up doing most of the time on Windows anyway, but by manually pasting in Paint and saving.

Pre Windows 10 I'd agree. Try Win+Shift+S on Windows 10.

Good to know, what does it do?

Too bad it's not bound to the Print Screen key but I guess it would break many people's workflow.

It allows you to select a region of the screen, then copies it to your clipboard, so you can easily paste it to other programs. It’s the best workflow there is because it requires no other running tools, and the binding is even simpler than ctrl+cmd+shift+4 on MacOS.

The is an option for this in Ease of Use > Keyboard > Print Screen shortcut

Try Windows-Shift-S if you have the Feature Update for Windows 10 20H2.

Win+PrtScr saves the screenshot as a PNG file in Pictures\Screenshots.

Windows also ships with a tool called Snipping tool[0], but that now says that it will be replaced by Snip & Sketch [1].

If you want to quickly take a cropped screenshot you can use Win+Shift+S. It only saves to the clipboard, but a lot of places, like imgur and Github, supports pasting images so I often find it more convenient than to have a bunch of old files cluttering the system.

[0] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/use-snipping-too...

[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/snip-sketch/9mz95kl8mr0l?a...

Snip and sketch allows you to save a copy of your snip. For me, that's the tool that comes up when I do the Win+Shift+S shortcut. Really handy tool and shortcut.

Alternatively, Paint.NET is the go-to for all of my image needs.

Superiority: It's not Eclipse.

Sold.

I know MS Paint is seen as a joke but what is the Linux program with equivalent functionality that actually works? Recently I wanted to copy image from Firefox and paste it into a program to crop and add some text. Ubuntu did not have a program installed that would let me do that. I tried few different programs available in the repository and none of them worked well enough to perform this task. Even GIMP was not usable because the icons and text would not scale up enough to be visible by human eye on 4k 15" laptop screen. In the end I had to reboot into Windows and use MS Paint which had this done in a flash. So, what is the Linux Paint that actually works like MS Paint?

A great web-based version is https://www.photopea.com

That’s a web based version of photoshop!

https://jspaint.app

Your point is well made, but for anyone wondering about this, I've found Krita[1] to be better than the GIMP for everyday use like this.

[1] https://krita.org/en/

Okay but mspaint is starting so fast and consume so little memory.

ImageMagick. Even has a command line interface!

On a serious note, I don’t have any problems with GIMP, 2.10 is supposed to have hiDPI support. Have you tried Krita and MyPaint?

The one I always use is Kolourpaint. Installable via apt.

I use mspaint seriously for mock-ups. Because you can’t do too much you dont waste time on perfectionism you can just do enough to communicate a design. It’s a brain hack. Lack of features (and vectors) is a feature!

100% agree. I used to use pencil and paper (and still do if I'm in person), but for a quick and dirty sketch to communicate ideas over screen share, MSPaint hits the sweet spot between speed and flexibility

Yes. Pencil and paper is better for a new ui design. Paint comes into its own when you already am have the app and desire to change the interface, or say create a new dialog box similar to an existing one.

paint.net is tone better and has nice OTB shortcuts.

You could probably get pretty far with LibreOffice Impress.

I usually use Google Drive for this kind of stuff (specifically the Drawing app.)

I use kolourpaint for that. If you don't want the Qt dependencies, also try mypaint, I used it in the past and it works well too.

Windows XP version of MS Paint seems to go great with Wine: https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=applicatio...

KolourPaint is the closest equivalent to Paint, and supports HiDPI display scaling:

http://kolourpaint.org

For a little more functionality (but still less complexity than GIMP or Krita), Pinta has a tabbed interface based on Paint.NET. It supports layers, but does not yet support HiDPI:

https://www.pinta-project.com

GIMP's current version (based on GTK+ 2) only has basic support for HiDPI, but their development version (based on GTK+ 3) has full support. I've found it to be quite stable:

https://www.gimp.org/downloads/devel/

https://www.gimp.org/news/2021/05/08/gimp-2-99-6-released/

Krita supports HiDPI, and has a different feature set compared to GIMP:

https://krita.org

Seconding (or third-fourthing?) kolourpaint. Not just the scaling, but I love that it supports true png transparency as just like if it were another color.

Pinta

(Its like MS Paint on Linux but with layers.)

Pinta is like paint.net on Linux but way less polished (it's image editor core started as a port of Paint.net 3.0's when paint.net was still open source, but it's UI was a clone in GTK). I remember being particularly unimpressed when I tried using it for low res image manipulation and discovered the selection "marching ants" and resize handles were rendered at the canvas resolution, for example.

At least for me, Krita has ended up as my paint.net replacement, but it is a step up in complexity from paint.net (and hence two steps up from paint)

For me, MS Paint is really good at pixel art. Pinta seems to be good at it as well. At first glance, Krita looks like more of a painting software, kind of closer to Photoshop than to Paint.

Dibuja "Simple to use paint program like Paintbrush for Mac or classic MS Paint, but for Linux" https://launchpad.net/dibuja

This has a vaguely steam punk sensibility of a rethink of those old punch cards using only technology / techniques from the current era. Instead of the cards you've got image files.

Maybe I missed it, but it would be good if it also created image outputs from the program stdout.

I bet the author had a lot of fun, but still, I must ask: "why, oh why!!?? Just why!!?"

93 % of Paint Splatters Are Valid Perl Programs (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19576425)

I'm both confused and impressed by this... really can't think of a use case other than mentioned in previous comment about parsing out code from an image copied from somewhere, which is rare. Maybe pitch to some VC's, they might put in a couple millions just in case this is a hidden unicorn or something...

I can finally put MS Paint back on my resume under “technical” skills!

Amazing dedication, made my day!

DIWHY

(Incredible talent shown though)

Um... wow. ;-)

Suggestion: start the demo by showing what the thing actually does.

I bet most visitors won't actually ever download/install. But I certainly was very curios to see what the hell this was, and it was rewarding to skip to the actual demo.

"It provides a clean and simple interface, with your actual programming in a program you and millions of others already know how to use, and already have."

Isn't that why many of us are using emacs/vim?

> MS Paint IDE is a program that can read a normal image file saved with MS Paint

I'm curious is it reading the image or using something about the way MS paint stores its data?

It reads the actual image, it could be saved with any program

Making images executable sounds like a bad idea.

Makes me want to take screenshots and paste them as comments in the code, with circles and arrows and stuff.

This is incredible. Need to go dig out the Bar-Mitzvah invitations I designed in MSpaint in 1990

i thought this was going to generate code based on drawings you made in ms paint.

If you can draw convincing enough text with a paint brush the OCR should pick it up.

But yeah next level would be drawing a square inside of a rectangle to generate “class Square extends Rectangle”

maybe the next level of leetcode will be to write code in this IDE using only the spray can tool, and if you don't get it done in less than 1 minute, they will pass on you. of course, everyone will happily go along with it.

Can I finally compile those whiteboard interview exercises?

Looks like its finally time for me to switch to windows...

But does it work with Wine?

Jesus what a colossal waste of time

I couldn't put it better myself, 1k+ hours poured into this for a handful of laughs isn't a trade many would do

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