Hacker News Reader

Comment by moelf | Hacker News Reader

I'm personally very empathetic to this. Fortunately, I think most "real" developers are pretty restraint regarding this in popular packages' code.

Some proper use casees IMHO are: 1. in "terminal" code: scripts, notebooks. 2. function internal variables 3. for making the code look like their counterpart of a paper.

idk what to think of 3. if you look at any paper, non of them only uses ASCII, which raises the question, if we're happy with reading papers (even CS ones) with symbols, why not in our code?

View on HN

I definitely agree with this. It's just a pain to type out.

Maybe I'm behind on this, but needing to use the mouse to find symbols in a huge menu is very painful.

You can copy and paste too but again, huge break of flow.

Do some editors support discord-style emoji syntax, where typing :fo would bring up a menu of emojis that might match foo. Then hitting enter inserts the emoji over the :foo: representation. You can also not use the auto complete menu.

Ex. :pow2: might turn into ²

Julia has the best REPL for this. You can \<type><tab> to type unicode symbol and emoji.

Better yet, you can reverse look up how to type a thing:

  help?> χ²ᵢ
  "χ²ᵢ" can be typed by \chi<tab>\^2<tab>\_i<tab>

Yeah. Now go edit your code.

I can edit it in Vim with no problem.

Sure, because you have a julia plugin. Not every casual user trying out the language will bother, or want to bother installing someone else's plugin. They'll just hit a function call they need to make with a Unicode character, go WTF man, and give up.

I don’t have a Julia plugin. I don’t even understand what you think the problem is.

> They'll just hit a function call they need to make with a Unicode character

This is optional, the language adapts to the capability of the user. He can write ∑ or sum for a function, µ or mu for an identifier.

https://docs.julialang.org/en/v1/manual/functions/

You get people riled up in this thread with your false assumption, next time simply ask questions.

that's for stuff in the stdlib. You can't control library writers, and julia does not force a function identifier that is mapped to unicode to have a "non-unicode equivalent", though, that might be interesting.

If libraries use unicode in their internals, it doesn't affect you or me. And I have yet to see in the wild any examples of unicode identifiers that are required for use. The closest thing i can think of is the composition operator in Base, though it has a somewhat awkward ascii equivalent.

Do you have any example? As far as I know this is strongly discouraged in the community.

You can easily search for omega and lambda via vim slash(/) search command?

Yes, just like searching for any other character.

How do you type it?

On my keyboard, if I’m in Vim and want to search for λ, I type /λ. I type the λ with <right-CTRL>l.

Any special setup for that? I'd be hard pressed to touch type capital/lowercase sigma, ro, pi and quite a few others, I think.

I fully think this is a problem with archaic input - but that doesn't mean it would not be inconvenient when navigating through a code base :/

I just use what X-Windows supplies for customizing the keyboard. The way to tell the machine what modifier keys to use for what is with xmodmap. My .Xmodmap file contains:

    clear control
    clear mod2
    clear mod4
    keycode 134 = dead_greek dead_greek dead_greek dead_greek
    keycode 108 = Multi_key
    remove Lock = Caps_Lock
    keycode 66 = Control_L
    add control = Control_L

But you have to figure out the keycodes that your keyboard is sending to make it work for your particular machine. The program xev is good for this.

This mapping also makes the capslock key into another control key, which is good if you use Vim.

The Greek letters will be on keys that make sense, and the other Unicode characters are pretty rational too: to make é, type <mod>'e. You can make any key combination produce anything, even long strings, by putting the mappings in the Compose file. My Compose file is in /usr/share/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8. I have snippets in there, such as my email address. This way the mappings work anywhere, not just in a particular editor.

Thank you. Looks like custom input is still a little up in the air on Wayland. I guess one benefit is that some solutions will also work for the console (though not for the bootloader, so no "pi" boot options... but i can live with that...).

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/292868/how-to-custo...

In particular: https://gitlab.com/interception/linux/tools

https://gitlab.com/interception/linux/plugins/caps2esc

(for remapping caps lock to escape - in the terminal and under Wayland).

Oh, sorry, I don’t know anything about Wayland. It took me long enough to learn how to get X11 to do what I want, so I’m not about to learn a new system unless there is a big benefit. I don’t use multiple monitors or do anything that X11 can’t handle, so I'll stay here in 1987.

I actually agree with this sentiment, using non-keyboard utf8 characters in code is just asking for massive problems down the line. A fun party trick perhaps, but such a bad idea for anything that isn't a hobby Project.

I disagree, in that it's the opposite. You might want to put some internal calls in Unicode as a way to gatekeep contributors and users to people who are serious about using Julia. But if you think your project could be used by casual explorers, your public API better not have Unicode calls, or, at least provide sensible non-unicode aliases for unicode calls.

Oh dang I didn't know this. Thanks, TIL!

Yeah. Many editors (VS-code, julia repl, atom), support something very similar where I can type in `\ome` tab complete to `\omega` tab complete to ω. (similar completions exist for many other common unicode symbols).

In the Julia REPL you can type LaTeX commands for Greek letters and math symbols, and a <TAB> converts them to the actual character; so \mu<TAB> gets you a μ. Or you can just input the Unicode directly. I’m constantly doing such things everywhere, so the extra few keystrokes seem worth it to get code where the math looks a more like math. Using the mouse and a menu or character palette is the worst possible solution.

EDIT: In general it makes sense to set up your keyboard with a compose key and a “dead Greek” key, and set up your Compose table so the shortcuts make sense to you. Then you can use an expanded set of symbols everywhere, including comment boxes like this one. You can even put things like your email address in your Compose table.

If your editor doesn’t help, on macOS ^⌘Space brings up the character picker with the search bar focused for the keyboard, so you can just search the name of the symbol and enter.

That might be a problem with your tooling, but most likely not. I know how to do that in Linux (XCompose) and I've heard there are similar tools in both Windows and MacOS as well. So more likely just a problem of not being aware/proficient with using these tools properly. Typing λ² is 6 keystrokes for me, no touching mouse required. And while maybe not very illustrative in this post, I'd argue it's way more readable than lambda_squared when being a part of long and complex formula.

Absolutely it's my lack of experience in tooling. Never had to type unicode symbols consistently.

I think restraint and common sense are key here (once you're comfortable typing the non-ASCII characters). In parts of my code it's much more intuitive to use \Omega or \Sigma and \mu than giving them ASCII names, and others looking at my code will immediately understand what the matrices and vectors do.

On the other hand, if you're going to use \mathfrak{i} to index a simple loop you're doing it wrong.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com