Hacker News Reader

Comment by BlueDingo | Hacker News Reader

This is how older editors like emacs work. You interact with views/windows/tabs called buffers and those buffers can have files loaded into them. Multiple buffers can reference the same code file but view different sections simultaneously. So you can investigate or edit different parts of one huge file the same way you would smaller ones.

View on HN

You just blew my mind.

I use JOE and JOE also supports multiple views into the same file. In fact, to open another file is two commands: the open view/window (^KO) command followed by edit file command (^KE). I've always used this facility for as long as I can remember and it never really occurred to me until now that people using more modern editors and especially GUI editors may not enjoy this same convenience--either not possible or no simple chain of command inputs to get there. And it's not like I don't use GUI editors, just not in situations where I would realize this feature was missing.

You can do this in vscode as well, even have it side by side. I’m missing something?

I just opened IntelliJ and it has this feature too, where you can "Split right" or "Split down" and have multiple views of the same file. Thanks for letting me know this is something editors might support.

For some reason I have not noticed that feature before. It's not like it is hidden either, as it is in the "right click" context menu that I use daily. I guess I need to learn the tool, so that I don't miss useful features like this.

For the "temporarily projects those targets as if they’re isolated files" part, you want something like narrow-indirect or edit-indirect.

https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/NarrowIndirect

https://github.com/Fanael/edit-indirect

Reply on news.ycombinator.com