Hacker News Reader

We're going to make a "Haystack-lite" extension in the future! I understand the pain here. We chose to go with a VS-code fork so we could maximize the canvas features. I am curious if you would find the "canvas" view distracting when it's on a sidebar as opposed to the main editor?

View on HN

Thinking about it, a sidebar "canvas" could be more useful comparing to the main editor to me:

* when reading code, I found I jump back and forth the call stack quite often, a visualization of this could help with this navigation, especially with some properly designed shortcut keys.

* I mostly code on MacBook so screen real estate is precious. The canvas as main editor looks like waste a lot of screen space. But the canvas in a sidebar do not have this issue.

1. You can hop back and forth using the "backward/forward" buttons in the top bar, similar to VS Code. Not sure if I misunderstood here. 2. That's fair. You can "pin" editors on the canvas, which allows you to fullscreen editors.

I think part of what makes this work is that ultrawidescreen monitors aren't as impossibly expensive as they once were, so screen real estate can be spent and your spacial reasoning can take over. It might just not work well on a laptop screen.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com