Seriously, we need multi-column editors | Hacker News Reader

Seriously, we need multi-column editors

falconair.github.io

16 pointspaperwork68 comments

Second image (http://falconair.github.io/assets/multicolumn/4k.png) shows IntellJ IDEA, that has multi-column editing. The first screenshot (http://falconair.github.io/assets/multicolumn/retina.png) shows Atom, that has multi-column editing as well. WTF?

He also has an IQueueFactory class, that seems like some nice antipattern to me ;) *Edit: also, use QuickFIX, don't write your own. Been there, done that, does not worth it.

The terminology really isn't clear, but assuming the author is not crazy and hasn't missed split windows, most editors have tiling systems, not multi-column systems: you can display different files tiled on the window, you can display independent views of the same file tiled, but it's not a continuous view of a file across multiple columns, where the end of one column is the starting point of the next, and scrolling is synchronised.

Or at least if you can do that, I've got no idea how to enable it in IDEA.

Emacs does provide that feature using follow-mode: http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html%5Fnode/emacs/F...

edit: it is apparently possible to do something very similar in vi/vim by using scrollbind.

I clicked the comments here first (bad habit) and presumed there was something more nuanced to the case the OP is trying to make... but you are right, it's quite the WTF.

To be fair I think Atom hides the split commands behind a View->Panes menu and IntelliJ (or PHPStorm at least) has the command in Window->Editor Tabs. (All on OSX). So it's not super clear where the split window functionality is, but it's also not hard to read the docs for your editor..

Edit: Ah I see what the OP is saying now. I'd be surprised if this functionality isn't covered by plugins, though.

I'm surprised too, but there don't seem to be any such plugins (although vim apparently comes closes...never looked at emacs).

What I find really interesting is that I seem to be in a _very_ tiny minority that wants this or even has given any thought to this. I expected that most other developers with modern monitors would want this. The comments here and on the blog show that isn't the case :)

I would love to have "news paper like columns" in my editor. I have been looking for it since 2007...

Another thing I would like is the ability to inject multiple files into the same "edit buffer" so that "search" works over these related files as whole, transparently.

I think most of the time, stupid stuff like IQueueFactory just appears because it's Java and Java didn't let you pass individual functions around until recently.

Author here. Looks like lots of people are mixing up multi-column editing with split pane views. I want the same file laid out in multiple columns to make use of the screen real-estate. If such functionality does indeed exist (other than emacs :) ), please let me know. I haven't been able to find it.

Regarding the anti-pattern. You may be right, I have't updated the code in a few years. I displayed it in the screenshot only because it is already open source. But I do need the option of writing files to disk, writing to some random data store or just keep the data in memory. Send me a note about your idea, the whole point of opening it up was to get feedback.

QuickFIX is pretty good, but doesn't hurt to experiment :)

Just curious, why is emacs not an acceptable solution?

Honestly, just never used it (not since freshman year almost two decades ago). I mainly use eclipse and it works very well for me. I like how I can hover over a variable and it tells me info about that variable, click on it and it shows me very other place it is used. I can rename a function and it gets updated in all files where it is used. I can very quickly see where a class fits in the class hierarchy or see which methods call other methods.

Emacs might do all of this, but eclipse does this well enough.

vi and vim has it.

If your class is so big that you need to have multiple views of it, then it probably doesn't have great SOLID metrics.

You don't have any files over 200 or so lines of code?

I do and I regard them as a bug in need of refactoring. I just ran sloccount on one of our key services and the largest non-test file is 106 lines. It has three methods that do not call each other. The largest test file is 268 lines.

Then again we have another service with four files over 1000 lines (1441 the biggest), and we experience significant pain: not because of the size of the files but because of what the size of the class means about its design. That's on a team that had significant pressure to meet some tight deadlines. They are now actively working on refactoring those classes - again, not because of the size, but because of the design.

off-topic: what font is that in the first picture?

I must have different eyes to everyone else in the human race...

It seems like on PC/Linux/etc every time resolution increases font size and everything else gets tinier. They might be taking up the same number of pixels on a 1080p and 4K display, but those pixels have physically shrunk. So the result is that millimeter to millimeter they have shrunk and your eyes need to focus on a smaller "thing."

Staring at tiny text all day is exhausting, but yet a lot of people love to do it as they constantly rave about how 1080p or 4K give them "more screen real estate" (because now everything is tiny). This is another example of that. Instead of the OP just increasing the font size, they've let the text get smaller and smaller and are now complaining that they have too much wasted space.

On all Windows machines I now run I use 125% DPI to try and make the text readable over long periods. On my Surface 3 I use 150% DPI which breaks a lot of stuff.

Honestly as far as I am concerned Apple are the only one that got this right when they scaled everything so it stays the same size (in real terms) as resolution increases (effectively giving your text more pixels, so it looks smoother). Windows is terrible and Linux is worse.

But since every other human seems to have cyborg eyes and is immune from eye strain I guess none of this matters...

With modern monitors, I could increase the font size until it matches a toddler's alphabet book, I wold still have plenty of space left for at least a couple more columns :)

Emacs already has exactly this built in with follow-mode.

http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Fol...

Same with (Neo)Vi(m)

Are you sure it's equivalent to follow-mode, not just vertical splits? Follow-mode emulates the file wrapping to the next column when it reaches the end of a buffer, and if the cursor moves across the top/bottom boundary it'll appear on the other buffer instead of scrolling the current buffer. And the buffers are synchronised as a single "page".

edit: apparently you can do that with scrollbind.

Is that Sublime Text, Atom, or Brackets? Sublime Text has great multicolumn (and grid) support, but I don't use the others.

Although, if you use a tiling window manager and use lightweight non-single-window IDE/editors, you can just launch multiple windows and your window manager can do the rest. Multi-columns seems like a more natural job for window managers, so editors should be designed to naturally handle multiple windows and be able to quickly close and open them.

This was my first thought, and you're right. But what if the author means two columns as in a newspaper or magazine, where the same content continues off the bottom of the left pane to the top of the right one? Does anything support that? Would it be useful?

In Emacs you can have as many independent view to same buffer as you like.

Emacs provides this with Follow Mode:

http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Fol...

Interestingly I find the default behavior more helpful. Usually if there are any declarations or some init code at the top and some use of those later, I would want to view the top of the file in one column and work or edit in another part without having both scroll synchronously.

Sometimes I have the same file open in 3 or 4 columns if I need to see what is happening in multiple parts of the code in front of me.

Another option would be to have more options to display addition development related information in side columns. Code statistics, terminal window, program source code visualization, live browser output for Web coding and such...

I think that is what he/she means, and I agree. I think that'd be awesome to have. That way you are more efficient with your space available.

This is already present in many (if not all?) editors already. In vim or emacs you can open a new buffer/window/pane (whatever terminology is used) on the same file and put different views of the same file (with live changes) side by side. I often do this when I need to keep an eye on the header/import section of a file and also work at the bottom of the file at the same time.

I'm pretty sure a lot of other editors/IDEs I've used in the past also support this. It's nothing new.

> This is already present in many (if not all?) editors already.

No. Tiling is, but it doesn't behave as if you had a single file view wrapping across columns. Emacs does have that via follow-mode, but I don't think I've seen it anywhere else (though vim might have something equivalent to follow-mode)

It wouldn't. When you scroll a side, the others moves too, which is probably not what you want.

Most editors with split views let you open the same file splitted and you can see two parts of the same file at the same time. That's useful.

It does? He means page wrapped, single file, multi-column views. Like multiple columns in Word.

It is Sublime Text using Package Control with this:

https://packagecontrol.io/packages/SideBarFolders

As in all tech, the future is already here, just very unevenly distributed. Fire up emacs, "control-x 3" and there you are. Next up will be googling about windmove-default-keybindings so that shift-arrowkeys does what you'd expect in an emacs frame (or has this become the default over recent years?).

For a good time try control-x 2 and finish with some control-x 1.

Add winner mode to get undo and redo with your window layouts. C-c left and C-c right

To be honest I don't have this problem because I selected a tool set that does this already.

Tiling window managers (Awesome, XMonad, etc) and VIM do all of this and more, and I use them every day with great ease. In fact, moving away from them and having to use a 'click + drool' GUI (Unity, KDE, Gnome, etc) to move windows around feels slightly painful to me now.

Are you referring to tiling or laying out a single file across multiple columns?

You can do both of those in vim.

How to do it using vim: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5131205/how-to-edit-text-... Seriously, just google it :)

Haha, I'm the one who asked that question years ago :) I'm the author of this article.

Vim does come closest to what I want. However, I'd like to be able to do this in intellij, eclipse, sublime, atom, etc. In other words, my contention is that this should be a standard feature, like syntax highlighting or code folding.

I wonder if Atom could achieve that with CSS3 Multiple Columns

I just looked up css3 multiple columns. Great pointer. I'll investigate it, thanks!

can i second the 'just use emacs' argument?

i look forward to the day i can fire up emacs on multiple 4k monitors

its a bit tragic that a programmer doesn't already know this fact?

Emacs has done this for years.

And at least a hundred other editors. I don't get this post.

People get to talk about their favorite editor. So it gets upvoted. Programmers love to talk about their tools.

Is it a common feature to lay out a single file in multiple columns? Not split panes. Not the same file split into two with two independent scroll bars. Multiple columns the way a single article is spread across multiple columns in a new paper?

I use Mjolnir[1] to arrange term, Atom or IDEA windows. It's quite efficient since you can switch/resize them very quickly and you don't have to rely on your full-screen-IDE's embedded terminal for console output.

[1] https://github.com/sdegutis/mjolnir

To the author: if this many people is confused about the difference between multi-pane and multi-column, your message isn't clear and it won't be to the developers you're asking either.

Explain exactly what you want (I read the blog post and it gave me no clue to that) and the developers might understand what you're asking.

You are right. I'm planning a follow up with more detail.

I very often have a vertical split in vim, both panes with the same file. I can skip around the file and look at stuff in one while actually writing code in the other. Is that more or less what the op is asking for?

I assume he wants the impression that the file wraps around to the same column, with the buffers synchronised across the split.

Emacs does have that using follow-mode, I don't know if other editors do.

Waste less space by turning your monitor to portrait mode. Not everything looks good on something intended for video.

Visual Studio has great multi-columns. Just drag any tab and snap it into place.

Also, here's a simple solution: don't maximize windows. There's a lot of space on that screen that could be taken up by a browser, desktop icons, calculator, and any other thing you need instant access to. It's not multitasking(which I've heard is considered bad), if you're using all those windows to accomplish one task.

Visual Studio has tiling. So do almost all editors, so I'd assume that is not what the author is talking about. You can display files side-by-side, you can even display multiple sections of the same file side-by-side, but you can't have a single file view "wrap around" into columns.

Emacs does have that feature via follow-mode.

Oh, I see.

You often will not need to see whole class to implement things.

cmd+f --> "string"

ctrl+g --> "line number"

in 4K tv example, you will need to focus your eyes too much that they will get tired after 30 minutes. Instead, zoom in and focus on the method you are dealing with.

you may use;

cmd+alt+2 --> for 2 columns layout in order to compare 2 files.

Your eyes are much more important than text editors.

Happy coding!

Edit: Examples are given from Sublime Text 3

It's funny that so many people missed the point and assumed the author is clueless.

'CTRL-W v' in vim ;) Also, Visual Studio has vertical and horizontal tab groups, Xcode has "counterparts" where you can display 2 associated files side by side (for instance .c and its .h file), and tmux lets you setup vertical and horizontal splits for terminal sessions which is also very nice in combination with vim.

Seriously, use emacs.

Visual Studio - As many vertical tab groups as you need.

Vim alone or vim+tmux is what you're looking for.

This is a joke right?

(Sublime has this feature baked in since day 0)

Split pane/tiling? Can sublime layout single file in multiple columns? Note that I'm asking for a multi-column editor, not a multi-pane editor.

Seriously we've had those for decades.

Press 'Ctrl+x 3' in emacs and you've split your buffer in 2 columns. Now you got a multi-column editor.

is that last screenshot intellij? If that's the case, the editor supports splitting windows https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/help/splitting-and-unsplittin...

Which is why I'd assume TFA is talking about something similar to Emacs's follow-mode[0], not mere vertical splits

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2797790

Heh, are there any editors which don't support multi-column editing?

All of them, as far as I can tell, other than (apparently) emacs and vim.

Seriously, you need to learn how to use your editor.

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