What is text? This blog post reminds me of the time 10 years ago when I tried to do away with Linux's desktop environment because it seemed overly complex and hard to wrap my head around. I had a lot of trouble running wifi without the desktop environment, and it left me quite bitter. Linux had seemed like a hacker's OS when I first started out. But it was trying so hard to compete with Windows that it was starting to seem like Windows in all the wrong ways, it seemed. That experience contributed to me walking off into the wilderness to build Mu. I've gone back and forth between two tendencies in my life. On the one hand, I used to brag about a minimalist setup living in text mode, only running startx as needed, long after the world had moved to fully graphical desktop environments. On the other hand, I was frustrated early on with the limitation of pure text, creating a little bit of Vimscript to view and edit drawings inside a code fold inside code comments. (I don't remember what format I used for the drawings. Maybe Inkscape? I always liked its format and found it quite easy to hack manually.) And these poles have continued to attract me in turn. I wanted to build Mu with just text mode for a long time, and now in the past couple of years I seem to have tried to minimize my use of terminals, with all their ugly historical and path-dependent hacks, and to do more on a graphical canvas (of a game engine). Trying to look back dispassionately, I seem to operate by: Structured data. Not too much. Mostly text. But then, last year, I had a fascinating and also slightly frustrating conversation with a friend where we realized we had very different associations for the term "text". When I said I wanted to keep something as "just text" I meant "viewable with cat on a vt100." (But with Unicode.) When they said they wanted text they meant, "everything you could do in the tradition of book publishing before the advent of computers." (But maybe not images? Equations and line drawings, certainly. And video is right out.) Another dimension of our disagreement: I was thinking of text in terms of compatibility. What can you do regardless of what device you have on you right now. They were thinking in terms of "what's possible with an extremely low-power reader without regard to compatibility." Also, I imagined authoring text and reading it as happening on the same device. Perhaps they imagined authoring on high-powered devices and reading on low-powered ones. So, 30 years after I started programming, I still don't really understand what I want. I try to clear my mind of the cobwebs created by the hacky, historically path-dependent past. But I'm not there yet.

As I start teaching the kids programming, I’ve been thinking about how to motivate it to them. They do a lot of drawing, so that seemed like a potential hook to show how drawing on the computer may make some things easier (erasing, manipulating, repeating) and other things harder (e.g. drawing well). Demo of a little bare-bones fork of Lua Carousel for a computer with a large screen and a mouse. The large screen is divided up between a code editor and a drawing area. There are a few drawing tools. When you make a stroke the code for it is inserted above the cursor in the code editor. You can also edit the code directly and run it to make changes to the drawing area. There is no support for grabbing points or shapes in the drawing area. All you can do there is emit shapes with coordinates. Everything else you gotta program the old-fashioned way. Download (120KB). Inspired by Ronin and Sketch-n-Sketch.

An experiment involving scrollbars Keeping scrollbars easy to acquire even in large files. Demo of an idea for a scrollbar with a shadow or "penumbra" which makes it easier to acquire to drag around, even as the conventional and smaller central object continues to be visible to give an accurate sense of file size and our position in it. Thanks Artyom Bologov and Mary, though I ended up taking their suggestion in a different direction…

As an experiment, I've machine-translated the help docs in Lua Carousel into 7 languages: Spanish (Peninsular and Latin American) German French Japanese Chinese Portuguese Hopefully it is helpful for someone to no longer have to put up with English. I put each language in a separate download to reduce the amount of data you need to download. Other languages are machine-translated from the English version. I've had friends spot-check it for obvious issues, but there are likely to be problems I missed. Please report any issues you spot. If you want to manually translate pages to improve wording and tone for your culture, contributions would be most welcome. No support yet for right-to-left languages, or languages with combining characters. Lua Carousel still assumes every character on screen is atomic. For example, I can support Chinese and Japanese but not Korean, Arabic or Indian languages. I don't know what I'm doing when it comes to multilingual keyboard support. My rough sense is that that's something to configure for your device. But if there's something I can change in Lua Carousel to make your life easier, please let me know. I've included different fonts for Chinese and Japanese, which blow up the download size for these languages. The source code inside each zip file download is exactly the same, only the font files are different. The larger font files also seem to take up to 10 seconds to load.