Posted by rdslw 1 day ago
The "0% product hunt, 100% show and tell" bit is one of the benefits of an ecosystem with painfully high upfront entry costs.
Does anyone know of an active forum of any kind (discord, reddit, phpbb, mailing list, whatever) for people who are building personal applications like this for love of the game, which takes hardline stances about desirable vs undesirable motives and behaviors, and enforces high entry/participation costs in exchange for unusually low quantities of transient grifters and self-interested status seeking by day-old accounts?
I don’t think we’re at the point where any random stranger on the street can get Claude to make a perfect Electron app for their use case.
> monospaced and thus fatiguing to read.
Monospaced text is fine. I don't see how people who read code (and code comments) all day care that strongly about this. Plaintext is king
But the beauty of this moment is that if you want a really good SwiftUI monospaced Markdown reader, you can have it before dinner. This is exactly what I'm talking about. You have an idiosyncratic personal preference, and it's now reasonable to expect software to shrink-wrap around that preference.
Also, are browser text area inputs monospaced by default for everyone? Or did I configure that for myself long ago and forget? If it's not just me, maybe the "reasons" you're alluding to are not so obvious. Anyway, I have no trouble at all reading the long comments I type into text areas.
And more power to people for embracing agency :)
You underestimate the number of HN users who are reading this site in their terminal. ;-)
Legacy decisions as a remnant from a time when taking more space on paper cost pages and therefore resources, remaining as a default from centuries of inertia in how text is printed?
But seriously: you do you. There are people who code in proportional typefaces and they're as baffling to me as you are right now. Let a thousand Markdown viewers bloom.
The legacy is proportional, at least in Latin script and its ancestors. Handwriting was proportional, of course, and so was Gutenberg's printing press. Books and newspapers have virtually always been printed in proportional type.
In Chinese and Japanese, monospace is legacy in both handwriting and print... and also still universally used today. All Chinese and Japanese text is monospaced by default. Billions of people are getting by just fine reading monospaced prose.
I don't really know where this conception that monospaced is somehow objectively harder to read is coming from. Actually, this is the first I've ever heard of the complaint. I can't help but wonder if you've been subjected to some very bad monospaced fonts in prose or something.
And why did you author them in LaTeX if you think reading in monospace plaintext is fine for everyone?
The whole entire point of computers in their best light is changeable software, the whole point should be "let people read how they want to."
But...I like MDV.
So I asked my agent to write typst, ran "typst watch", and now I can look at a nice pdf file. it even auto-refreshes when the clanker changes it.