3 ms·

How similar is this to using a line editor (ed/edlin/edit/teco) on a slow terminal? You have a model in your head, code in a buffer, and you use the edit comman

• Someone 16y ago
  It is somewhat similar, but to get the real 'feel', you should also limit your line width to one to two characters. Braille reading typically is done with both hands (with one looking ahead, and one doing the actual reading), so it does 'show' slightly more than that, but you will still be faster at reading those characters than a blind person would be. Also, you would have to give up syntax coloring and style and font variations. Finally, chances are that some characters (braces, asterisk, plus sign) from your programming language take up more than one braille character. Real nerds would hack their character-to-braille pattern translator to optimize that translation table, but the price you pay for that is that you will have to cope with multiple mappings. Actually, you would have to do that anyways, as there is disagreement about the encoding to use, even for digits, and because the U.S. frequently uses a contracted braille system (where, for example, the single-letter word 't' must be read as 'the' where appropriate; that 'where appropriate' is for the reader to guess at)
  • Avshalom 16y ago
    Also, you would have to give up syntax coloring and style and font variations. I'm pretty sure ed was dead by the time those were invented, the wiki claims the "one of the first" syntax highlighting editors was in 85.