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There's no end of unpopular experiments in double pane formats where one pane holds text and the other holds comments, footnotes, etc. They're unpopular becaus

There's no end of unpopular experiments in double pane formats where one pane holds text and the other holds comments, footnotes, etc. They're unpopular because they're confusing and brittle. How is the relationship between the two maintained when the developer is hard at work, when the text is not just a set piece for pretty presentation? No answer is given, because there is none.

ulbu 2y ago
> No answer is given, because there is none. case closed, guys, we can all go home now.
FullGarden_S 2y ago
>How is the relationship between the two maintained when the developer is hard at work, when the text is not just a set piece for pretty presentation? The text editor or IDE can provide a feature to show(pop up) or hide(collapse) the side comment section when needed while formatting the comments to make them look bold or italic. This will become a quality of life improvement if the implementation is done right. If not, it will be very confusing as you mentioned. I think writing API documentation can become very easy and since the function and its comment/description align on the same line, generating API documentation will become easy as well.
preommr 2y ago
There's also the issue of screen real estate. I often have other windows (terminal, browser, the build application), and panels within the editor (git, file explorer, console, etc.). It's already a hassle to maintain all this. It would be even more annoying if when I am comparing two code blocks side-by-side, there's another view for each of those that I'd have to either manually handle, or mentally keep in mind to look for something.
- skydhash 2y ago
  Which is why I like vim and Emacs where everything is a buffer that can be displayed in tiled windows. You choose your configuration depending on the current task. Jetbrains' IDEs are ok too, at least in the old UI. You can collpase everything to the fringe with nice shortcuts (XCode does too, but the default shortcut are horrendeous).
knallfrosch 2y ago
I'm just waiting for an AI-generated audio summary of a code section ;) Includes auto-play, of course. Straight from my horror cabinet of ideas!
zarzavat 2y ago
It's technically doable, the text in the right pane would be stored as comments in the source. The editor would parse the comments and collapse them into UI elements in the code, so that they could still be copy and pasted e.g. how the little blue capsules in Xcode work. It's a bad idea because it's wasteful of space while achieving very little over a conventional setup.

ulbu 2y ago

> No answer is given, because there is none. case closed, guys, we can all go home now.

FullGarden_S 2y ago

>How is the relationship between the two maintained when the developer is hard at work, when the text is not just a set piece for pretty presentation? The text editor or IDE can provide a feature to show(pop up) or hide(collapse) the side comment section when needed while formatting the comments to make them look bold or italic. This will become a quality of life improvement if the implementation is done right. If not, it will be very confusing as you mentioned. I think writing API documentation can become very easy and since the function and its comment/description align on the same line, generating API documentation will become easy as well.

preommr 2y ago

There's also the issue of screen real estate. I often have other windows (terminal, browser, the build application), and panels within the editor (git, file explorer, console, etc.). It's already a hassle to maintain all this. It would be even more annoying if when I am comparing two code blocks side-by-side, there's another view for each of those that I'd have to either manually handle, or mentally keep in mind to look for something.

skydhash 2y ago
Which is why I like vim and Emacs where everything is a buffer that can be displayed in tiled windows. You choose your configuration depending on the current task. Jetbrains' IDEs are ok too, at least in the old UI. You can collpase everything to the fringe with nice shortcuts (XCode does too, but the default shortcut are horrendeous).

knallfrosch 2y ago

I'm just waiting for an AI-generated audio summary of a code section ;) Includes auto-play, of course. Straight from my horror cabinet of ideas!

zarzavat 2y ago

It's technically doable, the text in the right pane would be stored as comments in the source. The editor would parse the comments and collapse them into UI elements in the code, so that they could still be copy and pasted e.g. how the little blue capsules in Xcode work. It's a bad idea because it's wasteful of space while achieving very little over a conventional setup.