johncoltrane

5 ms·

31.
by johncoltrane 7mo ago
They add this black line when an important figure of tech dies. It is the HN equivalent of a black armband: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_armband Today, it's Tony Hoare: https://news.ycombinator.c
32.
by johncoltrane 7mo ago
Assuming you already had a ~/.vimrc, the only non-defaults in that list are: :let no_man_maps=1 :let loaded_matchparen = 1 :set comments="" :set matchpairs="" :set paste All the other lines
33.
by johncoltrane 7mo ago
I didn't switch because there was no reason to. And there is still none.
34.
by johncoltrane 7mo ago
Conspiracy theorists have that special ability to jump to the most implausible conclusions from the smallest amount of facts. I tried to watch The Age Of Disclosure and, well… Everyone in it manages to stay relatively reasonable during the
35.
by johncoltrane 7mo ago
You can try what Apple calls "fast user switching", which is actually pretty fast. The last (and only) time I used it, my days were split half-and-half between two projects for two clients, each with its own infrastructure. I did
36.
by johncoltrane 7mo ago
Good work! FWIW, I use Chrome 145.0.7632.117 on a M1 MacBook Pro and I just got a notification suggesting me to "correct" the o'rer tab because it used too much resource. I was looking at the details of my Transilien station.
37.
by johncoltrane 7mo ago
Funny how they use the term "City of Darkness" a few times, without ever referring to the book "City of Darkness", by Greg Girard and Ian Lambot, from which most of the pictures in the article come. Strongly recommended.
38.
by johncoltrane 7mo ago
All text editors have always supported markdown, even before markdown even existed.
39.
by johncoltrane 8mo ago
I prefer my background dark so light colorschemes are not really an area I've explored seriously. Also, dark colorschemes are much easier to design than light ones due to the disproportionate amount of light a white, say, background em
40.
by johncoltrane 8mo ago
Because it means making choices, breaking assumptions, etc.. They have made it user-customizable so they don't have to go through all that. FWIW, the current de-facto standard is set by xterm. Here is a relevant excerpt of its source c
41.
by johncoltrane 8mo ago
My latest, "zaibatsu" is bundled with Vim. - Apprentice, a low-contrast colorscheme I made years ago and used for a long time: https://github.com/romainl/Apprentice . - Malotru, my curent colorscheme, more con
42.
by johncoltrane 8mo ago
No one can and people have been complaining about it for decades. But there is no standard or standard body anywhere for terminal colors so there is no obvious way to improve this situation. And no urgency either, because all terminal emula
43.
by johncoltrane 8mo ago
I make Vim colorschemes so I'm fully in control of all those aspects. If I decide I want a given token in muted violet it is because I know that it will works well with the background… that I have defined myself. The exact values of yo
44.
by johncoltrane 8mo ago
No, because I don't develop programs. I make third-party Vim colorschemes that users install because they like the colors. There is no impending happening, here.
45.
by johncoltrane 8mo ago
It has been working for decades and I would rather have it keep working for decades to come. What would be optimal is semantic _styles_ (not colors): - The developer marks the string "XXX" as an error message without even trying t
46.
by johncoltrane 8mo ago
I would really love to have that, too, on every "platform" I have to work on.
47.
by johncoltrane 8mo ago
I don't want true colours. I want what I already have, 16-255, to stay reliable in the future.
48.
by johncoltrane 8mo ago
First, I make third-party Vim colorschemes, not app. People install my colorschemes because they like the colors, not because I'm a monster with a gun pointed at their face. No one is harmed. No one is forced to do anything they don&#x
49.
by johncoltrane 8mo ago
I'm not an app developper. I make third-party colorschemes for Vim, which I assume are downloaded, installed, and used by people on their own volition, after they have looked at, and liked, the screenshots. Moreover, I take great care
50.
by johncoltrane 8mo ago
Yes, I know that (see the venerable https://github.com/trapd00r/colorcoke , etc.) but those tricks are not used widely enough for them to be a concern. Using those tricks is also a deliberate choice so it is definitely
51.
by johncoltrane 8mo ago
I have a bunch of Vim colorschemes under my belt. 0-15 are, as I said, a minefield because they are user-customizable: there is no guarantee whatsoever that my user's 1 will be the same dark-ish red as mine… or that it will be dark-ish
52.
by johncoltrane 8mo ago
The good thing with the 256c palette is that colors in the 16-255 range are fixed, which gives us a very high level of confidence that 146 will be a muted violet and so on. This is very useful for colorscheme developers because it allows us
53.
by johncoltrane 8mo ago
Well, I don't depend on my art to sustain my livelihood. This allows me to do whatever I want without a care in the world for marketability. Much better than all three choices combined if you ask me.
54.
by johncoltrane 8mo ago
For those who do. Not everything is for everyone.
55.
by johncoltrane 9mo ago
> slopper First new word of 2026. Thank you.
56.
by johncoltrane 9mo ago
It is certainly possible that the US tech sector will be affected by the latest US president's brain farts… but I couldn't care less. Not my country. Not my scene. I'm here for ASCII characters rendering pipelines, scientific
57.
by johncoltrane 9mo ago
I like HN when it is leans toward "a place for everyone to talk about tech". Not so much when it derails into "a place for technologists to talk about anything".
58.
by johncoltrane 9mo ago
> Despite his expertise, it's still a mystery how his anonymous persona was deanonymized. The only explanation is that his OPSEC wasn't as rigorous as you think it was. Reading the Wikipedia page, the most obvious gap would be
59.
by johncoltrane 9mo ago
The shitty stuff rarely survives the race to the front page so you could probably start by avoiding "/newest". As of Sat, 03 Jan 2026 14:06:17 GMT, there is only one irrelevant item on the front page… and surprisingly little
60.
by johncoltrane 9mo ago
If you mean "without AI assistance", then 100%. But I use snippets and keyword-line-filename-etc. completion extensively, so… maybe 95%?

More ›