--- rough notes ---
Gary introduces an side project that Gary has been working on part-time for an little over an year, including ...
- modal (like Vim)
- terminal only
- "much more powerful than Vim"
- not an IDE
- layers
- overlay an orthogonal "layer" on top of the source code
- examples:
- diff layer
- crash layer => overlay backtrace onto the source code
- performance layer => overlay time profiling information onto the source code
- interactions
- the user experience:
- one keystroke shows you all the code that the current line interacts with
- renders an graphical tree-like display in the terminal
- can navigate through the graph
- uses GraphViz
- Useful questions you can answer
- what code does this test hit?
- what code does this request hit?
- what code might hit this crash point?
- the user experience:
- raster graphics
- 24-bit color
- italics, bold, underline
- momentary keypresses
And, we've all been punk'd. All lies. None of the things above actually exist.
- We were surprised (right?) when Gary said that he wrote his own terminal. Why? Why is it surprising that someone would write an terminal?
- shipping culture => our "shipping culture" is poisonous to infrastructure replacement, even when the infrastructure sucks
- legacy and paralysis
- we overlook the things that have existed our entire programming careers (e.g., terminals)
- we overlook their limitations and whether those limitations make sense in today's world
- Advocating for thinking, hammock time, prototyping
- Our "shipping culture", incremental changes don't allow for fundamental improvements (i.e., rethinkings) like the ones Gary described above
Editor's note: With Light Table, Catnip, aneditor/anterminal, and Bret Victor's upcoming talk, it seems like "Re-imagining Your Development Environment" will be one of the themes of Strange Loop 2012
