Why Kakoune – The quest for a better code editor - <AUTHOR> http://kakoune.org/why-kakoune/why-kakoune.html <comment><USER3> If you are wondering why Kakoune and not Vim, the OP claims...

(you find following passages later in his post and they don't reflect my opinion)

> A design goal of Kakoune is to beat vim at its own game, while providing a > cleaner editing model.

> Kakoune manages to beat Vim at the keystroke count game in most cases, using > much more idiomatic commands.

> Kakoune provides an efficient code editing environment, both very > predictible, hence scriptable, and very interactive. Its learning curve is > considerably easier than Vim thanks to a more consistent design associated > with strong discoverability, while still being faster (as in less > keystrokes) in most use cases.

<comment><USER4> In this age we need to think about things like voice control and 3D manipulation of data-structures and a dynamic view of the code.

We can truthfully keep designing 2D editors (and we will always most likely use them to some extent) but I believe it is more important to consider different UI paradigms altogether.

For instance, what about editing a living code environment? Game development is very immersive: you can manipulate a running environment and see results immediately. How can this be extended to other development tasks like server- side development?

What if, when you select a for loop from code fragment a 3D visualization of the programs data structures at that point is shown to the user. What if you can, instead of launching a debugger, run the debugger as you're writing the code and step forward and back and see these visualizations change?

We have all the technology. It's time to get to the next level.

<comment><USER5> Yes, but. Keep ripeness in mind. It's very easy to spend effort in this area "too soon". So shape projects with care.

I run a Vive on linux. Which required my own stack. Which took excessive time, and is limiting, but has some road-less-traveled benefit of altered constraints. So I've gone to talks, and done dev, wearing Vive with video passthrough-AR, with emacs and RDP, driven by an old laptop's integrated graphics. Yay. But think 1980's green CRT (on pentile, green is higher res). In retrospect, it was a sunk-cost project-management garden path.

There's been a lot of that. One theme of the last few years, has been people putting a lot of effort and creativity into solutions to VR tech constraints, only to have the constraints disappear on a time scale that has them wishing they had just waited, and used the time to work on something else. It's fine for patent trolls (do something useless to plunder future value), and somewhat ok for academics (create interesting toy), but otherwise a cause for caution.

So on the one hand, I suggest that if the center tenth of VR displays had twice their current resolution, everything else being current tech, we would already be starting on a "I can have so many screens! And they're 3D! And..." disruption in software development tooling. But that's still a year or two out. Pessimistically, perhaps even more, if VR market growth is slow.

In the mean time, what? Anything where the UI isn't the only bottleneck (work on the others). Or which can work in 2D, or in 3D-on-2D screen (prototype on multiple screens). Or is VR, but is resolution insensitive, and doesn't require a lot of "if I had waited 6 months, I wouldn't have had to roll my own" infrastructure. Or which sets you up interestingly for the transition (picture kite.com, not as a 2D sidebar, but generating part of your 3D environment). Or which can be interestingly demo spiked (for fun mostly?).

For example, I would love to be working on VR visual programming on top of a category theoretic type system. But there seems no part of that which isn't best left at least another year to ripen. Though maybe 2D interactive string diagrams might be a fun spike.

<comment><USER4> Very well put. I have to agree that these technologies are still blooming and there are uncertainties--especially in my mind with cost associated with buying devices. Hololense for example with a $3000.00 USD developer edition isn't exactly accessible to the general community! The next 10 years however will probably be pretty exciting in the AR/VR space.

What about voice-controlled programming though? I always thought it would be nice to voice-control my OS. Not specifically for a text-editor, but as a general interface to the OS. It would be nice to move these features out of the cloud and directly onto systems. But then again, a lot of companies (amazon, microsoft, apple) probably don't want to encourage reverse- engineering of their intellectual property. We definitely need open-source variants.

Better AI chips with lower power-consumption and optimization for these types of operations will hopefully usher in a new set of productivity-enhancing applications!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This looks awesome (although I think the name could use a little work). It also brings up a question I have for HN:

Every few years, I make an attempt to learn to use one of the classic editors like vim or emacs, and inevitably give up after the enormous productivity drop I suffer when writing code. I just can't seem to pick up the muscle memory required to become fast with these tools, and the overwhelming array of customization options leaves me frustrated.

The most annoying thing is that I _want_ to learn one of these, because I think I'll enjoy it once I do. Any suggestions from people who have picked one up on how to accomplish this seemingly Herculean task?

And, I suppose, I have another another question: is it worth it?

<comment><USER7> I know you're seeing a ton of "yes it's worth it" posts, but i just wanted to add a slightly different perspective. Yes, it's worth it even when you aren't an expert at Vim.

I am constantly learning new Vim commands[1], and i feel i only know a tiny fraction of the vim editing language. Yet, i still love vim, and use it constantly, for everything.

The approach i take, as to make it enjoyable and not a job, is: "is what i am doing now annoying?". If you find yourself hitting j _(to move down)_ 40 times in a row, or holding it to move down slowly, etc - Google for a solution[2]. It can be a little annoying in the beginning, but when you're starting out your far less likely to want to "fix" every bad pattern, and therefor you aren't spending all your time Googling. In my experience, you are only improving upon the things that most annoy you, and as time goes on, you improve quite a bit while not even trying.

[1]: discoverability is not it's strong suite, which is why i'm going to try Kakoune. [2]: You can multiply the command (40j), or <Ctrl-f>/<Ctrl-b> to jump. Among other things.

<comment><USER8> Not much better. You have to count to find out that 40 number.

Sometimes a mouse is faster.

<comment><USER9> You can set line numbers in vim to be relative, then there's no counting involved.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> One of the nice things about being an Emacs user (hang in there, I have a real point about Vim to make) is that the concepts (especially non-modal editing) and the keyboard shortcuts map well to newer IDEs.

I switch between IntelliJ and Emacs all day, and all I had to do to become comfortable is choose the Emacs keyboard preset in the IntelliJ preferences. The same is true for Eclipse and Visual Studio.

The Emacs paradigm is a lot more similar to contemporary IDEs than the Vim paradigm, and that makes it a lot easier to switch back and forth.

While a better Vim is a nice goal, I don't see how it will bridge the gap between Vim and newer editors/IDEs unless it includes some fairly fundamental changes to the Vim paradigm. But then it wouldn't be a better Vim -- it would be something different enough that Vim users probably wouldn't like it. I suspect that Vim and modern editors/IDEs are doomed to remain divergent forever.

<comment><USER11> I find that nearly all editors have VIM "mode" that will allow you to just use the vim key bindings, so it's not really a problem swapping between two editors. They tend to have an emacs mode as well, in case you're interested in using your emacs keys.

<comment><USER12> Unfortunately, this is superficially true but not in practice all that helpful for a lot of us. Most vim-style input modes or plugins for other editors are woefully lacking, and even very good ones (evil mode) seem to differ enough to be uncomfortable for a subset of long-term vim users.

Like: I've used Emacs extensively in the past, and certainly _could_ switch to evil if need be, but a few days of recent effort showed me that the switching costs are higher than I'm willing to pay right now, and it's not clear I'd be any better off in the end.

Whatever the infelicities of vim's implementation (there are certainly plenty), I think there's a tendency to underestimate the expressive nuance and (for lack of better words) complex texture of the interface.

<comment><USER13> I've been using vim for decades and use evil/emacs now.

It's simply not true that the vim modes outside of vim are critically lacking.

In fact almost all of them support text objects and the other key parts of the vim editing experience that we are talking about here and they do it well.

Some things like macros or perfect register support are not there (evil is pretty great though) but they generally have useful analogs.

This is across multiple IDE emulations that I've used.

What you said might have been true 6-7 years ago but is not true now.

<comment><USER14> It's still true, most won't even allow you to remap keys or work with the system clipboard like you can in vim. Nevermind things like proper scripting and window support.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > Kakoune's grammar is object followed by verb

This is so important. It's the reason I've stuck by Quicksilver all these years, and avoided Spotlight and whatever Google's search bar thingy is called.

I've never been interested in vi because the effort to reward ratio doesn't seem favourable, but I think I'll give Kakoune a try.

<comment><USER16> Quicksilver, still? Why not move on to Alfred?

<comment><USER17> I'm not the person who mentioned QS but I'm still using it too. For me it's mostly inertia: Alfred can _probably_ do everything I use QS for, but QS still works just fine, so why bother? When something breaks the 10% or so of QS's capabilities that I actually use beyond fixing, _then_ I'll switch.

("Probably": last I tried using Alfred a few years ago, I think there was something I relied on QS to do that Alfred couldn't. I can't remember what it was, maybe Alfred does it now - but again, why bother? QS still does everything I want it to do.)

Also QS's interface looks cooler than Alfred's to me. Aesthetics matter.

<comment><USER16> QS was seriously broken for a long time. I understand someone else finally picked it up and started fixing the bugs, but I don't know why anyone actually kept with QS during the long broken period.

Even back when QS was under active development by the original author, it was still pretty buggy. I actually had a separate keyboard shortcuts app running in the background with a single shortcut which would relaunch QS for those times when QS decided to crash.

I am curious what you relied on QS for that Alfred can't do. Everything I remember doing with QS is doable with Alfred.

<comment><USER15> The great thing about Quicksilver is the grammar - it's actually object, verb, indirect object. That lets you do things like <file>, <email to>, <person>.

Alfred didn't have that basic structure when I tried it. I'm sure it's quite powerful, probably more so than QS given the latter's long stagnation. But I never bothered to figure out how to use Alfred effectively because QS is _so easy_ and works great. There were a couple of bugs that were annoying for a while, but they've been fixed.

Kakoune doesn't mention the "indirect object" part of the grammar, but apparently it'll prompt for more information when needed, so it's pretty close.

<comment><USER16> Alfred does use that structure, and as far as I remember, it always has. I can indeed do <file>, <email to>, <person> in Alfred (though my most common object, verb, indirect object sequence is <file>, <open in>, <app>).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> A better vim sounds great.

That said I suspect most people would be better off learning a good IDE properly, including but not limited to:

* effective navigation and selection using modifier keys and search

* built in refactoring

* project wide as well as single file search/replace, -and this includes regex search AND replace.

This should be quite doable in less than a week compared to a few months to get equally effective in vim.

Edit: let me add that parts of this looks like a huge improvement over vim.

<comment><USER7> > That said I suspect most people would be better off learning a good IDE > properly, including but not limited to:

To be clear, do you think a "good IDE" is inherently better than Vim/Kako for most people?

Personally i don't see a difference in a GUI based editor and a text based editor. In fact, i quite prefer text based, because it forces an editor to treat the keyboard as a first class citizen - GUI IDEs can get lazy and revert to mouse whenever they please.

I can see the argument that Vim might not be inherently as good as a "good" GUI editor, but i don't think that is a negative towards the potential of text based editors. It just means that we need new editors to focus on the UX, imo.

With that said, i'll be quite glad that we're moving towards standardizing _(of sorts)_ a code editor protocol so that new editors don't suffer from lack of tooling. It will be great to see a single set of tooling _(formatting, linting, imports, syntax checking, etc)_ plug into any new editor that might pop up.

Switching editors has enough friction, tooling shouldn't be one.

<comment><USER19> The core "IDE" features you don't normally get with an editor are things like project views, intellisense, code completion as you type, real time parsing and error highlight, code navigation. Sure you can get most all of this by wrangling plugins for vim (or which ever editor you choose) but in an IDE like eclipse, netbeans, intellij, visual studio, it's all there, ready to go.

In effect, a modern IDE is "programming ability" multiplier. It helps me code smarter and faster. That plus understanding what's going on behind the scenes is a powerful combination.

<comment><USER20> Sure, but the biggest problem with modern IDE's is the fact that they are terrible at editing text.

IDE's and text editors overlap in their uses, but they are not the same. Sometimes you really do just have a text editing task, and none of the IDE functionality will help with it. Also, the ways in which IDE's are extensible is lacking compared to something like Emacs. Yes, they come with a bunch of built-in useful stuff, but sometimes you want to add a keybinding to do some editing task you do a lot in a particular project or company, even if it's not useful in a more general-purpose setting.

<comment><USER18> _Yes, they come with a bunch of built-in useful stuff, but sometimes you want to add a keybinding to do some editing task you do a lot in a particular project or company, even if it 's not useful in a more general-purpose setting._

Don't know what IDE you used but Netbeans is _very_ customisable and extensible.

I think this is true for IntelliJ and eclipse as well and it would surprise me if it wasn't for Visual Studio.

(In fact I think I have seen vim modes for all of these and even embedded vim in eclipse.)

<comment><USER20> I think I probably didn't explain my meaning well. For Netbeans, Intellij, Eclipse, VS, etc. you tend to have to create a new project to write a plugin.

In Emacs, adding a simple extension is simply a matter of adding a function to your .emacs file. So adding useful functionality is very low friction, low enough that you can afford to do it when it wouldn't be worth the effort in an IDE.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> As a user, I think this is the main reason why I like kakoune:

> Another often overlooked property of using a text editing language is that > it's fun.

Some other things that I like about it that are not mentioned:

The author is responsive to feature requests and bugs on github.

The codebase is very well-made, if you have any interest in C++ I recommend taking a look at it.

</comment><comment><USER22> From the github docs:

> _" Due to Kakoune relying heavily on being in a Unix-like environment, no > native Windows version is planned."_

Deal breaker right there.

If I am going to go to the effort of learning a new editor, it better run on all reasonable platforms - like Vim does.

<comment><USER23> To be fair, vim is somewhere around a 4th class citizen on Windows. It works, but it ain't pretty.

Plus, with the unix subsystem (minus bugs) you can still run this in Windows. That still amazes me.

<comment><USER24> What exactly isn't pretty about vim (specifically gVim) on Windows?

<comment><USER25> The default fonts, the menus, the menu icons, the font rendering, the inability to use many plugins....

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Pontificating but for ide + editor replacement: someday we'll see ai/ml features that aide in opening files and keeping the right blobs of code nearby, maybe pre fetch good goog links that can drop down on a whim panel.

Even some kind of auto model visualizer that helps every so often like a replacement for the ignoble package mmanager side panel view.

We're still so stuck on text editing.

<comment><USER27> I think we need to first get over the hurdle of "code == text".

I mean, the features you talk about are great-- but right now I can't even embed a little vector graphic explaining a function's flow in my source file. Every time I've suggested using a file format that allows things like fonts, styles, embedded images, to write my code, the reaction is always an insanely irrational knee-jerk against it. (Seriously, try it out with your programmer colleagues.)

(And to prod the bear a bit, a large part of the problem is the developers who insist in working in tools like the ones we're discussing here, designed in the '70s and using absolutely no technology that was invented after 1985 or so. Ludicrous. Imagine if any other industry worked that way!)

Then a couple days later, you found out they spent like an hour making ASCII art of some diagram because they couldn't just paste the _actual_ diagram into the code. Sigh. Reason #3136269 I don't get along with other programmers.

I mean you're talking about advanced AI code that looks up Google links to explain code constructs, meanwhile 95% of the industry is using a code editor that doesn't even _allow_ you to embed a link in a code file. (If you're lucky, it'll make an obvious URL clickable, that's about the best you get.)

<comment><USER28> To prod back, you have three source code files---one is in Word Perfect format from 1987. The second is from Microsoft Word from 1998. The third is an ASCII text file from 1972. Which one can you open and reuse _today_?

<comment><USER27> I can open all of those formats in Microsoft Word right now this instant. So.

Good argument?

<comment><USER28> No. How about Easy Writer II? Or even Type-Rite?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Modal text editors are definitely not my thing, but anyway this looks like a huge improvement on vim.

Still a shame that it is entirely console-based. It's 2016 people! We've had GUIs for literally decades.

<comment><USER23> What would a GUI bring to this that isn't possible in the console? You can use a mouse to issue commands to console programs, after all: if you want to use your mouse to scroll through or select regions of text, you can.

<comment><USER30> I find that console apps are far less intuitive when it comes to visual thinkers. I also am not too keen on modal editing, it doesn't match how I do most things in life. I don't have to switch out my teeth when eating vs drinking. It just doesn't seem natural to me. I've always found I'm more productive with a GUI. Command line is great for simple tasks and executing commands, but editing files has always seemed less than ideal. You have to remember so many key combinations and commands and track what mode you are in and what modes are available. I would rather spend that brain power on solving problems.

<comment><USER23> > I don't have to switch out my teeth when eating vs drinking.

But you do switch how your mouth is working when switching between eating and drinking. In one, you masticate and move food around your mouth before swallowing once (maybe twice), whereas the other involves directing fluids back to your throat which acts in a near-continuous swallowing action.

> You have to remember so many key combinations and commands

They become muscle memory after an admittedly non-trivial amount of use. Yes, it is an investment in your future usage of that tool.

And to be fair, you had to memorize C-x, C-c, and C-v at one point too.

<comment><USER31> He doesn't control his mouth when switching between eating and breathing, I'm pretty sure that it's part of the autonomic system. You kind of made his point since there's no way Vim actions actually become fully reflex actions, especially the powerful stuff that separates Vim from a good IDE, since the vast majority of those really complex actions will be done at best dozens of times per day (and I'm being generous here).

<comment><USER32> > there's no way Vim actions actually become fully reflex actions

You might be surprised. Maybe not quite the level of a true "reflex", but it can get close. I find I not infrequently get weird compile/test/spellcheck errors when I'm not using vim and go back to find a string of vi keystrokes in the middle of my document that I typed without consciously realizing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I generally pass over mentions of new text editors because they seem to be either orthogonal to what makes Vim great, or else to approach Vim with the approach that it's mostly wrong—think of Cream, for example, which seems more about onboarding newbies than appealing to experienced users (which is fine!). I think of Neovim as an improvement for Vim scripters and coders, while aiming to provide mostly the same end-user experience, so I haven't really bothered with it. I'd discounted previous mentions of Kakoune, assuming that it was more of the same, but this discussion (and in particular greenspot's deservedly top-rated comment [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13166784](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13166784) ) made me take a closer look, and I think I'll give it a try.

</comment><comment><USER34> I'm sorry... but "kak"?

I love/like vi[m], I love/like emacs... I ... never mind lol

The new editing language does look great, and I like the idea of the piped filters... but I can't get over the name :-/

<comment><USER35> Worth noting is "kak" is one of the (many) words in Dutch for "poo".

I dabble in vim and it's my editor for when I quickly want to change stuff whilst in a terminal, but not enough to be "proficient" in it. As others have noted, I feel there could be a massive gain in editing if I were to get more acquainted with the many vi commands, but the initial productivity penalty has stopped me more than once from making it my default editor. Kakoune's mental model of commands seems friendlier, so maybe it will stick :)

<comment><USER36> Hopefully this is a temporary name. Investing in branding upfront can be a waste of time but if it picks up, it might be worth a more thoughtout and friendly name.

<comment><USER37> Could be `kk`

<comment><USER38> And that is short for cancer in Dutch, used as a swear word.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I'm still waiting for someone to do a modal abstract syntax tree editor. You would only type text when naming something, the other mode would be for navigating the AST.

<comment><USER40> Sounds like a visual scripting system with low level constructs.

<comment><USER39> Visual scripting is nice in that you can have a seperate presentation layer on top of the language syntax. There's a lot of potential in improved readability that way I think. Most visual scripting depends on mouse actions, which is kind of slow and I suspect a big reason why programmers dislike it so much.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Might be a good idea to include a link to this new editor at least _somewhere_ in the text. I couldn't find even one little link...

<comment><USER42> You can find the editor source, and installation instructions on github: [https://github.com/mawww/kakoune](https://github.com/mawww/kakoune)

<comment><USER41> Thanks! However, my point was that people shouldn't have to read comments on HN to be able to find the editor (I thank you for helping me though!) that someone wrote a whole blogpost about.

<comment><USER7> I agree with you, though it's a frequent issue that blog posts don't link back to the main site. With that said, it's fairly obvious to go to the root domain for something like a blog post, and that's how i found it.

Definitely should include a link, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> A few things I like:

* No NodeJS/NPM * No Electron * No multi-threading

<comment><USER44> No multi threading is a plus?

<comment><USER43> From Design notes:

> "No threading: multithreading is a hard problem, and is not well suited to a > text editor:

Either we want a direct result, and we need to be synchronous with the user, so getting a 4x speed up is meaningless, we need to have an algorithm which appears instantaneous the user.

Or we want an asynchronous result, and then the processing is best left to a helper command which can be reused with other Unix tools."

I agree with them. Multithreading today in all situations is like Fuzzy logic of yesteryears. It is suppose to make everything better.

<comment><USER44> One of the big problems of editors like emacs and vim is that they haven't had means for background processing for years. And no, multithreading is not hard if you design for it. It is very hard if you need to add it as an afterthought. Some people would even say threads are easier then async.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Looks great.

Does it have a different scripting language, or is it still VimL? What kind of plugin support does it have?

Is it embeddable? Does it have a messaging API like Neovim?

How well does it handle long text lines and long documents?

<comment><USER21> Some answers as a user:

No scripting language, most of the heavy lifting done in plugin is through shell calls (asynchronously or not). Example here [1]. I personally think that it's kinda hard to grok to be honest.

Thanks to the client server architecture, it is possible to make an external UI[2].

There is no line wrapping currently. Don't know about long documents, but the editor in general is very efficient.

[1] [https://github.com/mawww/kakoune/blob/master/rc/core/grep.ka...](https://github.com/mawww/kakoune/blob/master/rc/core/grep.kak)

[2] [https://github.com/mawww/kakoune/blob/master/doc/json_ui.asc...](https://github.com/mawww/kakoune/blob/master/doc/json_ui.asciidoc)

<comment><USER7> What _is_ your 1st example exactly? I mean, if Kak doesn't come with a scripting language, then what language is that exactly?

This is an important note to me, because i imagine i'll have to implement my own tools for common language tasks like Gofmt and Goimport.

Honestly, it would be cool if i could write plugins in any language i want, ie if it fully uses a backend editor server API.

<comment><USER21> They are just command that you could execute manually (using ':' like in vim). The difference is that all the commands in this file are executed at startup.

As I said, all the heavy lifting is done in scopes like %sh{ ... }. This way you can actually use any language you want, and it's only the piping you have to do through kakoune commands.

Most common languages (like go) already have plugins to do some basic tasks like formatting.

If you're interested in the editor, I would rather recommend reading the readme of the project[1]. There is a lot to read, and you can start making plugins once you understand it.

[1] [https://github.com/mawww/kakoune](https://github.com/mawww/kakoune)

<comment><USER7> Yea i'm definitely going to try this out. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> I don't want to belittle anyone's work or inventions, but I think modal editors are old and outdated. They've had their time in my mind.

Bret Victor gave a great talk about programming and tools: [https://vimeo.com/36579366](https://vimeo.com/36579366)

His talks always blow me away.

<comment><USER46> On the contrary, my reaction to reading OP was, "wow, somebody brought Bret Victor's ideas to modal editors!" The goal of switching verb and object is precisely to stop drawing dead fish ([http://worrydream.com/#!/StopDrawingDeadFish](http://worrydream.com/#!/StopDrawingDeadFish))

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Looks like an excellent model. I'll probably stick with vim, at least for the time being, but I'm always glad to see new work being done on modal text editors. I agree that vim's model has certain shortcomings, and it's nice to see see someone trying to address them.

The multiple selections thing looks really cool.

</comment><comment><USER48> I love this idea, and look forward to trying it when I have a little more disposable time to learn something new. I just want to point out one thing: While it is admirable that this project sticks to just text editing, our text editors often form a part of a system. This includes IDEs, shells and interpreters, and the OS itself. One of the missing "modes" of vim is a yield- to-something-other-than-editor mode. Because we don't have this, any time I use vim or a vim compatibility layer, I end up having to remap keys from their defaults to something that I have trouble remembering and is completely different from the docs. I hate remapping keys. Give us a mode that allows us to keep the rest of our ecosystem intact.

</comment><comment><USER16> This looks very interesting. But why does this whole site try to use WebM video even on browsers that don't support it? When viewing this site in Safari, there's a bunch of broken videos scattered around.

</comment><comment><USER49> It's pretty hard to find a link[0] to actually getting kakoune on the home page. Usually that sort of link at the bottom is an email URI and I try to avoid clicking on those.

Based on the linked screenshot[1], perhaps the editor should be named "Clippy's Revenge"

[0] [https://github.com/mawww/kakoune](https://github.com/mawww/kakoune)

[1] [http://kakoune.org/img/screenshots/screenshot- tmux.gif](http://kakoune.org/img/screenshots/screenshot-tmux.gif)

<comment><USER50> "Clippy's Revenge" sounds like a cool name, at least it's more memorable than Kakoune.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> One functionality I find missing in all modern code editors is - <USER2> action. This was present and extremely useful in, now extinct, Convergent Technology OS (CTOS) resident editor. In brief, it allowed users to repeat all the actions they performed on one-line of code, on another line of code. It's amazing how productive you can be when you have that feature. This goes beyond find & replace; It also helps format code, insert, replace multiple parts of the line, etc. all with one keystroke.

<comment><USER52> This sounds like macros? Of course, the problem with macros is that you sometimes realize you should have hit "Record" only after you've completed the action.

<comment><USER53> > the problem with macros is that you sometimes realize you should have hit > "Record" only after you've completed the action.

Happens to me all the time. But if using a macro was actually worth the effort in the first place, then it's probably still worth the effort to undo and record

<comment><USER7> Definitely. In fact because of that "blind actions" that Vim has, and Kakoune seems to be trying to fix, i often record macros multiple times. I'll make the macro, but the realize it doesn't fit all cases i wanted it to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> > _Interactivity comes by providing feedback on every commands, the inverted > object then verb grammar makes that possible, every selection modification > has direct visual feedback, regex based selections incrementally show what > will get selected, including when the regular expression is invalid, and > even yanking some text displays a message notifying how many selections were > yanked._

Did anyone else think of reverse Polish notation and concatenative languages like Forth when reading this paragraph?

</comment><comment><USER55> Neat. One question: How can I script it? What is the scripting language for customizing the editor? I couldn't find information on this in the documentation.

<comment><USER20> This thread explains that you script it using shell commands: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13166635](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13166635)

<comment><USER14> So it's not possible to have something like vims quickfix?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> A few questions after playing around with this for a bit:

After making a complicated selection, doing something else, I want to go back to that selection easily. Is there a selection history? A way to execute the last selection?

I tried running a shell command that waited on input and kak hung waiting for the command to finish. is there a way to kill the command? Or better, a way to interact with the command after its running?

I like it so far!

</comment><comment><USER57> The 'd2tf' example is just wrong... after realizing I didn't hit the right 'f' I would just press '.' (not 'ud2tf')... I think I will stay with vim for now, also the discoverability could be better... Btw. mixing vim with tmux also solves the 'command line next to editor' problem.

</comment><comment><USER58> I will give this a try.

I had been a long time vim/emacs rejector. I used ide and sublime text for most of the time.

But few weeks ago, I needed to program a server for deep learning. Because of the graphics driver on that server, there is really no option to run a gui application. So I had to learn vim.

It turned out to be not that difficult to get used to it.

The only complain I have is code navigation. The font size of the vim is fixed to the font size of the terminal. The text is relatively large, therefore the viewing window can only show few lines of code.

Sometimes, I need to reference a previously defined variable or function of the same file, It's difficult to quickly navigate to the right place.

With sublime text, it's mini map navigator is so convenient to allow me go back and forth between locations.

With vim, however, I rely more on my memory. I need to go back once and remember everything, and then go to the end of the file to edit.

<comment><USER59> You might like the '*' and '#' keys, as well as marks, particularly "'.".

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> Problem with all these hotkeys is discoverability and memory. In the end, I use just a few well known hotkeys. It's useless to define hundreds of them. I don't like modal editors especially because keys have even more functions then, which I have to remember.

</comment><comment><USER61> I started a similar project in 2013, sadly never delivered a working prototype. Its name was going to be "Kuji Editor", basically an editor in visual mode by default and with context-verb grammar instead of vi's verb- object grammar. I knew this would represent a big improvement over other editors because of a more intuitive and modern approach leading to a better workflow.

I started with building the UI in PyGame but never got further than that...

(I am really disappointed I didn't spend more time on this now I see the attention Kakoune gets. I would have loved the feeling of contributing something truly innovative... well...). Congrats to Maxime!

</comment><comment><USER62> Really interesting project and looking forward to having time to play a bit more with it. After trying it for the first time and reading the documentation I have the impression that the `alt` key is used a lot as a modifier key for basic things such as selecting inner objects. One thing I love about Vi and Vim is that most it tries to reduce the usage of modifier keys which is awesome when you are touch typing. I would love to know why the author chose the `alt` key and what the other options were. That's a great project and I'm sure it could help a lot of developers to understand modal mode. Great work!

</comment><comment><USER63> This is awesome, I only wish it was a mode integrated into Emacs, like evil- mode. I can't afford to give up the debugging, completion etc. that I get as part of emacs, but I would love to use this in my day-to-day flow.

</comment><comment><USER64> Why not write it in Rust though like Google's Xi [0]?

[0]: [https://github.com/google/xi-editor](https://github.com/google/xi- editor)

<comment><USER65> > I have been working, for the last 5 years,

Rust was very, very different five years ago.

<comment><USER64> Sorry, I've missed that!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> This might get lost in here, but one thing that I'm dissapointed by is I love this idea, it looks fantastic, and I'm a vim "user" that would love to switch.

But I put user in quotes because really I use IntelliJ or VS or whatever, with the vim plugin, for the rich refactoring / autocomplete support which, for most languages, is awful to try to integrate with a command line editor like this.

Anyone know if the author plans to make a plugin client? That would be amazing.

<comment><USER67> The problem, I think, is on Intellij's or VS' side rather than on Kakoune's; otherwise, we would already have an Intellij client based on neovim. I'm in a similar boat to you, but I don't think there is much hope unless those IDEs actually do something to make this viable.

<comment><USER66> Yeah, you're probably right. I was sort of implying "with the understanding it's unlikely any of the IDE makers are going to do this, it would be nice to have the common code separate so a plugin wrapper is easy".

Something along those lines.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> Shameless plug: I have been working on my own code editor as well, I wanted something between Notepad++ and Jupyter Notebooks; I called it TeIDE: [https://github.com/omtinez/teide](https://github.com/omtinez/teide)

Fully open source, built on Polymer and currently working on a plugin/action model to enable users to execute custom commands on the underlying shell.

Accepting pull requests and all forms of feedback :-)

</comment><comment><USER69> Interesting, but how will they make money to fund continued development? So many editors show great promise to slowly disappear and fade away because of budget issues.

</comment><comment><USER70> I liked the ideas and especially the paperclip :)

I couldn't find whether it is completely written from scratch or a vim fork? If not, why is it not a vim fork?

<comment><AUTHOR> I believe it's a complete re-implementation. I think with so many 'deep' changes to the functionality, rewriting would probably be easier than forking.

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> I moved from Sublime Text to vim. Tried emacs first but for some reason it didn't click. vim was much easier to start with and I see the benefits of mastering modal editing. It's not about typing faster, but developing the muscle memory to transform text without thinking about it. That's really powerful.

</comment><comment><USER72> I tried this editor out and the most maddening thing was figuring out how to reduce multiple cursors back down to one. I finally figured out - by accident - that pressing the space bar reduces your number of cursors down to one. The documentation needs to make this basic, necessary key-command a lot more obvious.

</comment><comment><USER73> I think editors provide at least two more things: Code completion and global refactoring. Eclipse/IntelliJ users in the Java world can pound out entire programs in seconds using nothing but keyboard shortcuts. Are there features like this for other languages?

</comment><comment><USER74> I see many valuable feature, such as the highlighting and the tooltips.

I wonder if these could have been expediently implemented as VIM plugins - perhaps each feature could have been a VIM plugin so that people can pick and choose which feature set they wanted.

</comment><comment><USER75> Interesting, as a long term Vim user I might try this out. Currently invested some time in Spacemacs and I don't want to jump around too much.

It really needs a catchier name though. We have Vim. Spacemacs. Emacs. Kakoune sounds a bit foreign imho.

</comment><comment><USER76> I really like it. However given how confusing for my Vim muscle memory a switching would be, I would have to make sure the ecosystem around it is good enough. Basic programming languages highlights and completions and similar tools.

</comment><comment><USER77> This webpage has the honour of causing my browser (Firefox Nightly, Windows, 64-bit) to crash outright. It's been _ages_ since that's happened. Ah, the occasional joys of running a nightly browser as your primary browser!

<comment><USER78> The same happens for me on FF on Android. I tried three times and it crashes each time. A shame, the comments have intrigued me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER79> The features demostrated here are almost the exact ones I'm looking to do in Vim (I've only been using for a few months) and the way they describe them here makes them so simple. I hope this continues to mature!

</comment><comment><USER80> What I'm interested in is whether the editor will have nicer interfaces for plugins - async evaluation of things is a massive pain in vim. The same could be said for regular expressions to do syntax highlighting.

</comment><comment><USER81> but when I ssh into a server it's 100% guaranteed vim or vi will be installed on it already. It will take years for kakoune to reach that state. Same with curl and grep. They are every where so I learn them.

</comment><comment><USER67> I was pleasantly surprised at how good it is. Definitely keeping an eye on it.

</comment><comment><USER82> This reminds me of "vis" from about a year ago - [https://github.com/martanne/vis](https://github.com/martanne/vis)

</comment><comment><USER83> How do you pronounce 'kakoune'?

Some people are already using 'kak' instead of 'kakoune', IMO 'kak' will be a better name.

<comment><USER84> Kak sounds like poo-poo in german and similar languages. It's even a loanword in english.

</comment></comment><comment><USER85> The videos don't seem to play on firefox 45.5.1

</comment><comment><USER86> Boost dependency, which I always have bad luck getting to build in a reasonable time. Isn't Boost going away?

</comment><comment><USER87> The concept is interesting but do the videos work? I get only moving ghost images. Android Opera and FF.

</comment><comment><USER88> Finally, the legacy burden of vim and neovim gone, and a whole new world :D Thank you a lot!

</comment><comment><USER89> It would be interesting to see it as an editing mode in atom.io or vs code!

</comment><comment><USER90> You have my attention. :) edit: Wow, super excited to try this out.

</comment><comment><USER91> what's the font that is used on the screenshots ? I would love to try it in Pycharm IDE/Jetbrain products.

<comment><USER92> The font is called terminus

</comment></comment><comment><USER93> vi [vee-ay] : Aztec expression for "how the fuck do I get off this shit".

Esc Esc : q!

</comment><comment><USER94> I've actually never heard of Kakoune. And I'm not too familiar with verb based text editors in general. I've been using Visual Studio Code recently and like it functionality wise.

[http://jsdiaries.com/2016/11/27/visual-studio-code- features-...](http://jsdiaries.com/2016/11/27/visual-studio-code-features- part-1/)

I may move on to a verb based editor like this as my projects getting more complex and navigating through verb commands is a must. But can someone tell me what languages would benefit most from an editor like Kakoune? I'm assuming creating macros would be a big part of using it ?

</comment><comment><USER95> Interesting. Haven't seen a new modal editor in a while, nice to see some innovation there. How long until someone ports this to Emacs?

</comment><comment><USER96> I'm glad to see someone thinking outside of the vi box when it comes to modal editing.

But the problem is that editors aren't very useful on their own without an ecosystem of development plugins.

I'd love to see this ported to VSCode.

</comment><comment><USER97> There is GNU Emacs, there is Vim and you make your choice here. The rest is just pale copies.

</comment><comment><USER98> Blah blah blah another "modal editing is better" article.

And once again, I'm not impressed. You may not like GUIs, but I do. You may think that keeping your hands on the keyboard and off the mouse makes you more productive, but I don't.

We all have our preferences. Yours are not better than mine. End of story.

<comment><USER99> they're not mutually exclusive. vim's modal features are handy even if you use gvim - e.g. you could select a range of text with the mouse and use y to yank it because you were in editing rather than insert mode</comment></comment>


The year of the Cyrus Foundation - <AUTHOR> https://blog.fastmail.com/2015/12/22/the-year-of-the-cyrus-foundation/ <comment><AUTHOR> I pretty much gave up on my "life" for this one for most of this year. Finally back teaching gym classes and singing in choir. Gotta have balance.</comment>


Huawei Trolls U.S. on Spy Claims with a Jab at Snowden - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-26/u-s-huawei-wage-war-of-words-at-telecom-industry-s-top-show <comment><USER2> I feel like this is fair. People like to paint enemies of the east while essentially letting the west get away with much more heinous stuff.

The difference of course is that we implicitly trust US tech companies, of course we do, nobody else has such a monopoly on CPUs and Operating System production. Not to mention web browsers and all kinds of technology. Avoiding the USA in your tech stack is quite literally impossible.

And we permit the US government (by extension the NSA and 5eyes) to do what ever they want to us without fear of repercussion because what course of action could we take? As long as we are not a US citizen we have literally zero protections.

it's to the point that my EU based company is applying US sanctions (to Crimea for instance, where no EU sanction covers telecommunications) because we would fall out of line in many of our contracts from US tech companies.

It is clearly a double standard. But the answer is to hold the US to account. Not bring more of this hostile crap in.

<comment><USER3> I don't like the false equivalence of what the US-lead western intelligence does and what the Chinese state does.

Obviously in a perfect world none of the "bad" things happen, but I'd rather take the US government spying on me than the Chinese government spy on me.

<comment><USER4> > I'd rather take the US government spying on me than the Chinese government > spy on me.

Not everyone shares your opinion.

<comment><USER5> If the Uighurs had a voice, I think they might have something to say about that[1].

[1] [https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global- opinions/chin...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global- opinions/china-has-turned-xinjiang-into-a-zone-of-repression--and-a- frightening-window-into-the- future/2019/02/23/780092fe-353f-11e9-854a-7a14d7fec96a_story.html)

<comment><USER6> Cool story bro.

Me, just like Uyghurs, would prefer to be spied on by the evil empire which DOESN'T rule me.

Uyghurs are ruled by China so they'd rather be spied on by us for sure.

I live in Europe so I'm ruled by US, and therefore would prefer China to spy on me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> We should start with the assumption that every government, carrier, service provider, device manufacturer is rogue and will start spying on us. As a technologist, it is responsibility of the people here to create sustainable systems and services which are simple to adopt so can be used by billions of people while keeping there privacy intact. I'll be happy to fund (in my meager capacity) any effort by Mozilla/EFF to take back control.

<comment><USER8> Thank you. The rest of these comments are involved in a circular argument about East v West, as thought these are fresh debates no one's ever had before.

China v US dick-waving doesn't change the 'facts on the ground' for average people, which is that state surveillance exists, and many people don't know just how expansive it is. That's what people should be opposing, instead of cheering on two massive bureaucracies like they're sports teams.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is really not a smart defense. US accuses Chinese company of introducing backdoors in its products for the benefit of China. Chinese company says everyone does it, proves it based on Snowden revelations.

The Chinese company is most likely right. But if you are a national carrier, do you then buy the product with the Chinese backdoors?

The only defense that wouldn't kill their sales would be arguing for the opposite, that backdoors undermine the trust of their customers, and that they have the same incentive as Google, Apple or Cisco to push back on those requests.

<comment><USER10> It may not be smart but at least it's refreshingly honest.

<comment><USER11> Basically, choose the built-in backdoor. Nevermind the fact that nation-states with the capability will amass 0-days against them anyways.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Referencing Prism is a jab at the US, but hardly a jab a Snowden. Misleading headline!

<comment><USER13> I agree it's not worded well. I think they might have intended to mean a jab at U.S. surveillance dragnets via the Snowden _affair_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Nice, Huawei Finally pointed this out, so the next step is hopefully somebody pointing out the difference.

There will never be a Snowden in China. You can guarantee their life, or their love one's life will be held hostage.

So not only does the "West" ( So to speak ) has a system in place protecting these people, they also have a system to vote them out and elect a new form of government should the ultimate worst come to play.

What can you do with the CCP?

<comment><USER15> Can you cite evidence of Chinese dissidents having family members held hostage? Genuinely curious if this is true, because it doesn't sound like it's true as even the Chinese government is accountable to public opinion to a large degree.

For an accusation like that you should always provide substantiated evidence, otherwise you're just flaming the anti-Chinese racial flames. Because as terrible as you may think the Chinese government is, it still has the legitimacy and support of a vast majority of the Chinese population.

<comment> King-Aaron > Can you cite evidence of Chinese dissidents having family members held > hostage?

Not the best coming from the Guardian admittedly, but still. Top result in google.

[https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/mar/26/chinese- activi...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/mar/26/chinese-activists- family-taken-away-over-letter-calling-for-xi-jinping-to-quit)

<comment><USER16> > Not the best coming from the Guardian admittedly

What is that supposed to mean?

<comment><USER2> Guardian is a newspaper generally perceived to be anti-authoritarian.

It's one of the few "left" newspapers in the UK.

<comment><USER16> I know that. I'm questioning GP's apologetic tone that implies it's wrong to link to the Guardian.

<comment><USER17> If you know that then you know the answer. It's an anti-authoritarian paper so it's going to be biased against an authoritarian government.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Ping makes a pretty clever reference directly to this NSA program: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_\(surveillance_program\)). I've got to admit, it's quite apropos, although I don't think it dismisses the US's legitimate concerns over PRC tech influence.

</comment><comment><USER15> Frankly if Huawei tech is at risk of being compromised, so can any tech, even US-based ones. Shouldn't be putting that much trust in the manufacturer regardless of where they are from.

The fight then ends up being a squabble over power and who should have it. The US government is only saying what it says because it simply wants more power in its hands—nothing more. Same goes for the China side, although they're just trying to sell something. There's no way China can win this argument since it's just about power (unless they bend over).

</comment><comment><USER5> Some of these comments are... weird. Multiple accounts with broken English defending China and bringing up African Americans (somewhat irrelevantly) in every argument. I'll leave the speculation as an exercise for the reader.

<comment><USER2> This is spreading FUD and I'm not sure for what reason.

I have no problem telling you who I am; I currently seem to have the top comment here[0] which makes me probably the prime target of this message.

What about my English is broken? I am British[1], I have been around for a long time[2] and I currently live in Sweden. I have no obligation to any US or China based tech company and no affiliation with China at all (other than the fact I work for a games company that is 5% owned by Tencent[3], but I am definitely not directly involved and I consider their efforts an intrusion).

If you think I'm a troll then I've been playing the long game, I have GitHub commits under this name since 2011.

[0]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19261105](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19261105)

[1]: [http://linkedin.com/in/jharasym/](http://linkedin.com/in/jharasym/)

[2]: [https://github.com/dijit](https://github.com/dijit)

[3]: [https://www.polygon.com/2018/3/20/17144094/ubisoft- vivendi-s...](https://www.polygon.com/2018/3/20/17144094/ubisoft-vivendi- sells-stake-tencent-deal)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> The crime is the action, not who is doing it. Why should US firms be allowed to not only get away but seek to normalize and profit from global surveillance while Huawei is penalized for FUD? What sort of global system is this?

This just won't fly for anyone concerned with the ethical issues. The point is not that Huawei should get away with anything but no one should. This not only makes a mockery of concern with surveillance but also exposes globalization and free markets as self serving political tools.

Huawei is a perfect example of how ethical issues are hijacked by vested interests with zero interest in the ethics to encourage an empty culture of jingoistic finger pointing that serve to distract and deny while advancing their own financial interests at the cost of everyone else.

</comment><comment><USER20> What about the million Uighurs in Chinese concentration camps?

The scale of state crimes are vastly different here.

<comment><USER21> How many separated Latino children are in indefinite detention these days?

<comment><USER20> That makes it okay then? Because the US does shady stuff, that means China is okay to do what they want?

Putting millions of your own citizens in a concentration camp is a crime on the scale of nothing currently seen in the modern world.

Excusing China's human rights violations because the US actions are whataboutism and is a completely bullshit argument.

<comment><USER21> No, it makes neither side OK. And failing to do anything about it in the side under democratic control makes it harder to do elsewhere.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Your favorite email app - <AUTHOR> I am just curious what email app you use for your own domain.
On Android, the stock email app does not have many features.
I do not want to trust GMAIL or Yahoo apps with confidential emails.
What would you suggest for an email app that comes with some nice features? <comment><USER2> The guy said he doesn't trust Gmail (Google) with confidential emails and you recommend him Inbox?

</comment><comment><USER3> Zoho Mail has a tolerable UI, free custom domain support, no ads and much less interest in the value of your data. They make their money when you use all their other apps.

</comment><comment><USER4> Google's Inbox works quite well for me.

</comment><comment><USER5> Wha? Just GPG your email.

</comment><comment><USER6> inbox</comment>


OpenVMS State of the Port to x86_64 [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://vmssoftware.com/pdfs/State_of_Port_20170707.pdf <comment><USER3> For those interested in DEC history, HP have put the text of their Digital Technical Journal articles online at [http://www.hpl.hp.com/hpjournal/dtj/past.htm](http://www.hpl.hp.com/hpjournal/dtj/past.htm) (no figures, alas).

Volume 4 issue 4 introduced the Alpha architecture and includes an article describing the effort to port OpenVMS: [http://www.hpl.hp.com/hpjournal/dtj/vol4num4/vol4num4art7.pd...](http://www.hpl.hp.com/hpjournal/dtj/vol4num4/vol4num4art7.pdf)

<comment><USER4> There's also the later (since 2003 or so) OpenVMS technical journal: [http://h41379.www4.hpe.com/openvms/journal/](http://h41379.www4.hpe.com/openvms/journal/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I see lots of questions about who uses OpenVMS. In general, places where downtime and security breaches are frowned upon, as well as markets where VMS has had a long-time presence, and where moving away doesn't solve any problems they have and just costs money (in some industries, particularly the cost of re-certifying systems).

Without giving away any specific customers, I have personally dealt with VMS customers in the following markets: nuclear industry (power plants, research reactors, reprocessing plants, research labs), military (weapons systems, logistics), law enforcement, railroads, airports, healthcare, manufacturing (process control, logistics), retail, and I may have overlooked some markets.

</comment><comment><USER5> _OpenVMS supports nine programming languages,six of which use a DEC-developed, proprietary back-end code generator on both Alpha and Itanium. We are creating a converter to internally connect these compiler front-ends to the open source LLVM back-end code generator, which targets x86_64 as well as many other architectures. (The other three compilers have their own individual pathways to the new architecture.)_

This should be interesting when they get done. OpenVMS had a reputation of not going down and having amazing storage clustering. I found it a bit odd when I used it in college and years later on a job. I wish it had been open sourced, but I guess it makes me feel good to know it's still going regardless.

<comment><USER6> VAX/VMS was always open sourced and available first on microfiche and later on CD. I don't know if this continued after Compaq and then HP came to own the code but that's how it started life. The only censored code was the license management facility, which realistically, was trivially subvert-able if you knew VAX assembly language.

<comment><USER7> While a factually correct description of what was made available, I don't think that's quite the intended meaning of "open source".

<comment><USER8> "Open source" historically meant just that: that you could look at the source, in contrast to machine code-only software.

Only later did the term got confused with "free software" idea from Stalman and the "preferred form for making modifications" as he put it.

<comment><USER9> While "source listings as an aid to debugging" was definitely done, and still is (e.g. Microsoft Windows source is available to researchers), Wikipedia disagrees with the use of the term "open source" as ever meaning this.

 _The term "open source" was first proposed by a group of people in the free software movement who were critical of the political agenda and moral philosophy implied in the term "free software"_

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open- source_model](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_model)

<comment><USER8> Interesting. I'm probably confusing some things. I was under the impression that the term "open source" was older than both the free software movement and "open source" as defined by Eric Raymond et al. Not sure where I remember that from. Thanks for correcting me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This may be a fun anecdote or a cool story bro but I attended the 1982 National Computer Conference (aka NCC) in Houston, TX. At the time I was attending a high school with a PDP-11/05 and a PDP-11/34A which along with a PLATO terminal which were the center of any student's life interested in computers.

Needless to say I was beyond excited to see Digital's booth with actual Vaxen. They were mystical, super powerful systems we could only dream of one day touching at college. One of the floor walkers was demonstrating VMS and let me login and play around.

At school we had learned all sorts of commands by a mix of monkey command line silliness (we discovered SUBMIT when someone literally typed SUBMIT TO MY WILL at the prompt) and reading the hallowed documentation which were normally locked away in the IT director's office. You had to be especially good (straight A student) or a toady to get access to the docs.

Anyway we learned RSTS/E would let you claim resources with the allocate command. You could ALLOC a printer or disk but at NCC Digital had networked their systems to demonstrate global VAX clusters and VMS supported the same command across the network! You could ALLOC HOST::DEVICE and it would work.

Out of curiosity I ALLOC'd an entire VMS node (ALLOC RED::). It crashed. Unable to believe it when they got the server up I tried it again and it crashed again. I slunk away nervously sweating the rest of the day, convinced somehow that the Digital police were going to descend on me and kick me out of the conference. I went back the next day and confessed and told them what I had done to crash the VAX, figuring they would no longer be angry and that they should know what happened.

Unrelated to crashing the VAX I ended up getting a job offer from a Digital client to write Pascal code for MRI machines connected to VAXen strictly from one of those right place right time conversations. Those were the days. (Sadly as a 10th grader with no car I had to turn down the job.)

</comment><comment><USER11> In the x86_64 server space (which is, what, 90% of the server market today?), the choice of operating systems is basically between Windows and some variant of Unix (Solaris and its open source offspring, numerous GNU/Linux distros, and *BSD).

Adding another system to the mix, especially one that has been in development for ~40 years, is an interesting proposition in itself. Add to that the reputation OpenVMS has for reliability and security, and I could certainly see a bright future for it on commodity hardware.

Whether that actually comes to pass is another question, but there is at least potential.

<comment><USER12> If the licensing fees on x86_64 aren't ridiculous, I will be tempted to make a serious evaluation of it at work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I found this picture of the team. Not sure how old the picture is. [https://yellow.place/file/image/cover/0/0/204/ulriejwjzgbqti...](https://yellow.place/file/image/cover/0/0/204/ulriejwjzgbqtian.jpg)

<comment><USER4> That's a fairly old one, IIRC it dates from the 8.4-1H1 release, or May 2015. The team is considerably larger today.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I worked on OpenVMS at the start of my career. I heard that the customer didn't want to port away from OpenVMS and this prevented HP from killing it off. One famous story in VMS folklore was where a building containing a datacenter catches fires and Unix admins run into the building to retrieve the backup disks and OpenVms admin do not since clustering give hot backup by default. Another story was of banks having data centers near the twin towers. The datacenters go down since the air conditioners go down due to the dust from the twin towers crashing. But the OpenVms cluster continue to operate since the half of the cluster is in New Jersey.

It was ported to Itanium while the x84 port and the POSIX compatibility project was never completed.

<comment><USER4> The Commerzbank case (datacenter near twin towers, contingency site in Rye, NY) is well documented: [http://www.availabilitydigest.com/public_articles/0407/comme...](http://www.availabilitydigest.com/public_articles/0407/commerzbank.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Really hoping the Hobbyist License program continues on to the x86 port.

</comment><comment><USER16> These dudes are insane in a good way. Also, their earlier slide decks had more diagrams and even screenshots.

<comment><USER4> Thanks! I have some videos online of presentations I did at last year's OpenVMS Boot Camp. Some with diagrams :-) My apologies for the sometimes poor audio quality.

[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLwebt4CzDP_hT2rHCm8Sw...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLwebt4CzDP_hT2rHCm8SwL0k1FZ9aAAsA)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> For those who have never heard of OpenVMS they might want to get themselves a copy of this book:

[http://theminimumyouneedtoknow.com/app_book.html](http://theminimumyouneedtoknow.com/app_book.html)

VMS was the OS of choice when it posolutely absitively had to work. It was even banned from the Black Hat conferences because it never gave up the flag. THEN they started adding OpenSource components and it became just as insecure and unstable as Windows and Linux. It is now, once again welcomed at Black Hat conferences because every piece of OpenSource on it is the same 8-lane wide security breach the other platforms have.

</comment><comment><USER4> For those unfamiliar with OpenVMS clusters, here's an excellent write-up: [http://www.availabilitydigest.com/public_articles/0306/openv...](http://www.availabilitydigest.com/public_articles/0306/openvms.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER9> Is there a VAX emulator/VM for x86 that would allow running VMS?

<comment><USER18> SIMH emulates a lot of things, including VAX. You used to be able to get a Hobbyist license for OpenVMS from HP. I'm not sure whether you still can.

[http://simh.trailing-edge.com/](http://simh.trailing-edge.com/)

<comment><USER4> Yes, you can still get hobbyist licenses from HP for OpenVMS: [https://www.hpe.com/h41268/live/index_e.aspx?qid=24548](https://www.hpe.com/h41268/live/index_e.aspx?qid=24548)

Note that some fields that are not marked mandatory should be treated as mandatory, esp. the one about the intended use.

Besides VAX emulators, there are also Alpha emulators you can run OpenVMS on; of interest to hobbyists are FreeAXP - free as in free beer, not open source, and Windows only - (www.freeaxp.com), and for those who want to be able to change it, the open source ES40 Emulator (www.es40.org) (disclaimer - I am the author of both of these emulators)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Who, and why?

<comment><USER20> There are still a non-trivial pile of organizations out there that rely upon VMS. I still can hardly believe it myself when I run into them, but as I understand the situations when I ask out of curiosity, these are relatively lower-margin organizations, and the cost of rewriting their VMS applications for them greatly exceeds the cost of adopting a platform that is a port to a major chip architecture and emulating the older chip architecture on that new chip when needed.

Generally, a rewrite places the organization's ongoing processes at huge, disruptive risk, because the existing application and its configuration accumulated all the corner cases earned painfully in the past (often stretching into decades of accreted domain knowledge). Forget the cost of the technical effort to rewrite: even if that were zero, the business impact to take on all the costs of relearning even just a quarter of those lessons in even just a five year project is excessive.

<comment><USER21> Could you give an example of such an industry? VMS to me has always been that OS that everyone claimed to be better than UNIX-likes, but none could explain why.

<comment><USER22> Here's a couple of examples for you:

I Sysadmined a VMS box running on a couple of AlphaServers (2100 and 2100A) if I recall.

At one point a disgruntled employee had taken a 22 rifle into the server room and shot several rounds at the equipment, only 1 bullet hit, but it went through a RAM bank, the system disabled the faulty hardware and continued running.

The other cool part was the interchangeable boards - the system had a case that swung open on the side and you could insert cards much the same way as you slot in PCI cards today, except one of the cards could be a CPU block, or it could be RAM, so if you had a CPU intensive workload you could disable a physical board of ram, take it out, and replace with a CPU board - <USER2> halting or rebooting the OS

<comment><USER23> Ever work with Sun servers? Yeah, you could swap out cards, CPU, ram, drive, power, without halting or rebooting the OS. But not just Sun servers. This is not a feature unique to Alphaservers/VMS.

<comment><USER22> Nope! I didn't know that. Very interesting.

The Alphas had a motherboard and daughterboard - and the daughterboard was a generalized bus, so a single slot could have a RAM or CPU slot in it --- were Sun servers capable of this too? Or was a RAM slot a RAM slot and a CPU slot a CPU slot and they were not interchangeable?

I'm curious because I've never seen any other machines with a generalized CPU/RAM bus, I'm curious if Sun hardware supported this? If it did, can you remember the model numbers so I can read up on it?

<comment><USER23> discussions here too - [https://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/1jlmn...](https://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/1jlmnz/ram_is_hotswappable/)

[http://www.serverwatch.com/hreviews/article.php/3688771/Serv...](http://www.serverwatch.com/hreviews/article.php/3688771/Server- Snapshot-SPARC-Enterprise-M8000-M9000-Servers.htm)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


UNICEF: Give Money, Not Facebook Likes - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/04/unicef-tells-slacktivists-give-money-not-facebook-likes/275429/

<comment><USER2> I'm not on facebook, but from what I've seen there doesn't seem to be an easy way to broadcast your donation. I wonder if people would be more inclined to donate if it also broadcasted "columbo gave $2" over "columbo likes this".

If it sorted the highest donations to the top it'd even encourage large companies to donate for the free advertising - "Nissan gave $2,500"

<comment><USER3> it's up to them to create a facebook app that will broadcast messages on their page whenever someone donates. And I can help , they can hire me since I can do it ! ;)

<comment><USER4> Yep, they could easily add this to their donation system, I am kind of surprised they didn't do this already.

Hell, this is one instance where they wouldn't even have to be sneaky about this like some scummier apps.

A big "Post this donation on my facebook page" checkbox/link etc would be enough since a good number of people would probably want that feature.

It seems we are living in an age of increasing open'ness (dare I say narcissism?). Might as well harness it.

<comment><USER5> Because the vast majority of UNICEF money comes from having friends inside governments and employing the -usually moronic- kids of foreign government officials, to give them salaries exceeding the President's pay.

Just like most worthy causes, money comes from relatively few (still hundreds to thousands in the UNICEF case) very big donors. Small donations just transfer money to banks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Maybe there should be a "Like+" button or something. You can fund your facebook account and every time you "Like+" an image the person or entity who posted the image receives a dollar which is deducted from your account. Maybe only certain types of accounts, like UNICEF, should be eligible to receive funds.

<comment><USER7> Have you heard of flattr? It operates pretty much in the way you've described:

<http://flattr.com/>

<comment><USER6> I have not heard of it. Pretty cool, though it doesn't seem to be available for Facebook.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Bitcoin could play a key role here. In my experience, donating using bitcoin feels clicking a "like" button. After learning about the system and how to use the client, its as easy as logging into facebook to like something.

<comment><USER9> Leaving this here:

<http://reddit.com/r/bitcointip>

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's very disappointing to see such a smart community bicker about a topic they clearly know little about and have done even less research to back up their comments. Let's cut the crap about Bitcoin, building esoteric Facebook apps to broadcast message, and A/B testing funding effectiveness to prove a point.

An article from Humanosphere (full disclosure, I work with this organization) [http://www.humanosphere.org/2013/04/unicef-sweden-wants- your...](http://www.humanosphere.org/2013/04/unicef-sweden-wants-your-money- not-your-likes/) actually digs a little deeper into the topic. Regardless of what you think of The Atlantic's article, the UNICEF campaign is fully integrated with press ads, tv spots, radio commercials, digital material, and PR. An integrated campaign on this scale is (unfortunately) relatively unheard of in the development community due to funding issues and uproar whenever any non-profit's seen to be spending excessively on initiatives that don't directly go to the task at hand.

I personally think the campaign is effective; UNICEF is going against the grain by calling out the shortcomings of social media when most other non- profits (I've had experience working with a couple) are all using likes, retweets, and pins as KPIs (but clearly don't have a perfect correlation with the bottom line)

</comment><comment><USER11> As Bob Geldoff said so elegantly at live Aid "People are dying NOW. Give us the money NOW!"

</comment><comment><USER12> Fully on bored with UNICEF, but this article is poorly written.

First of all, the entire article says nothing I didn't get out of the headline but it used a lot words to say it. And, the paragraph that quotes Zeynep Tufekci seems to misunderstand, or the very least mis-apply Tufecki's statement. After all, it never took a full-on _activists_ to donate four euro to UNICEF.

<comment><USER13> OT: "on board", not "on bored".

<comment><USER12> yes, that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm working on an idea to tackle/nudge slacktivists into become really active ... or at least make visible to them how volatile and in the end meaningless their +1, Likes and Favs really are when true/real world/operative support would be due. If you are interested please stop by at www.sustinion.com as I'm looking for "external" feedback to validate the ideas.

</comment><comment><USER15> All in all, bad darts from Unicef as 'likers' donate as well. Basically they say we don't want likes, just money please.

The solution is simple. The platform (in this case Facebook) has enough money to step up and give 0.01$/0.1$/1$ for each like of the photo/page.

I am pretty sure it wouldn't be a significant dent for Facebook's finances, actually with proper campaign it could go in their favour via stocks.

But then again, Unicef isn't the only charity in the world and supporting one and ignoring the others isn't fair as well.

</comment><comment><USER16> Point is well taken, UNICEF. But are the people who Like the pages the same people who are likely to donate? I suspect that many of the people who Like the sites are either unable to donate or are too young to donate. So the Likes are a good idea because they encourage involvement and influence future behaviour when such people are able to do more. Might not help in the short term, but it will likely have great benefits in the future.

</comment><comment><USER17> Seems like they want it both ways. They put share and like and follow buttons all over their site, but then they say it's meaningless.

"Likes" seem very similar to ads and mailers. They generate donations. At least Likes don't cost Unicef anything... that mailer they send me stops some kid from getting a polio vaccination.

<comment><USER18> Do you have an A/B test to back up your claims of fundraising effectiveness? Fundraising finances vaccinations.

<comment><USER17> Oh, on average, I'm sure the mailers have a net positive, or at least I hope so. I'm saying the particular mailer they send me is costing money and they aren't getting a donation from me because I already have my charities, so it's actually worse than me Liking one of their posts on Facebook.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I take offense at this. My facebook activity has yielded _hundreds_ of grains of rice for starving children! I also stopped Joseph Kony and brought about marriage equality.

</comment><comment><USER20> Likes can lead to money. Think of likes as volunteers helping to spread the word.

<comment><USER21> Actually, likes and shares may make people feel like they did their part and can move on. Donate, then share culture would help but if everybody thinks they are doing great job by "charity marketing" then we have a problem. Probably UNICEF has a problem so they are taking an action against it.

I would not say that sharing the word is volunteering because it's so trivial that people share and like things by mistake all the time. When was the last time you heard somebody accidentally helped somebody in need?

<comment><USER20> >Actually, likes and shares may make people feel like they did their part and can move on.

That is true.

Perhaps people who donate can share a different message. Not everyone on FB may be able to donate, but they will help spread the word which may prompt someone in their network to donate. Ignoring this base might not be smart, but yes, the message should be to donate instead of like/share/retweet.

<comment><USER21> maybe charities can exploit the methods that games use? badges, avatars... something to differentiate paying and sharing users without scaring away the sharing folks while rewarding the donors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> If people _do_ things, they're by definition not "slacktivists".

<comment><USER23> Liking is not doing something, the same way people commenting on internet forums about something (patents, privacy, whatever) is not actually doing something.

<comment><USER24> Commenting on internet forums and engaging in debate is at least better than clicking "like". In terms of conversation, the "like" button is DH3, where comments and debate can potentially be DH4 or higher (<http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html>).

If I "like" a support page about marriage equality, I'm not convincing anyone who holds an opposing view. That's not necessarily true of commenting on e.g. HN.

Of course, commenting does nothing for many issues, such as those requiring money, but a comment can be marginally better than a "like".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> _upvoted_</comment>


By November, Russian hackers could target voting machines - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/07/27/by-november-russian-hackers-could-target-voting-machines/?postshare=3971469647898918&tid=ss_tw-bottom <comment><USER2> I thought North Korea were the master worldwide bogeymen hackers?

Or wasn't it Chinese hackers doing everything.

Neither the Republicans nor Democrats trust evoting.

Standford Uni even went so far as to say evoting gives HRC a 9% advantage over Bernie ! [1]

Which reminds us of when HRC called foul in 2004 [2]

But Diebold were accused of a 7% bump for Clinton in 2008 [3]

We don't need foreign bad actors.

[1] [http://www.thecommonsenseshow.com/2016/07/12/stanford- study-...](http://www.thecommonsenseshow.com/2016/07/12/stanford-study-shows- clinton-steals-elections/)

[2] [http://edition.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/03/10/voting/index.h...](http://edition.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/03/10/voting/index.html)

[3] [http://www.bradblog.com/?p=5540](http://www.bradblog.com/?p=5540)

</comment><comment><USER3> Yeah, sure: blame it on the Russian hackers.

Was it their fault in Florida in 2000, too?</comment>


In a Verizon-Charter Deal, Analysts See One Massive Pile of Debt - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-27/in-a-verizon-charter-deal-analysts-see-one-massive-pile-of-debt?cmpid=flipboard <comment><USER2> Funny how they always have money to buy a company but they don't have money to upgrade their wired network.</comment>


Ask HN: Why can reddit users delete their old comments, but HN users can't? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> Because they are two completely different websites.

<comment><USER3> also because features are complicated -- [http://css-tricks.com/features- complicated/](http://css-tricks.com/features-complicated/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > Why can reddit users delete their old comments, but HN users can't?

1\. Because of the sometimes perverse and always unfair effect of deleting comments after 20 replies are attached.

2\. Because HN commenters expect to be held to a higher standard of personal responsibility.

3\. Because we should be obliged to explain our misstatements, not delete them.</comment>


Newfound fossils in China highlight a dizzying diversity of Cambrian life - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencenews.org/article/china-fossil-cache-cambrian-explosion <comment><USER2> Stupid question, but there have been a number of high profile fossil forgeries in China over the last few years and my understanding is that these are largely done by destroying other fossils of the type to fool tests that rely on the chemical composition being wrong. Is that easier or harder to get away with things like this that have few close parallels?

<comment><USER3> I think it's kind of hard to destroy unremarkable fossils so they not only 1) appear as unknown taxa 2) and are well-preserved, but also 3) create a complete Lagerstätte where palaeontologists can just go and dig up more of them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Does this mean that this area was a sea (or a lake) in the Cambrian where these creatures lived?

<comment> maze-le It was part of the ocean. The Eurasian landmass was not yet established and in large parts submerged. The bulk of the landmass of what is now central/eastern Asia developed during the late carboniferous / early permian era, due to colliding tectonic plates that would form the continent of pangaea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> [https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/w3cswmqx](https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/w3cswmqx) \- More here from 07:40. Amazing stuff

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm impressed by the jellyfish fossil.

<comment><USER7> I'm amazed at how recognizable so many of these critters are, half a billion years on.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Sources for $10K Seed Money? - <AUTHOR> It's occurred to me recently that many folks have great ideas—and the technical chops to pull them off—but lack the funds to be able to focus for a solid month to see them come to fruition.
Many of these folks don't live in a major city, don't have wealthy family, and don't have the option to go a month without income.
Are there sources for small-value (around $10K) grants or investments that these entrepreneurs can go to? Short of taking out a bank loan, that is.
I'm thinking of sources that make their underwriting decisions on the idea, and not on the personal credit or age of the founder.
There are many folks out there that could benefit from this, and I thought HN would be a good place to learn and share about them. <comment><USER2> For $10K seed money for a typical YC funded company ($150k for 20%?) that amounts to 1.67% of equity.

If you could convince people to sell 2% of their idea for 10k maybe it could work (!)

How to validate ideas and teams and markets, though?

</comment><comment><USER3> I think any investor would say that you can put that amount on your credit card(s). That's not the answer you want to hear but it's the truth (disclaimer: I'm a broke entrepreneur myself).

<comment><USER3> Oops, I misunderstood if you were looking to invest or receive investment.</comment></comment>


Build An Animated Chart In 19 Lines Of Code With d3.js - <AUTHOR> http://needforair.com/blog/2012/05/09/d3-tutorial/

<comment><USER2> I've been learning d3.js myself lately, and i'm very impressed. As it's popularity increases it's worth reading this article from Mike Bostock, the creator of d3 proposing some conventions to follow when building charts with d3...

<http://bost.ocks.org/mike/chart/>

</comment><comment><USER3> A few months ago I learned d3.js and made myself an interactive site logo for myself with it. It's an awesome library.

Check out the logo (try clicking it and dragging the letters) and tutorial at <http://tullo.ch/2012/making-the-site-logo/>.

<comment><USER4> Your logo doesn't work. I'm using the latest Firefox on a Mac. Error: strengths is undefined.

<comment><USER3> Hmm strange, just tested then and works on my end with Chrome 18 and Firefox 12.0 on OS X.

<comment><USER5> I'm on Chrome 20 on OS X and I got this error:

        Cannot read property '0' of undefined      d3.v2.js:5166

<comment><USER6> I got this too. It's reproduceable for me if I click on any of the nodes before the page is ready for it, and once this happens I can't use it at all. But if I wait a second or two before doing this it works fine. Using latest chrome.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Also plenty of really good beginner d3 tutorials from Scott Murray:

<http://alignedleft.com/tutorials/>

</comment><comment><USER8> Beautiful chart, I want to make some interactive charts and d3.js is just suited for me. But I can't dive into JavaScript though it looks like easy. I'm familiar with Python. Anyone can suggest enough JavaScript tutorials to hack d3.js. Thanks!

<comment><USER9> I would get yourself a copy of The Good Parts. As someone who also went from Python to JS, it didn't fully click until I sat down and read through the book. Now there are aspects of JS I actually prefer over Python.

<comment><USER8> Thanks, the book is fantastic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> D3 is awesome but I've always felt it is more suitable for complex visualizations. For simple stuff like line graph etc. Existing graphing libraries are pretty cool. Anyone using it for common visualizations like line chart or pie chart?

<comment><AUTHOR> What I like in d3 is that it leaves completely free to do whatever you want, be it simple bar charts or complicated stuff. I don't like integrative libraries that don't allow you to make your graphs evolve.

I used it to build animated line charts but those are a bit more complex (you have to use SVG paths with Bezier curves which are a pain to calculate ...)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Pfft. I can Build An Animated Chart In 1 Line Of Code With DoesEverythingForYou.js

<comment><AUTHOR> Of course, but the point here is that d3.js really is not "doeseverythingforyou.js" : it only takes care of the "boring" stuff (manipulating DOM, binding data) and lets you do whatever you imagine. So it's more like "build this chart writing only the 19 lines of javascript that matter".

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Alas, the site is down. I'd love to see this.

<comment><AUTHOR> I just checked and it is up, you can retry!</comment></comment>


Quadrigram: a Visual Programming Environment to Share Living Data - <AUTHOR> http://www.quadrigram.com To companies or individuals who want more hand-holding with data visualization, Quadrigram offers a unique training service and the opportunity to pair users up with a specialist who will teach them and their team the basics or more advanced techniques within the platform.  Training is a great investment, as customers can go in, get the knowledge that they need to get things going, and are then empowered to do work on their own with the support the documentation.  Specific solutions range from executive dashboards to robust data war rooms. Finally for companies who prefer not to work directly within the visual programming language, Quadrigram offers the opportunity to leverage consulting services, in which staff data analyst, designers, and developers use the tool to ensure clients get customized solutions out the door, far quicker than coding from scratch.  Plus, with 'big data' extending in all directions, the use-cases for such a service are vast.  Quadrigram's clients encompass a variety of data visualization scenarios, ranging from those in finance, consumer products, retail, services, healthcare, transportation, energy and more.
The buzz is out.  Quadrigram was recently chosen to be among five finalists of the IBM Smart Camp ( http://ibmsmartcamp.com/2012/10/22/5-finalists-announced-for-smartcamp-barcelona-kickstart/ ) and will be presenting in the upcoming Smart City Expo World Congress ( http://www.smartcityexpo.com/ ). Additional Information: Website: http://www.quadrigram.com/ Examples: http://www.quadrigram.com/action Services: http://www.quadrigram.com/services The Video: http://vimeo.com/41136214 <comment><USER2> Wow, it's a visual programming language for data visualization. Looks like they offer consulting too. Could be faster, more customizable that other tools, etc.?</comment>