Ancestors

Written by Ian Wagner on 2025-01-20 at 06:36

I have what I think is a somewhat contrarian view among programmers: the CLI is NOT the world's best interface for most things. It CAN be efficient with decades of practice (which I have). But for all the dogma of CLIs just being "better," I still haven't found a sane way to curl a URL with Korean text in the query string. I have to encode the URL first! This is UX, and is solved in nearly every GUI.

Text may be the "universal API" but all that means is that it's the lowest common denominator.

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Written by sotolf on 2025-01-20 at 07:12

@ianthetechie that's because the programs, terminals and everything is made by anglophones who just don't car about us using "foreign" languages, machine translating their stuff into gobbeldigook, I remember atom crashing if you used an "exotic letter " like å for example it's horrible

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Written by Ian Wagner on 2025-01-20 at 07:22

@sotolf This is indeed a closely related problem ;) And in fact, the roots of this go WAY back to everything from ASCII to the C language, which didn't give any thought to non-English users. (Granted some of this was excuseable as they were dealing with such tiny memory spaces, but still...).

I never used Atom, but I'm honestly surprised it was THAT bad. I wonder what the source of that issue was 🙈

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Toot

Written by sotolf on 2025-01-20 at 08:53

@ianthetechie Well, dealing with tiny memory spaces is also not quite an excuse, people using non english languages still exist, and English is by far not the most effective, when you see translation projects of old game roms for japanese games, often what they struggle with is to fit the english translation into the text space of the rom.

Yeah, the weird thing is that atom was written in javascript as well, so it's very weird, it kind of felt like it had something to do with the input loop, that they just never expected that someone could input a letter that wasn't on their keyboard, or something like that. But I don't really know what it was.

I know that is the case with multiple neo-vim frontends at least, that they just have all keys on an ANSI american keyboard handeled, and puke when anything else is tried.

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Descendants

Written by Ian Wagner on 2025-01-20 at 10:11

@sotolf exactly 😅 JS is terrible at many things, but handling non-ASCII text isn’t normally one of them.

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