YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Show HN: Toast, a beautiful by default in terminal IDE

60 points dividedcomet 1 hour ago 40 comments

CamperBob2 51 minutes ago | parent

Looks like another unreadable black hole of nothingness. God, I wish this trend would hurry up and run its course.

dividedcomet 50 minutes ago | parent

there are other themes, the one shown is just extending my terminal theme so it doesn’t feel out of place.

spiderice 48 minutes ago | parent

Ironically, I understand what the "unreadable black hole of nothingness" is perfectly. But I have no idea what your comment means.

0gs 42 minutes ago | parent

hard to argue that the UBHON is a recurring theme these days! rimshot

rschiavone 43 minutes ago | parent

Unfortunately the trend is only accelerating

gkoberger 49 minutes ago | parent

It's interesting that it brags about no AI as a feature, but the website (and maybe the product itself?) was clearly built using AI.

dividedcomet 24 minutes ago | parent

Yep, I have 2 kids under 1 so this project is either built with AI or it’s not built. I put that line in because the IDE aspect doesn’t need agent management or anything. Other tools are better for that.

bigfishrunning 22 minutes ago | parent

Irish twins! congratulations :)

dividedcomet 11 minutes ago | parent

Thanks so much! Only reason this got posted today is because everyone is home sick

latexr 1 minute ago | parent

I would still be nice if you stated upfront that this is built with AI. The people who are interested in “no AI features” are likely to also be the ones who do not want something built with AI. It would be honest to be clear about the project’s stance on the matter.

gopalv 46 minutes ago | parent

The "Emacs doesn't have a file-tree" is when I stopped short and wondered what this person's background is in IDEs.

My emacs days are 1999 during my "functional or get out" phase, but my .emacs had close to 4000 lines in it, including xterm mouse support, a clone of midnight commander + sftp to a wehbost and deep integration with ctags/cscope/c++filt. There was even a line by line debugger with custom .gdbinit commands - look at the php project's gdbinit[1] if you want an idea of how to walk your own super special data structures.

You can't put Emacs in an IDE comparison and say anything about features without at least one person saying "well, actually".

I eventually switched to vim but that had to do with needing to ssh into 100k+ machines on support rotation & never having emacs on any of them.

[1] - https://github.com/php/php-src/blob/master/.gdbinit

alecfv26 41 minutes ago | parent

I’m surprised you wouldn’t use TRAMP for remote access then?

cyberax 15 minutes ago | parent

Sigh.

Long time ago, in mid-2000-s I tried to switch to Emacs or Vim from Visual Studio.

I wanted to have a simple project file tree as a side panel and multiple editor tabs on the right. I spent a week toying with various elisp scripts, Vim plugins, and digging out information from a then-moribund XEmacs mailing list.

And I couldn't do what I wanted in the end. Nothing worked seamlessly or reliably.

Can this be done out-of-the-box now?

mplanchard 6 minutes ago | parent

Yes, speedbar, with speedbar-prefer-window set to t

Or use any of the various file tree packages in [M]ELPA

kccqzy 1 minute ago | parent

[delayed]

mplanchard 9 minutes ago | parent

Yeah, speedbar and dired are built-in. Speedbar by default still opens in a new frame I think, but in emacs 31 there’s a config option to make it open in a side window without any additional tweaking needed.

LiamPowell 3 minutes ago | parent

It also incorrectly says that Emacs has no mouse support. When you first open Emacs the default buffer has clickable links in it, it's impossible to miss the fact that Emacs has mouse support if you ever even open it.

colesantiago 46 minutes ago | parent

> "No AI features"

> Sees "Claude"

Now almost 90% of projects on GitHub including existing projects are now slop or are adding slop.

Many projects are getting contaminated with AI, and even Linux is getting contaminated with this.

There is a list of projects that have non-slop alternatives one can use instead.

https://codeberg.org/ethical-foss/open-slopware

jjice 42 minutes ago | parent

Do you count any use of LLMs, including highly reviewed and controlled use as "slop"?

The idea that there can be no high quality use of LLMs to aid software development is lacking a lot of nuance.

aniviacat 34 minutes ago | parent

The files (even the go.mod) contain references to "yourusername". You can be certain this project's LLM use was not highly reviewed and controlled.

delis-thumbs-7e 30 minutes ago | parent

If it is high quality use, we would not notice the AI. It would just be good code.

colesantiago 29 minutes ago | parent

> Do you count any use of LLMs, including highly reviewed and controlled use as "slop"?

Yes.

To quote the repository:

"slop: Anything generated by AI, typically code, books, articles, or images."

Philpax 33 minutes ago | parent

I wish you luck on your quest to avoid all of the software on that list.

dividedcomet 26 minutes ago | parent

I mean yeah, I have 2 kids under 1. So I wasn’t gonna spend the 100+ hours doing it all by hand. The project either gets made using AI or not at all.

cnqso 9 minutes ago | parent

Good luck!

kolme 43 minutes ago | parent

Vim does have mouse support.

kccqzy 36 minutes ago | parent

And so does Emacs. I don’t think this person has really used them.

dbalatero 24 minutes ago | parent

Making these kinds of AI projects with fancy READMEs give you a veneer of authority, but the lack of earned wisdom tends to stick out once a few people glance at it.

dividedcomet 22 minutes ago | parent

Yeah maybe not the best wording. It’s more meant that ideally toast can be fully used with a cursor for interactions. I don’t think you can exit vim or emacs just by clicking on a button?

jasonjmcghee 43 minutes ago | parent

First file I look at (concerning):

"github.com/yourusername/toast/internal/components/breadcrumbs" "github.com/yourusername/toast/internal/components/closedialog" "github.com/yourusername/toast/internal/components/commandpalette" "github.com/yourusername/toast/internal/components/editor"

schainks 27 minutes ago | parent

> toast is for the developer who wants to stay in their terminal without spending hours getting it up to snuff.

I need a terminal that just works. If it doesn't work out of the box with sensible defaults, it is indeed not up to snuff, and therefore thrown away immediately. Don't ask me to use your buggy-vibe coded thing if it's not up to snuff, right?

This is coming from someone who did spend hundreds of hours learning to customize their terminal, their vim environment, and put all of it in source control to rot away.

krogenx 26 minutes ago | parent

Now just add a terminal inside the IDE and we’re gold.

OSaMaBiNLoGiN 18 minutes ago | parent

vim has a built in file tree. You didn't even proof-read your readme.

Christ.

dividedcomet 15 minutes ago | parent

Poor wording, more so meant that when I drop into vim, vi, or emacs I have no way to (without some external knowledge) know how to open a file tree. Just a barrier to usage is all.

fwip 3 minutes ago | parent

By external knowledge, do you mean knowing how the program you're using works?

nosioptar 10 minutes ago | parent

In what way is it "beautiful"?

To me, it's just yet another bland low-contrast dark mode interface.

Also, vim has mouse support. Probably shouldn't use a clanker to write your readme if you're not going to take the time to do a basic fact check.

dividedcomet 6 minutes ago | parent

That’s just the theme matching the terminal, there are two others out of the box but I prefer the system theme. And by beautiful I mean it has a cohesive system design and theming. I prefer to to another VsCode clone

dim13 10 minutes ago | parent

Nerdtree is such a waste of screen real estate. I prefer netrw.

gslepak 2 minutes ago | parent

So glad to see this! This is exactly what we need! Love this!

I wrote this article a while back on how to build a great terminal editor that's better than Emacs and VIM [1], you might find it interesting!

[1] https://gist.github.com/taoeffect/086220456e736cceb30d68834d...

s_dev 1 minute ago | parent

I have a script that changes the background colour of my terminal based on whatever directory or server I'm in. That's enough beauty for me, I do believe there is such a thing as over configuring and defaults are very powerful.

This seems like all those UI designers who have a crack at redoing Wikipedia and then fail miserably because they just plaster whatever trend on top of something that is universally good.