AFAIK, the current version of Nota Bene -- a direct descendent of XyWrite -- still has this; the current feature list explicitly mentions "Editable Show Codes view so you can see exactly where commands take effect, and edit them as desired". Nota Bene has survived into the present day by moving pretty firmly into a niche academia market, though, and carries a pretty stiff price ($349).
Simon Willison is on Bluesky, and I'm going to go out on a relatively safe limb and suggest that if you check out what he reposts, who he follows, etc., you will find people who do not deeply hate AI. I do think Bluesky, in general, is a lot like the Twitter of, say, 15 years ago, where the quality of one's feed is very much dependent on how aggressively one curates it -- although I wish they would finally add a feature for selectively turning off reposts user by user.
(It is absolutely true that a lot of creators hate AI, although I would argue that they have fair reasons to do so given the way AI is frequently presented / talked about / used. I find it unfortunate that everything remotely related to machine learning has now been rebranded as "AI", which leads people to reflexively dunk on tools that really aren't that much like the AI they have in their heads, but it's not their fault.)
Sort of side question, but why do you set the command key to be Emacs' meta key? I've sort of waffled on that myself -- the plus to doing it is that it matches Windows (which I am in too much of the time) and Linux, but the minus is that it not only breaks 20+ years of muscle memory I have with MacOS, it collides with a few other global hotkeys. (Recent collisions I've noticed are Alfred's clipboard manager, which defaults to Shift-Command-\ (M-|, shell-command-on-region), and the system-level screenshot hotkey on Shift-Command-5 (M-%, query-replace).
Ah yes. I find the ⌘ key placement a little more ergonomic/convenient, but at the end of the day, pick whatever works for ya.
Thinking back, I prolly didn't use those two commands often enough to internalize M-| or M-% bindings, so the system-level handling didn't bother me. While I do replace things all the time, I typically use multiple cursors (I do use bindings for that). If I need querying, I just type `M-x que RET` which gets picked up by a completion frameworks (in my case ivy).
Relatedly, I also use Hammerspoon on macOS and set some global key bindings using the ⌥ key.
You can say anything to an LLM, but it’s not going to actually write in your voice. When I was writing a very long blog post about “creative writing” from AIs, I researched Sudowrite briefly, which purports to be able to do exactly this; not only could it not write convincingly in my voice (and the novel I gave it has a pretty strong narrative voice), following Sudowrite’s own tutorial in which they have you get their app to write a few paragraphs in Dan Brown’s voice demonstrated it could not convincingly do that.
I don’t think having a ML-backed proofreading system is an intrinsically bad idea; the oft-maligned “Apple Intelligence” suite has a proofreading function which is actually pretty good (although it has a UI so abysmal it’s virtually useless in most circumstances). But unless you truly, deeply believe your own writing isn’t as good as a precocious eighth-grader trying to impress their teacher with a book report, don’t ask an LLM to rewrite your stuff.
I'm attempting to work on a "spiritual successor" to Dramatica Story Expert, a crazy story theory/brainstorming program of days gone by. Technically, Dramatica is still around, but they never made a 64-bit version for Macs, and both the Mac and Windows version have been tenaciously clinging to the trailing edge of technology for decades. (The Mac version somehow never got retina fonts. I'm not sure how you even do that.)
I started my program in Swift and SwiftUI, although for various reasons I'm starting to look at Dart and Flutter (in part because being multiplatform would be beneficial, and in part because I am getting the distinct feeling this program is more ambitious than where SwiftUI is at currently). It isn't a direct port of Dramatica by any stretch, instead drawing on what I've learned writing my own novels, getting taught by master fiction writers, and being part of writing workshops. But no other program that I've seen uses Dramatica's neatest concepts, other than Subtxt, a web-based, AI-focused app which has recently been anointed Dramatica's official successor. (It's a neat concept, but it's very expensive compared to the original Dramatica or any other extant "fiction plotting" program. Also, there's a space for non-AI software here, I suspect: there are a lot of creatives who are adamantly opposed to it in any form whatsoever.)
I don't think I'm planning to go open source, although I have to get through the whole "have an actual application to start letting people beta test" stage first. Even if it's a commercial program my thought is "pay a single price once, not a subscription," and probably under $100.
Arc Studio looks like it's a screenwriting program, which is a different animal, though. Have you tried out Fade In (https://www.fadeinpro.com), which is a $79 one-time fee? I haven't used it, I confess, but I hear great things about it. (I used the even cheaper Highland Pro for my one try at screenwriting so far, but that was a learning exercise.)
Fade In looks like a great option! I'll check it out.
I find selling commercial software to be really difficult, honestly I'd rather just release my projects for free versus dealing with someone complaining that it doesn't run right, etc.
If you have a mailing list or something I would be glad to sign up! I'll be your first customer.
I think at least a small version of a font stack like these isn't a bad idea even if you're using web fonts. Folks who insist on disabling web fonts are likely a small percentage of any given site's readers, but they're out there. (And for certain sites, like this very one, there's a much higher percentage of them, usually ready to hop right out and proclaim how arrogant it is for web developers to choose typefaces for them and CSS was a mistake and we should all go back to VT100 terminals like God intended etc. etc.)
Literally toying with the idea of a "modern" BBS centered around current terminal usage... supporting varying display sizes, images, mouse clicks, urls, etc.
Mostly in that I want at least half a step between someone being able to just click a browser link and participating in discussions.
(Because of the OFL, “Roboto Serif” is replaced by another name since I modified the font when I subsetted it)
Large font stacks made sense in the days of IE6 for the following reasons:
• Dial up users did not have enough bandwidth to download webfonts.
• Only IE supported webfonts, in a weird proprietary “eot” format
• 99% of desktop operating systems all had the same web safe fonts “Verdana/Georgia/Trebuchet/Times New Roman/Arial/etc.”
Here in 2025, font stacks no longer make as much sense:
• 100k for a webfont package is a small file, even on a 4g network in a third world country. [1]
• All mainstream current browsers support woff2 webfonts [3][4]
• On Android, font support is very limited and has no support for the old school “web safe” core fonts for the web (Verdana/etc.)
As an aside, if metric compatibility (i.e. all of the fonts letters are the same size) with an OS core font is needed, “Arimo”/“Liberation Sans” is metrically compatible with Arial, “Liberation Serif”/“Tinos” is metrically compatible with Times New Roman, and “Cousine”/“Liberation Mono” is metrically compatible with Courier New.
[1] CJK users have font files large enough where the download size might be an issue. In that case, we either accept the download size as part of a modern website, or we accept that Android users will get Noto [2] while Mac/Windows users will get different looking system fonts.
[2] These font stacks linked in this article by and large all end up using Noto on Android phones. [5] I personally await the day when Apple and Microsoft include Noto by default with their OSes, so “font-family: Noto, sans-serif;” always does the right thing.
[4] Some people will turn off webfonts, but those people have made it clear they don’t care whether or not they get a font which looks like the design the webmaster intended. Again, use https://screenspan.net/fallback to find a reasonably metrically compatible fallback font.
[5] Looking at them in Firefox on my Android phone, “System UI” works, “Neo-Grotesque” gives a pencil thin font which is very difficult to read (“Inter” on my phone is pencil thin), “Slab Serif” actually looks nice (both in Windows, with Rockwell, and on Android, with Roboto Slab), and “Handwritten” works for its purpose (Android uses a “Cursive” fallback font). All the other font stacks are giving me the system default serif/sans/mono fonts (either Noto or Roboto). With Chrome on my Android phone, source sans pro is used a lot, as well as Google specific metric compatible versions of “Arial”, “Georgia”, “Courier New”; “Slab Serif” doesn’t work there even though Roboto Slab is installed on my Android system. Point being, Android has made web safe fonts a thing of the past.
Even in first-world countries, there are places with terrible coverage, where only 2G/3G service is available. The modern Web is pretty much unusable in those conditions, because Web designers think that “everyone has a fast network now”.
MacOS 26 actually has some really great new features around Spotlight, from actions to clipboard history, and the heretofore-underloved Control Center has been really improved (and is clearly being positioned as the new solution to the plague of ever-increasing menu bar icons). There are improvements to Shortcuts automation. And, for nerds (hi), Terminal finally got 24-bit color and support for Powerline fonts.
I see a lot of "ugh, Tahoe is just the iOS-ification of macOS" on HN, which, on the surface, I get -- the visual changes by and large make things worse, and ironically I think they're actually not as good as the changes on iOS. But the Mac got stuff that the iPad didn't, and there's still a lot you can't do on the iPad that you can on the Mac. I don't think the two are merging any time soon, even if they're becoming more visually similar. (Actually, I don't think the two will ever merge, strictly speaking, but that's another post.)
"Excessive" is obviously a subjective measurement. At times I don't think that HN's median audience appreciates that a 400k/yr salary is objectively extremely high, even for software engineers, even in 2025. A "mere" $367K/yr total compensation puts you in the 90th percentile of SWE earnings. I know Google, Facebook, and a few others greatly exceed that in total compensation at their higher SWE levels, but they're probably not the baseline you should be looking at across the industry.
I would personally say that $400K/yr for being an open source developer is fantastic, although I appreciate that that's also subjective. Even in Silicon Valley, though, $400K/yr would net you about $18K/month, which would be enough to live quite comfortably while still socking away more than half of your income for retirement.
it's really important to not compare freelance and W2 salaries directly. freelance gets 10% off the top immediately for social security and Medicare taxes that employers usually pay. next is your health insurance which will eat another couple thousand a year. then you have to remember that as freelance you don't get paid for vacation and sick time, so there goes another ~10%. also, you're not getting paid for all the hours. if you spend a day without work to do as a freelance, you don't get payed for it. $200 an hour is still a good salary, but it's not $400k a year. it's probably closer to $250k
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