Top all-time · #1462
Lord.io
Personal blog · lord.io/blogprogramminggames
Lord.io is a personal blog at lord.io about programming and games. Since 2014, 48 different Hacker News readers have linked it 61 times, most often “Text editing hates you too (2019)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-01-23, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (23) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Lord.io's posts on text rendering and text editing, plus pieces on spreadsheet engines and reactivity algorithms. Commenters cite the text-editing articles alongside the rendering article.
- Recommended for · 5 comments
- Spreadsheets post called a favorite and highly recommended; text-editing article liked and recommended as a companion to the rendering piece.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 23 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Text editing hates you too (2019)16 people · 21 mentions · first linked 2021-05-20
- How to Recalculate a Spreadsheet10 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2021-05-22
- Text Editing Hates You Too4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2019-10-29
- Rust to WebAssembly, Made Easy3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2017-10-23
- The Limits and Lies of Incentive Alignment2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-08-06
- A programmer's guide to leaving GitHub2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2026-02-04
- Identity Beyond Usernames (2020)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-08-29
- Unlocking Hacker School with a Text2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2014-03-23
What Hacker News says?
If your framework has a broad audience, please make sure it accounts for the full complexity of text rendering [1] and editing [2], particularly when it comes to internationalization. You may find that there are good reasons for Cocoa to be as slow as it is in the measurement phase, if not the rendering phase. And of course, please don't forget about accessibility. [1]: https://gankra.github.io/blah/text-hates-you/…
Comment linking /blog/2019/text-editing-hates-you-too/
on “Xi-Editor Retrospective”Submitted Text Editing Hates You Too as a story · 875 points
HN discussionDo you mean this [1]? It links to the referenced article too. [1] https://lord.io/text-editing-hates-you-too/
Comment linking /text-editing-hates-you-too/
on “Text Rendering Hates You (2019)”Submitted Text editing hates you too (2019) as a story · 384 points
HN discussionhttps://lord.io/text-editing-hates-you-too/ Generally speaking, implementing this stuff from scratch is a terrible idea; especially on the web, it’s not possible to implement this stuff from scratch without losing platform functionality that is not exposed—though in the last couple of years the primitives have reached the point in functionality and consistency where you can get surprisingly close on most platforms.…
Comment linking /text-editing-hates-you-too/
on “Text Rendering Hates You (2019)”Submitted Unethical Growth Hacking from YayView as a story · 356 points
HN discussion> Instead of trying to decide whether a GUI toolkit is native or not, I recommend asking a set of more precise questions: > > * Does text look like the platform native text? > > * To what extent does the app support preferences set at the system level? > > * What subset of expected text control functionality is provided? > > * Complex text rendering including BiDi > > * Support for keyboard layouts including “dead k…
Comment linking /text-editing-hates-you-too/
on “Advice for the next dozen Rust GUIs”Submitted How to Recalculate a Spreadsheet as a story · 298 points
HN discussionThis post is pretty good: https://lord.io/spreadsheets/
Comment linking /spreadsheets/
on “Scaling our spreadsheet engine from thousands to billions of cells”Submitted Rust to WebAssembly Made Easier as a story · 182 points
HN discussionWhat's frustrating is people who think that they can radically simplify something without knowing anything about it. The same people think they can implement a text editor in 1000 lines of code because that's how the first text editors were made. Why can't we go back to those simple days? We can't because modern software handles cases that those didn't. For example, rendering and editing text seems straightforward u…
Comment linking /blog/2019/text-editing-hates-you-too/
on ““I Could Rewrite Curl””Submitted Identity Beyond Usernames as a story · 181 points
HN discussion> It goes both ways. I certainly hate un-needed complexity but somethings are just complex. Good examples are font rendering https://gankra.github.io/blah/text-hates-you/ and text input https://lord.io/text-editing-hates-you-too/ You think it's going to be easy. It's not. It just isn't. This reminds me of a talk by Venkat Subramaniam, called "Don't Walk Away from Complexity, Run", here's a recording of it: https://y…
Comment linking /text-editing-hates-you-too/
on “I hate almost all software (2011)”Submitted Text Editing Hates You Too (2019) as a story · 126 points
HN discussionIt goes both ways. I certainly hate un-needed complexity but somethings are just complex. Good examples are font rendering https://gankra.github.io/blah/text-hates-you/ and text input https://lord.io/text-editing-hates-you-too/ You think it's going to be easy. It's not. It just isn't. Often software is too simple. I just recently got my first "Smart Lights" (my mistake). I'm using Apple Home to control them. I put 3…
Comment linking /text-editing-hates-you-too/
on “I hate almost all software (2011)”Submitted Building Realtime APIs in Rust as a story · 71 points
HN discussionLots of reasons. Font rendering for all of unicode is extremely hard. https://gankra.github.io/blah/text-hates-you/ Multi-language input is extremely hard https://lord.io/blog/2019/text-editing-hates-you-too/ Having to download an extra meg or 10 of code does not make your website responsive to start, worse if you're updating it constantly so you're users have to re-download that code every few days, hours. Support…
Comment linking /blog/2019/text-editing-hates-you-too/
on “Show HN: Canvas engines performance comparison – PixiJS, Two.js, and Paper.js”Submitted A programmer's guide to leaving GitHub as a story · 8 points
HN discussionText alone is already a painful domain [1][2] and text is just a small subset of the full UI domain. -- [1] https://gankra.github.io/blah/text-hates-you/ [2] https://lord.io/text-editing-hates-you-too/
Comment linking /text-editing-hates-you-too/
on “PSA: React 18 calls code twice in strict dev mode to detect side effects”Submitted Unlocking Hacker School with a Text as a story · 7 points
HN discussionI very much disagree with JBlow because I came from games, I had similar opinions, and then I worked on "real software" (Chrome) and I had my thinking corrected. The problems JBlow and similar game devs are solving are not the same problems being solved elsewhere if you they really tried to solve the *same* problems I strongly believe they'd change their minds. IIRC one example he once brought up was a text editor w…
Comment linking /text-editing-hates-you-too/
on “Jonathan Blow on Societal Collapse (2019)”Submitted Rust to WebAssembly, Made Easy as a story · 6 points
HN discussionI wanted to see if they actually handle text well ( https://lord.io/text-editing-hates-you-too/ ) but every one I download to Mac the OS said "This App is damaged and can't be opened"
Comment linking /text-editing-hates-you-too/
on “Using a game engine to write a GUI to the OpenBSD package manager”Submitted Text Editing Hates You Too (2023) as a story · 5 points
HN discussionhard is this: https://faultlore.com/blah/text-hates-you/ and this: https://lord.io/text-editing-hates-you-too/ those are both things most ImGUIs ignore. And, even if you pick some library that somehow handles the first you're left with all of the issue mentioned above. To be clear, if I was writing a devtool (and I am actually) i'd reach for an ImGUI (and I did). But I'd be unlikely to use one for user facing tool.
Comment linking /text-editing-hates-you-too/
on “Zed editor switching graphics lib from blade to wgpu”Submitted Invariant Lifetimes as Static, Unique Tokens as a story · 5 points
HN discussionI have been thinking about building an open-source RPI Pico-based E-Ink writer for a long time. I was primarily motivated by my opinion that the Freewrite seems way more expensive than its components should cost. I also didn't like the industrial/mechanical design, and I didn't like a lot of the choices made by the company (cloud storage). I wanted a little more flexibility, such as being able to use my own keyboard…
Comment linking /text-editing-hates-you-too/
on “The digital typewriter and the unnecessarily costly pursuit of focus”Submitted How to Recalculate a Spreadsheet as a story · 4 points
HN discussion(2019) Previous discussions: • https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21105625 (29 September 2019, 542 points, 169 comments) • https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30330144 (14 February 2022, 399 points, 153 comments) —⁂— If you find this article interesting, you’ll probably also like the article someone else published a month later: “Text Editing Hates You Too” < https://lord.io/text-editing-hates-you-too/ >. It has…
Comment linking /text-editing-hates-you-too/
on “Text Rendering Hates You (2019)”Submitted Text Editing Hates You Too (2019) as a story · 4 points
HN discussion
