Hijacking the back button to lock me on the page is an unacceptable violation of my browser functionality. Don't do that. It's bad. When I click the back button, I want to go away from where I am, back to where I was before. I don't click the back button to remain in the same place.
I wanted to watch the demo video again; even if it's only on the initial signup page, the hijack is irritating. If it's intentional, that's offensive.
Video didn't play on Firefox. I had to hit the "pop-out" icon to show it separately, at which point it showed the regular video controls (which should have shown in the first place, right?). If I didn't read the comments here, I wouldn't have realized this was a video.
An audio track narrating what's happening would be nice, although it's pretty clear from the video what's happening, which is great!
One question: how do you display functions that are more than a dozen lines long? Do they get shown in a scrollable window, or does the window get auto-sized to show the entire function (which, IMHO, would be bad if the function was huge)?
The back button seems to work fine for me, at least in Chrome. Could you provide more specific repro steps? Are you sure it's not just the OAuth redirect dance?
Having worked as a frontend web developer, I can assure you that the back-button hijacking is sheer incompetence of the developers. They have to be mutating your browser history in a careless way to achieve this. That or they somehow picked a really bad client-side routing library. (Even just following a basic tutorial for react-router wont cause this behavior. It's almost always sloppy state management causing this)
Great idea, and I was excited to try it (and even pay for it!) until the requirement to sign up and the hijacked back button. Also, in my Firefox, your white box as a background appears transparent and so your text is just on top of a _very_ noisy background.
On the missing Terms of Service, you have the Data Use notice, but it essentially describes how you're using our email, not any code that we would need to upload to you. In the day and age where we're having daily discussions on copyright violations and people hoovering up any data or analysis they can find, I definitely want a sturdy legal agreement in place before I ship IP off to someone's systems.
Seconding other comments about having it run as a local program in some way, I have a lot of different tools that I use in my IDE to explore codebases, utilize LSPs, etc. One of the big ones is how I utilize semantic color coding (https://medium.com/@evnbr/coding-in-color-3a6db2743a1e) to quickly parse function / variable names, and usually a standalone app gives me a lot more ability to control things like that. Having it local (and not communicating remotely) means that I _also_ don't have to worry about you hoovering up my codebase.
Otherwise, excited to see someone implement an idea like this! I can be very visual with certain kinds of diagrams and code bases and was unhappy with how few tools I felt visualized those organizations well.
> I was excited to try it (and even pay for it!) until the requirement to sign up
How much would you be willing to pay? I feel like if you say that, and you like a product on HN, it's helpful to provide feedback (although it's not show hn, so idk if they'll see it). One time payment of $100? $5/month subscription? 10/month?
If social-sign-in is too much of a barrier (it was two clicks for me, and my email is pretty public, and I can switch to another account within the browser), then I'd be very surprised that you'd be willing to pull out your credit card and deal with the hassle of a purchase or subscription.
Also, saying that you'd be willing to pay for the product is meaningless if it's much less than the effort to often build and maintain for the business.
Maybe I am wrong, and you're willing to pay 1000s if only for those few small issues, but sometimes small hurdles like sign-ins are a good way to filter out customers that should be turned away because they're not as invested in the product. I would even argue that an app that requires no sign-in comes off as non-serious because any non-trivial app requires sign-in; the ones that don't are often very simple and the type of thing most people wouldn't pay for.
We built an "infinite canvas" style app for exploring codebases. We cut your repo into atomic pieces - functions, data structures etc. and give you an interactively expandable graph of defintions.
Even with the best go-to-definition editor feature you need to keep a whole bunch of mental context when tracking down a deep control flow. The idea of Territory is to give you exactly the relevant cross-section through a large codebase. A code map that you build in this fashion can then provide explanatory value to others.
So far we indexed Linux, LLVM and Godot to prove we can handle repos of that scale and to provide value free of charge to free software contributors. We will be adding more repos and shipping self-service build setup later. Would love to hear your opinion. Are there any projects you think we should cover next? We are doing C/C++ first -- our initial parsing setup is build around libclang.
Ideally this would be a standalone app (perhaps ported using electron) that I could run locally, and import codebases directly. Sourcegraph was on the right track, but eventually fizzled out unfortunately.
I would love to use a tool like this to navigate the unknown on rails!
But I’m not going to give a website my email before learning the pricing strategy and ToS which (currently) aren’t available (on mobile at least). Would love to see these added.
Same. The video looks interesting, but forcing a signup before disclosing any more caused me to click away. It's interesting, but not interesting enough to make me give them my details.
I'll wait and see if someone in my dev network recommends it now. Too bad, it did look interesting.
Besides my other comment ; I like this idea and I have been thinking a lot about code understanding and overviews. As I get older I notice my memory degrading and I read a lot of codebases for my work, hobbies etc; many are very over architected and pretty annoying to grok. How can you rapidly understand where a specific functionality is? Etc. Codebases that have been thought out, nicely organised etc are a joy, but many, especially, newer ones I see, take going across 10+ files (in 5 packages) (with a number of build steps) to add/change a simple thing. And IDE's are not helping with that at all.
Luckily I usually find the patterns used and know the tools and libraries used, but indeed some things make me sigh deeply as I know i'm in for a dig in a pit of the damned when having to diagnose + fix something.
I was just about to post the same information. Sad to see the concept never caught on. I really liked using Debugger Canvas on VS2010 even if it was somewhat buggy.
IMO better representations for code is one of the big things we need to build more complex software.
Unfortunately as the demo shows, a tree-map is hard because the code is just too big. Like, you can only see one or two full snippets in the window at once, the others are mostly off-screen. I think this is one area that would genuinely benefit from virtual reality, due to the massive "screen space" and ability to map code directly to physical locations (which is a known technique for memorization and allows for even more space).
In my opinion this has to be local and/or open source to get serious uptake. I really find it hard to trust slurping my codebases through some 3rd party site. Unless it's something well known and huge (aka can be sued when abuse comes out), I cannot see me using it on anything except open source projects.
It's unclear what the superpowers would be? Video doesn't show anything I can't do with an IDE or decent code editor, and there I also have refactoring tools, metadata like indicators for usages that can be used for navigating and so on.
Reminds me of UML-like diagrams over relational databases, except that it's generated one piece at a time. In practice I generate diagrams showing cyclomatic complexity much more often, and for code exploration outside the IDE I'd use ast-grep.
I wanted to try it, but I was scared away by the idea that I was creating a new seeming-infinitely-persistent asset I didn't want. Could you put up an actual demo where I can just see an existing graph?
There are keyboard shortcuts for navigating up and down the goto definition navigation stack that are absolutely indispensable for this reason (in JetBrains IDEs at least, though I’m sure in other IDE/editors too). Their demo gif is exactly how I would visualize my thought process using this navigation, which is pretty neat! It’s so painful watching people global-search by function name to navigate back to where they just were once you lock this functionality in to your workflow (aaaa you can get there instantly and exactly!)
I definitely would not be able to live without my C-o's and gd's. Making the research process persistent is the next step forward IMO. We want the machine to extend your mental context.
I saw this work a while ago, they posted some early demos roughly when we were first opening up with our Linux index. While the interface is indeed similar, I'd say as things stand now we are different in a couple of dimensions.
First, we pre-build a codebase-wide index for large repos that's readily available vs some kind of local VSCode plugin.
Secondly, we cover different languages. We started with deep support for C/C++ based on clang while they seem to be focused on TypeScript.
I'm curious why you'd say that theirs is more polished?
Sometimes it takes great amount of time to understand a specific flow in any given software that's abstract enough. This is a great concept. I'm ready to pay for it.
curating those accurate mental models of the system and its architecture are valuable things, even more so if it can be expressed in a snapshot graph like this tool can render.
Best in class experience for navigating code graphs started in Visual Studio Ultimate circa 2010. The nav experience for dgml was super smooth and I've never experienced another graph tool as powerful as that. Looks like some of that lives on till this day https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/modeling/map-....
We're actually building something similar at getSpectral.io . Ours focuses on Javascript/Typescript, and is a VSCode plugin so you can use it on any repository!
This seems great, I would use something like this day to day if it were a vscode plugin. Often times two side by side panes are not enough to get the intertwined context of a large program that spans both code / subprocess / api boundaries. Currently, I solve this problem by keeping a set of tab groups for different "workflows" that I need to edit frequently
[+] [-] observationist|1 year ago|reply
I wanted to watch the demo video again; even if it's only on the initial signup page, the hijack is irritating. If it's intentional, that's offensive.
[+] [-] pst723|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] kmoser|1 year ago|reply
An audio track narrating what's happening would be nice, although it's pretty clear from the video what's happening, which is great!
One question: how do you display functions that are more than a dozen lines long? Do they get shown in a scrollable window, or does the window get auto-sized to show the entire function (which, IMHO, would be bad if the function was huge)?
[+] [-] pst723|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] koito17|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Esras|1 year ago|reply
On the missing Terms of Service, you have the Data Use notice, but it essentially describes how you're using our email, not any code that we would need to upload to you. In the day and age where we're having daily discussions on copyright violations and people hoovering up any data or analysis they can find, I definitely want a sturdy legal agreement in place before I ship IP off to someone's systems.
Seconding other comments about having it run as a local program in some way, I have a lot of different tools that I use in my IDE to explore codebases, utilize LSPs, etc. One of the big ones is how I utilize semantic color coding (https://medium.com/@evnbr/coding-in-color-3a6db2743a1e) to quickly parse function / variable names, and usually a standalone app gives me a lot more ability to control things like that. Having it local (and not communicating remotely) means that I _also_ don't have to worry about you hoovering up my codebase.
Otherwise, excited to see someone implement an idea like this! I can be very visual with certain kinds of diagrams and code bases and was unhappy with how few tools I felt visualized those organizations well.
[+] [-] preommr|1 year ago|reply
How much would you be willing to pay? I feel like if you say that, and you like a product on HN, it's helpful to provide feedback (although it's not show hn, so idk if they'll see it). One time payment of $100? $5/month subscription? 10/month?
If social-sign-in is too much of a barrier (it was two clicks for me, and my email is pretty public, and I can switch to another account within the browser), then I'd be very surprised that you'd be willing to pull out your credit card and deal with the hassle of a purchase or subscription.
Also, saying that you'd be willing to pay for the product is meaningless if it's much less than the effort to often build and maintain for the business.
Maybe I am wrong, and you're willing to pay 1000s if only for those few small issues, but sometimes small hurdles like sign-ins are a good way to filter out customers that should be turned away because they're not as invested in the product. I would even argue that an app that requires no sign-in comes off as non-serious because any non-trivial app requires sign-in; the ones that don't are often very simple and the type of thing most people wouldn't pay for.
[+] [-] pst723|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] parentheses|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] pst723|1 year ago|reply
Even with the best go-to-definition editor feature you need to keep a whole bunch of mental context when tracking down a deep control flow. The idea of Territory is to give you exactly the relevant cross-section through a large codebase. A code map that you build in this fashion can then provide explanatory value to others.
So far we indexed Linux, LLVM and Godot to prove we can handle repos of that scale and to provide value free of charge to free software contributors. We will be adding more repos and shipping self-service build setup later. Would love to hear your opinion. Are there any projects you think we should cover next? We are doing C/C++ first -- our initial parsing setup is build around libclang.
[+] [-] pseudosudoer|1 year ago|reply
I would love to use a tool like this to navigate the unknown on rails!
[+] [-] dontdieych|1 year ago|reply
Nice work!
[+] [-] voxelghost|1 year ago|reply
Don't overlap existing boxes when exploring new definition. Instead find the lowest free space in the column (or insert it at appropriate level)
When adding a reference to rather than exploring definition, default to adding box to the opposite side (left)
[+] [-] speps|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] aappleby|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] anentropic|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] azeirah|1 year ago|reply
Do you have a way to contact you?
Any reason you're not using treesitter with LSPs by the way? This would make it really easy to get this working with all major languages at once.
[+] [-] LeafItAlone|1 year ago|reply
But I’m not going to give a website my email before learning the pricing strategy and ToS which (currently) aren’t available (on mobile at least). Would love to see these added.
[+] [-] marcus_holmes|1 year ago|reply
I'll wait and see if someone in my dev network recommends it now. Too bad, it did look interesting.
[+] [-] gigatexal|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] anonzzzies|1 year ago|reply
Luckily I usually find the patterns used and know the tools and libraries used, but indeed some things make me sigh deeply as I know i'm in for a dig in a pit of the damned when having to diagnose + fix something.
[+] [-] drhodes|1 year ago|reply
https://cs.brown.edu/people/spr/codebubbles/
They have teamed up with Microsoft to develop a visual studio ultimate extension:
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=Debugger...
[+] [-] thomassmith65|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] alexvoda|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] armchairhacker|1 year ago|reply
Unfortunately as the demo shows, a tree-map is hard because the code is just too big. Like, you can only see one or two full snippets in the window at once, the others are mostly off-screen. I think this is one area that would genuinely benefit from virtual reality, due to the massive "screen space" and ability to map code directly to physical locations (which is a known technique for memorization and allows for even more space).
[+] [-] pst723|1 year ago|reply
As seen here: https://x.com/pst723/status/1745105464113676478
[+] [-] anonzzzies|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] wodenokoto|1 year ago|reply
Everybody seems fine with doing just that on github.
[+] [-] cess11|1 year ago|reply
Reminds me of UML-like diagrams over relational databases, except that it's generated one piece at a time. In practice I generate diagrams showing cyclomatic complexity much more often, and for code exploration outside the IDE I'd use ast-grep.
https://ast-grep.github.io/
[+] [-] conartist6|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] corytheboyd|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] pst723|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] mritchie712|1 year ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvMw-JSeGK8
* click on a table to get a preview
* write SQL or create analysis with pivot-table-like UI
* add visualizations to canvas
* publish as a dashboard
[+] [-] benzguo|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] pst723|1 year ago|reply
First, we pre-build a codebase-wide index for large repos that's readily available vs some kind of local VSCode plugin.
Secondly, we cover different languages. We started with deep support for C/C++ based on clang while they seem to be focused on TypeScript.
I'm curious why you'd say that theirs is more polished?
[+] [-] gediz|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] jxramos|1 year ago|reply
Best in class experience for navigating code graphs started in Visual Studio Ultimate circa 2010. The nav experience for dgml was super smooth and I've never experienced another graph tool as powerful as that. Looks like some of that lives on till this day https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/modeling/map-....
[+] [-] pst723|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] nitric|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] abalaji|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Tagbert|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] asicsarecool|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] DLA|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] pst723|1 year ago|reply