Show HN: Watch random code typed out on an MS-DOS IDE

Posted by vunderba 13 hours ago

As a software dev, I really enjoy having live coding videos playing in the background while I work. But it's surprisingly difficult to find hour+ long videos of coding without commentary on Youtube.

What I really wanted was an infinite coding video, so I built one. Pick your IDE/monitor/ambience of choice, hit the Screensaver button, put it on a second monitor or TV, and enjoy infinite coding ASMR.

Comments

Comment by nubinetwork 5 hours ago

One problem I can see with this is that the files are typed out, from top to bottom... People don't really code like that... They write functions and jump around between files as they add functionality...

Comment by vunderba 3 hours ago

Yeah, good point. To expand on that: this actually started out as an animated typist for classic literary works in the public domain (some of which are in the Library), like The Machine Stops or The War of the Worlds.

That’s why, if you look at the IDEs, there’s a WordStar one. At the time, having it write from top to bottom made sense.

Now that I've expanded it to handle code, it would basically require building or integrating some kind of AST so a bit more work than I want to put in right now. Maybe I’ll include it in a future update!

Comment by martinflack 3 hours ago

Looks interesting but I keep getting "Preview error" (?)

Comment by vunderba 2 hours ago

Hmmm... sorry about that, I'll try to put a more descriptive error in place. The 2D/3D CRT effects use shaders and require WebGL; that's probably what's causing the issue.

Can you try hitting this and seeing if you get an error?

https://webglreport.com/?v=2

Comment by malux85 7 hours ago

DJGPP (with rhide) was my first IDE, love!

Comment by vunderba 2 hours ago

Thanks! I completely forgot about RHIDE~ I remember seeing a friend of mine using it and mistakenly thought it was Borland's Turbo C++ since they look so similar.