Zen Writing Mode

https://github.com/blog/1379-zen-writing-mode

by rjsamson • 13 years ago

154 55 13 years ago

troygoode• 13 years ago

GitHub epitomizes a "culture of shipping" to me. They're slamming feature after feature out the door (multiple features in the same day sometimes - like today). I like BitBucket too but, man, I would not want to be competing against the GitHub team right now. They're just prolific.

leeoniya• 13 years ago

i wish they would slam out a feature of a all-project-activity-feed and make it the primary home view of repos.

d0m• 13 years ago

I wish not!! When I get on a repository, I want to see the code. Although I don't mind if there is smaller area containing the feed.

up_and_up• 13 years ago

I agree.

But I would also say they do have a rather largeish dev team: https://github.com/about/team. Like 50-80 devs maybe? Thats like 12-20 teams of four people each.

Plus they have some really productive people on their team, several people are/were core contribs to Rails.

I guess one would expect with that many high quality people that a decent amount of work would be getting done.

kneath• 13 years ago

Our team makeup is almost entirely "devs" (I call them Engineers — people who design, build, and ship software). A lot closer to 120 than 80. However your estimates a pretty far off in terms of people who work on dotcom — that number is much closer to 15.

One of the more interesting sociological problems of software to me is this idea that more people equals faster movement. The only studies in this field prove the opposite, yet common opinion is simply that: more people equals more output. We've actually spent a great deal of effort not growing our team lately, much of which has directly contributed to an increase in pace.

I would credit our pace far more to the organizational structures we've created within our company (ex: http://tomayko.com/writings/adopt-an-open-source-process-con...) than the size of our team.

mbesto• 13 years ago

I'll just leave this right here: http://www.amazon.com/Peopleware-Productive-Projects-Second-...

miles_matthias3• 13 years ago

Granted they have a highly technical product, but it's also really cool to think that they have loads of devs, and not a single manager. jealous

miles_matthias3• 13 years ago

So I love how github works. Love it. But I think they're able to work like that because they are a highly technical, product oriented company. (see http://zachholman.com/posts/how-github-works-hours/)

I've always wondered, how can companies that do client work adopt those principles? Is it even possible?

ipmb• 13 years ago

Our work is still primarily client based at Lincoln Loop and we share many of the same principles that GitHub does. Keeping track of billable hours is how we get paid, but our people get to choose when, where, and how many hours they will bill. We've written a little about it here: http://lincolnloop.com/blog/categories/business/

meh01• 13 years ago

There are features that are worth shipping, and there are "look at me" features. This the latter.

homosaur2• 13 years ago

This is part of a larger scheme by Github to get you to start writing text and code directly into the website. This is just another nice, small editor improvement.

jasonm233• 13 years ago

Say what you like, but I much prefer having a screen to type in vs a piddling little textarea.

tesmar2• 13 years ago

This is excellent. I wonder if they can open source it so I could use it on my sites :)

imjared3• 13 years ago

Open sourced: https://gist.github.com/4627220

kordless2• 13 years ago

That made me laugh!

6d652• 13 years ago

Finally, this was one of the most wanted features for me. Congrats to the team for the amazing work.

imjared3• 13 years ago

Out of pure curiosity, what use do you have for this? I can't wrap my head around this being anything more than a shiny new thing. It doesn't have syntax highlighting, doesn't have keyboard shortcuts, and therefore seems to be worthless for anything other than markdown editing (for which I would rather just use my text editor).

homosaur2• 13 years ago

My guess is that they're making sure this works before integrating it into the editor at large. Isn't that the most obvious thing to do with it?

6d652• 13 years ago

Initially, i thought it had shortcuts and syntax highlighting. Anyway, i don't think it will be too long before they will add these features. But it's true, now is kind of useless.

timdorr• 13 years ago

I think this is inspired by the fullscreen mode in Wordpress. That's a good thing. Now I wish other places would incorporate this. I'd love a zen mode in Gmail, for instance.

pc86• 13 years ago

You mean instead of the "let's take a step backward and give you a tiny window in the bottom right corner of your screen?"

That would be nice.

decad• 13 years ago

For gmail the new compose allows full screen mode which is very distraction free and clean UI. http://i.imgur.com/jrqOfiQ.png

dhruvmittal• 13 years ago

I wasn't even aware this was a thing. Google's been busy updating their older stuff as of late- the new image search took me by surprise just earlier today.

jasonm233• 13 years ago

It's an editing mode initially re-popularised by an OS X app called WriteRoom.

And, you know... Typewriters

yid• 13 years ago

It's a little funny that "Zen mode", absolute quietness on screen to focus the mind without any distractions at all, has a little, largely unnecessary widget on screen that you can keep clicking back and forth that lets you change the color scheme.

sp3322• 13 years ago

I think it would be funny if they replaced that icon with a yin-yang symbol :)

jff• 13 years ago

Why? Zen doesn't have anything to do with that symbol, IIRC.

saraid216• 13 years ago

If it was auto-hide, it'd be fine.

cmelbye• 13 years ago

I thought that too. It seems weird to include a setting in plain sight in a writing mode that's supposed to be completely focused on writing.

skreech• 13 years ago

"Zen" doesn't mean "being in the zone"

Cool feature, though!

Falling3• 13 years ago

No.. but it does mean a state of quiet focus. (That's as far as I'm going to go with that - trying to define zen in a few words is hard, but that's a very rough translation.) How is minimizing distractions and emphasizing a simple workplace not zen?

mbrock• 13 years ago

Zen is also shit sticks, rotten vegetables, and screaming. It's Ikkyu's poem about how he hates incense, it's Ryokan playing ball with the village kids, it's Pai-chang refusing to eat, it's arduous meditation retreats, it's Seung Sahn surviving on pine needles, it's Bernie Glassman founding a bakery to give work to the unemployable, it's seeing into your own self-nature, it's the Rinzai master hitting you with a stick, it's the Gateless Gate, it's a rhinoceros horn, it's the family of the Buddha, it's the vow to save all sentient beings from suffering, it's "vast emptiness, nothing holy," it's arousing the spirit of great doubt, it's drinking coffee out of a thermos in a beat-up old car, it's getting laid (that's wisdom!), it's Kanzeon's all-pervading gaze of compassion, it's drinking wine and eating fish, it's a blown-out candle, it's a pebble in a bucket -- in short, it's not just elegant stuff for refined aesthetes.

"Joshu Roshi: It is very hard for me to comment on things like Japanese culture. I am Japanese. So things like chado (tea ceremony) and so on, these are things I almost cannot speak about because they are so much a part of my culture. My feeling is so deep. I could try to show you though.

"If you brought me a tea bowl, one of those fine, very very expensive tea bowls... You know that most of them have names? Like people's children or pets, they have names... If you brought me one of those tea bowls then I could show you my feeling. I would first have to drink some water. Yes, very much water. And then I would pick up the tea bowl and look at it from every angle. I would sit in seiza before it and admire it, how much it cost. And then I would piss in it. And then I would drink more and more water and piss in it again and again. I would have to drink the Pacific ocean and the Atlantic ocean to be able to truly show you my feelings about Japanese culture and what it has to do with Zen. [...]

"These army people and rich people, lords and ladies and emperors wanted to play with Zen. Some lazy monks played with them and painted pictures for them, taught them how to eat and drink tea. But the army people and the lazy monks made a big game out of tasting tea. They sat around making moon faces and doe eyes about "simplicity" in little tea huts. These tea huts were built especially for them to sit around like that. This cost a lot of money, being "simple" like that. [...]

"Zen arts without Zen study is just cultural junk."

mfonda2• 13 years ago

If you're writing an inline comment (in normal mode, not Zen mode) on a commit and accidentally hit escape, your whole comment is lost. I think the biggest improvement to comments github could make would be to not wipe out everything you've written if you hit escape. This feature will help a bit with this, as it given you an extra level before escape will destroy a comment.

joemoon• 13 years ago

On a related note, this plugin has been invaluable to me in the past: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/lazarus-form-recov...

mfonda2• 13 years ago

It looks like GitHub fixed this issue. No more lost comments. Thanks GitHub!

Scriptor2• 13 years ago

Are there any plans to add a keyboard shortcut for this?

cobychapple2• 13 years ago

You can toggle zen mode with cmd/ctrl + shift + L :)

Scriptor2• 13 years ago

Nice, thanks!

jimmytucson• 13 years ago

Would be nice to have it in fixed when you're editing code. But, then again, if you're using it for editing code, you might need syntax highlighting as well.

Man, my old man's generation probably thinks we're all candy asses.

nerdfiles• 13 years ago

Wonderful. I'll be able to finish my books more easily with this feature.

kordless2• 13 years ago

I'd like to see this applied to gists as well.

jiri• 13 years ago

Yeah, I am a bit disappointed that this is not supported by default.

natex• 13 years ago

Submitted to http://theworsthorse.com/category/dharma-burger/

iambot• 13 years ago

I wrote a short blog post [1] on what I found while trying out Github's new zen writing tool. Just using it was enlightening for me if you havn't tried it yet give it a go, or have a look at what I thought of it, then you'll want to give it a go?

  I realised that I wanted to be able to link to this. 
  Not the main github page of my code repository (although I will want to do that too 
  of course) but to this markdown rendered zen mode view of what I want to show them.
  be that code or prose.

Over all I think it's great and have tried to explain my thoughts more fully in the link provided.

[1] https://github.com/christopherdebeer/zen/blob/master/README....

imjared3• 13 years ago

thanks for the mention, and yes, it's definitely quite cynical :)

That said, I'm still trying to figure out what's so enjoyable about it. What about it is "enlightening" or makes you go "warm and fuzzy inside?" Basically, what differentiates this from using a full screen window in your text editor? Is it the contrast of colors? Is it because it's on the web? I wonder if I'm not using github to its full potential since I don't get it. Any insight to process or use cases other than how it makes you feel (I agree, it looks pretty, I guess) would be really appreciated!

marcrosoft• 13 years ago

This news worthy?

KedarMhaswade• 13 years ago

Cool! What's the keyboard shortcut to indicate "Exit Zen mode" after I am done writing?

cobychapple2• 13 years ago

cmd/ctrl + shift + L will toggle both in and out of Zen Mode. Also pressing escape works for leaving Zen Mode too :)

glazskunrukitis• 13 years ago

How long before they offer full blown IDE? Something like Cloud9 IDE could be quite easily integrated - https://c9.io/

jasonm233• 13 years ago

I just found it by accident... "Oh my god!" ;)

Zen Writing Mode

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