text objects

A Key & Peele sketch in which two friends keep misreading the tone of each other's text messages while making plans.

A HandmadeCon 2016 panel where Chris Hecker, John Miles, Sean Barrett and Chris Green give an oral history of software texture mapping in 90s games.

Jason Scott discusses making his documentary GET LAMP at a Google Tech Talk and screens part of the film. It covers the history of text adventures and interactive fiction, with interviews of Infocom developers and others.

Jonathan Blow gives a formal, hour-long demo of his Jai compiler focused on the implicit context feature. The context carries things like allocators through a program without explicit parameter passing, and the talk walks through the code.

Chris Toomey of thoughtbot explains Vim as a language of commands, motions and text objects that combine into precise edits. He shows how to master the built-in pieces and extend them.

Vim creator Bram Moolenaar's 2007 Google Tech Talk on habits for efficient text editing. He explains how to spot repetition and inefficiency, then use editor features to fix it.

A short excerpt from Werner Herzog's film Lo and Behold in which Ted Nelson lays out his ideas about hypertext and interconnection. Herzog concludes that Nelson is the only sane person in computing.

Raph Levien presents Xi editor at RustConf 2016, a high-performance text editor built in Rust. The talk goes into technical details, building polished GUI apps, and running a community-focused open source project.

Casey Muratori captures CygnusEd Professional running on an Amiga 2000, showing how smoothly it scrolled text. He notes the real effect is better on a period CRT.

Hyperland is a 1990 BBC documentary written by and starring Douglas Adams, who tours an imagined future of hypertext and software agents. It features Ted Nelson among others.

Samuel Falvo II live-codes a text preprocessor and blog engine in Forth over about an hour. It shows Forth's dictionary being snapshotted and restored in place of mutation, and how a small Forth system gets real work done.

Russ Cox gives a 23-minute tour of the Acme text editor from Plan 9, showing its mouse-driven interface, executing commands from text, and its filesystem-based interface to other programs.

Mirabai Knight's PyCon 2013 talk on Plover, a free cross-platform stenography engine that lets people write at up to 240 WPM on ordinary hardware, including a demo of coding by steno.

Joe Armstrong, creator of Erlang, and Jeremy Ruston, creator of TiddlyWiki, discuss hypertext, Ted Nelson's idea of intertwingled knowledge, and a way to combine TiddlyWiki with Erlang. It is a Code Mesh LDN 2018 talk.

Ted Nelson, the originator of hypertext and Project Xanadu, gives a personal account at age 80 of his ideals, his career, and how a poor career plan led to discoveries and adventures. It works as an alternative history of personal computing and hypertext.

Disney Research presents Touche, a swept frequency capacitive sensing technique that recognizes complex hand and body configurations, and adds touch sensitivity to humans, liquids and everyday objects.

The first lecture of Jordan Peterson's 2017 Maps of Meaning course, setting out the Cold War context for his theory of belief and culture. He introduces the narrative structure of culture and archetypal characters for the individual, the known and the unknown.

Juan Pedro Bolivar Puente explains immutable and persistent data structures in C++ and how they support value semantics. He presents the Immer library, rrb-trees, and a prototype text editor that opens a huge file instantly.

James Powell's nearly two-hour PyData talk builds up Python's data model, decorators, generators and context managers, coding live in Vim. It aims to take intermediate programmers toward real Python expertise.

Ted Nelson explains the original Xanadu hypertext idea of visible connection, the notion that links between documents should be shown and preserved. He argues that the Web and current document standards lost this concept.

Alamo Drafthouse posted an angry voicemail from a customer who was kicked out for texting in the theater. The theater turned it into a humorous in-house preview.

A SIGGRAPH Asia 2013 research demo of 3-Sweep, a tool for extracting editable 3D objects from a single photo using a few user strokes. It predates modern AI image tools.

A demo of the 8pen, a gesture-based keyboard replacement for touchscreens that lets users enter text by moving around a circle. It is meant for phones, remotes and game controllers and mimics handwriting.

The first lecture of Stanford's CS231n Winter 2016 course on convolutional neural networks for visual recognition, introducing the course and the historical context of computer vision.

The full recording of Douglas Engelbart's 1968 demonstration, which introduced the mouse, hypertext, video conferencing, word processing, and real-time collaborative editing. It runs about 100 minutes.

Science writer Jay Dixit explains how he uses Emacs as a non-programmer to write, edit and research more productively. He shows his plain-text writing workflow and what led him from tools like Scrivener to Emacs.

Jason Scott of textfiles.com tells the story at DEFCON 17 of being sued for two billion dollars by a scammer who plagued him and others for over a decade. The talk is tragic and funny, covering what he learned about misleading schemes.

Saqib Shaikh, a blind developer, shows how he writes and debugs code in Visual Studio 2017 using a screen reader. The short demo shows an expert doing ordinary developer tasks.

Ned Batchelder's PyCon 2012 talk gives a quick overview of what Unicode is, then focuses on what a Python programmer needs to handle text correctly. It presents the 'Unicode sandwich' strategy: decode bytes at input, work with Unicode internally, encode at output.

A promotional video for Leap, the navigation technology invented by Jef Raskin, demonstrated on the Canon Cat computer around 1987. It shows keyboard-driven search and cursor positioning in place of a mouse.

A 1979 CBC radio interview in which Ted Nelson tries to explain how computers could serve as tools for thinking and visualizing. The interviewer keeps failing to grasp the idea, and Nelson patiently answers again and again.

Archival footage of Larry Tesler demonstrating Gypsy, the modeless text editor he and Tim Mott built at Xerox PARC, running on the Computer History Museum's restored Alto. It is a long hands-on walkthrough of one of the earliest graphical document editors.

A short Italian-language clip about the Canon Cat, a text-oriented personal computer from Canon designed by Jef Raskin, who started the Macintosh project. It shows the machine in use.

Highlights from Doug Engelbart's December 1968 demonstration at SRI, the first public showing of the mouse, hypertext, windows, real-time collaborative editing and shared-screen teleconferencing. This is a roughly six-minute condensed version of the full demo.

Aaron Bieber, a longtime Vim user, describes his experience trying Emacs with evil mode. He covers what he found, what he missed from Vim, and what Vim could borrow from Emacs.

Symbolics developer Kalman Reti gives a short introductory demo of a Symbolics Lisp Machine running Genera in an emulator. It shows the context-aware command line, typed on-screen objects, and the live-editable system, including swapping in a C-compiled JPEG decoder.

An Alan Kay talk on programming and scaling, covering theoretical limits of code size, engineering versus tinkering, and biological cells as inspiration for object-oriented design.

George Brocklehurst of thoughtbot demonstrates Vim's built-in completion mechanisms, from word, line and block completion to ctags. The aim is to type less and make fewer typos.

Elasticsearch engineer and Lucene committer Adrien Grand explains the design decisions inside a Lucene index and what problems it can and cannot solve. The talk goes into how Lucene stores data for fast search and analytics.

PBS Space Time examines the interstellar object 'Oumuamua and the popular theories about it, including the light-sail hypothesis. It argues that a natural rock is the likeliest explanation.