[dmd]

Ooh, this is the thread to ask my question in. A few years ago I ran across a ... I think a video game walkthrough? maybe? which was written to be read in monospace font, and it was full justified perfectly all the way through (thousands of lines!) SOLELY through word choice.

Anyone know what I'm talking about and have a link?

[macleginn]

Cf. also http://tom7.org/bovex/ (a layout engine that tries to achieve a similar effect by rephrasing the input using an LLM).

[corytheboyd]

Wow that was… such an amazing ride. Thank you for sharing!

[mandibles]

CSI pun payoff at the end was worth it.

[jtolmar]

That's called bricktext[0], it used to be a thing you'd occasionally see on usenet and places like GameFAQs.

[0] http://www.catb.org/esr/jargon/html/B/bricktext.html (Also wow Google has completely erased this concept from its search results.)

[_the_inflator]

Funny guide, different scene.

http://www.catb.org/esr/jargon/html/crackers.html

On C64 the signs of puberty were usage of words like “lamer”, “loser/looser”

Loser vs looser was especially painful. “Haha, we know it’s loser but looser sounds cooler.” A lame cover up, somewhat contradicting the whole meaning.

90% of the scroll texts were about contrived stories of displaying superiority over lamers and losers.

The folks from Finland appeared to be a bit over the top with references to their weight lifting careers to appear like some sort of brutal fighting machine.

Kids back then… ;)

[red_trumpet]

> Also wow Google has completely erased this concept from its search results

For me, it replaces the search with "brick text", but allows you to change to "bricktext" again, at which point it does give the catb.org result.

[paradox460]

Google may have, but kagi still shows it prominently

I actually got an angelfire link in my search results a few days ago. Was related to quake 2

[sweeter]

oh my god that person wrote "The Art of Unix Programming" I binge read it last week and it was exceptional. What a world. These are the kind of people that I look up to and aspire to be like.

[klez]

That person (Eric S. Raymond) also wrote "The Cathedral and the Bazaar"[0], a seminal work for the Open Source movement.

[0] http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/

[boffinAudio]

See also, "In the Beginning Was the Command Line", which I seem to recall was also monospace presented in the good ol' days ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Beginning..._Was_the_Co...

Or maybe it was just a plain ol' textfile, I forget.

[baq]

just came here to say your post makes me feel old. esr was a classic a cool 20 years ago. enjoy!

[aarreedd]

Laravel does something similar. Each line of multi-line comments are exactly 3 characters shorter than the previous line.

https://github.com/laravel/laravel/blob/11.x/config/database...

[tasuki]

Wow, this is amazing! Just in that file or everywhere? Why? How do they enforce this for all the contributors who might be unaware?

[aarreedd]

Pretty much everywhere. I guess to demonstrate the framework's attention to detail, craftsmanship, etc. No clue

[CM30]

I vaguely recall seeing a GameFAQs walkthrough that did this, and I think it might have been for a Final Fantasy game of some kind, but unfortunately I can't remember more than that.

[dmd]

GameFAQ was enough! FOUND IT! Thank you!

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/snes/588741-super-metroid/faqs...

[5-]

this gets discussed, or at least mentioned, often on hn, e.g.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28651093 (this very faq)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40773880 (jart's commit)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40605970 (tom7's gnujpl)

and bonus: recently i've been enjoying http://arlyle.sdf.org/

(unfortunately, links do not work in preformatted text on hn)

[immibis]

"I could totally hear the first one in singing form"

Thanks to AI, now you can.[1]

[1] https://suno.com/song/22f52bca-7119-4aac-8f0a-5daf9afa509d

(Also an amusing waste of time. Here's "a religious folk song in the format of a Cisco configuration file": https://suno.com/song/536fe16f-079c-4cce-921c-c2518f6dedb6 )

[082349872349872]

> unfortunately

Don't worry; I pasted your words

into vi just to experience their

fully justified bricktext glory.

[beautron]

Wow, this is wild! Maintaining perfect justification solely through word choice is... quite a writing constraint, lol. I don't think I've seen this done before.

[gsbcbdjfncnjd]

I betcha it wasn’t perfectly through word choice alone as I can think of a few “tricks” that could be deployed undetectably.

[kstrauser]

Like what? I would think you could hide much in mono ASCII.

[tvchurch]

This is why the internet exists.

Incredible catharsis. Love it.

[nuancebydefault]

I would be even more impressed if the TOC and changelog followed the same layout.

[danbruc]

Here is another ooh, this is the thread to ask my question in.

For years I wanted to make a Visual Studio [Code] extension that justifies comments as you type including hyphenation but accepting additional spaces as necessary. I never dared to really start beyond some research into relevant algorithms and libraries because it seems pretty complex. I tried to use things like fmt and par but mostly accepted that I can not have nicely formatted comments unless I do it manually, which I do sometimes but in general just costs to much time, especially as any small change often forces redoing several lines.

You have to deal with long identifiers that you preferably do not want to break across lines, [nested] lists, tables, code blocks, or ASCII art contained in comments, distinguish between hyphens as part of words and hyphens inserted by hyphenation, there might be structured comments like XML doc and Javadoc tags, ... When I saw Tom7's Badness 0, I considered throwing a LLM at the problem, but I think that this is not [yet] practical if you want it in real-time and without hallucinated comments.

Does something like this already exist or something to build on top that would make writing an extension not a year-long effort?

[RoddaWallPro]

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=stkb.rew...

I use this extension extensively. It's not auto-wrapping, but you can bind it to an easy shortcut and wrap when you need to. I find it almost indispensable. I wrote a vscode extension to do the same thing, then discovered this one which does it far better.

[danbruc]

I will give that one a try, might at least speed up things, but it still misses hyphenation and justification. Hitting enter when reaching the guide line takes the least effort but this might be really handy when editing existing comments, especially with auto wrap enabled.