Programming

I’ve been switching from Vim to Helix recently. I did the built-in tutor, and whenever I need to configure something, I look it up in the docs. The problem is, I only find what I already know to look for. Without reading the documentation more broadly, I don’t really know what I can configure in the first place.

So I’m curious, do you sit down and read documentation to understand a tool, or do you just search it when you hit a specific problem?

Hi everyone 👋 I wanted to share a little project I've been working on: rbbasic, a BASIC programming language compiler I'm writing in C++.

The idea is simple — and a bit nostalgic: It's a transcompiler that converts BASIC code into C, then compiles it using GCC into an executable.

🛠️ Current Status

Early alpha stage

Only basic features implemented (closer to a primitive GW-BASIC for now)

Still missing a lot of built-ins and syntax features

Focused on Windows right now — Linux support coming

The long-term dream is something like QB64-lite, maybe focused more on GW-BASIC style

🎯 Goals

See if I can actually build a working BASIC compiler 😅

Recreate the feel of GW-BASIC / QBasic on modern systems

Eventually MIT-licensed and published on GitHub

Mostly a personal hobby project right now — not aiming at mass adoption

Possibly demoing progress soon on my YouTube channel

❓ Why am I doing this?

Honestly... curiosity and love for BASIC. I code mostly in retro-style languages (FreeBASIC, QB45, Euphoria, etc.), so it feels natural to try building my own compiler even if better tools already exist today.

💬 Feedback welcome

I’d love your thoughts, advice, or suggestions. If anyone here has experience writing compilers, transpilers, or retro programming tools, I’d really appreciate hearing about your journey too.

Thanks for reading & happy coding! ✨

I've seen some projects on GitHub (howdy being one of them that came to mind) where there are forks, but when I check the forks out they are either unchanged, or are behind by a few commits. I was wondering why this would happen. It couldn't be for archival purposes, could it?

https://fosstodon.org/users/ThePSF/statuses/115446659188615376

Or: XKCD 1179 has its heart in the right place, but we can only wish it was actually that simple

I want to improve my touch typing skills on Linux. I’m curious:

1. What tool or program would you recommend for learning touch typing on Linux?
2. For someone whose native language isn’t English, would you recommend learning on their native keyboard layout or switching to the US QWERTY layout for programming purposes?

Hi c/programming,

for quite some time I have been working on the open-source project PdfDing - a selfhosted PDF manager, viewer and editor offering a seamless user experience on multiple devices. You can find the repository here. As always I would be quite happy about a star and you trying out the application.

Last week PdfDing was selected to receive a grant from the NGI Zero Commons Fund. This fund is dedicated to helping deliver, mature and scale new internet commons across the whole technology spectrum and is amongst others funded by the European Commission. The exact sum of the grant still needs to be discussed, but obviously I am very stocked to have been selected and need to share it with the community.

PdfDing's features include:

• Seamless browser based PDF viewing on multiple devices. Remembers current position - continue where you stopped reading
• Stay on top of your PDF collection with multi-level tagging, starring and archiving functionalities
• Edit PDFs by adding comments, highlighting and drawings
• Manage and export PDF highlights and comments in dedicated sections
• Clean, intuitive UI with dark mode, inverted color mode, custom theme colors and multiple layouts
• SSO support via OIDC
• Share PDFs with an external audience via a link or a QR Code with optional access control
• Markdown Notes
• Progress bars show the reading progress of each PDF at a quick glance

cross-posted from: https://crazypeople.online/post/9879331

I wish to create an f1 game on open typer, klavaro or GNU typist for kids, which would become an engaging practice for kids in speed typing. Can anyone help me with this ??

Thompson didn't want to write about the usual things that Turing award winners write about— in fact, according to him,1 he didn't want to write a paper at all. However, when he did finally write a paper (after putting it off for a year past the original deadline, see ~2:52:49 in the above video), he describes at a high level how the C compiler (itself a program written in C) parses and compiles C source code into machine code to set the stage for how the "Trojan horse" would be injected into the generated machine code while leaving the original input C source code seemingly unmodified.

If so, I'd like to know about that questions:

• Do you use an code autocomplete AI or type in a chat?
• Do you consider environment damage that use of AIs can cause?
• What type of AI do you use?
• Usually, what do you ask AIs to do?

Ordinality let you manage any changes in your system via declarative actions, and a storage that remember applied actions.

Ordinality may be used to migrate scheme in your postgres database, to migrate from a JSON file to a database and back, to copy files from SSD to a S3, etc.

I can't believe these aren't available in my package manager