I agree. I started using Foot based on a recommendation from the notcurses library author, who has deep expertise in terminal emulation and collaborates with maintainers.
A tip for new users: The default theme is a bit harsh. I was able to port my Alacritty theme and other config by feeding the config file to an LLM (along with the Foot documentation). It generated a configuration that was 80-90% correct and only required about five minutes of manual fixes.
The result is now visually identical to my Alacritty setup, but Foot feels faster.
It's not their lane. There are other solutions that exist which are fine. Maybe I was too quick to judge, I don't know. Maybe I'll be surprised in a good way.
Can anyone in here explain why there are so many vague "I don't trust Kagi" comments in here? I don't know who they are. And, I haven't seen anyone expand on why.
I read Isaac Asimov’s foundation series a few years ago (side note for anyone who hasn’t read it: it still holds up incredibly well with a small suspension of disbelief and some grace for when it was written).
In the preface to the 4th or 5th book (which were written 30+ years after the “original” trilogy) he discussed how the originals parts of the trilogy were published as a set of short stories in a SciFi publication over 8 years, and later compiled into the books.
I was astonished.
Perhaps everyone else already knew this. But such a clear narrative through line to be written in discrete short stories. Very impressive.
It sounds like this may have been common prior to this era as well.
Weird. I bounced off Foundation immediately because it felt like a series of short stories instead of a novel (and also I couldn't take psychohistory the least bit seriously). I'm kind of kicking myself for not predicting that it actually did start that way.
New information that challenges one's context can often appear weird at first. Its a common reaction.
Regarding psychohistory: It's worth considering the era in which the books where written. The 1st half of the 20th century saw massive innovations in economic theory, physics, and information theory. It was not a big leap to predict that in 500 years time, humans would further advance macro economics. Personally I felt the books did a great job setting limits in the capabilities of the theory, and using its inherit flaws to drive interesting plot lines.
Didn’t Verne also serialize his stories? This has been going on for a long long time but for sure Clark and Asimov have books that were serials in periodicals.
Edit: looked it up. Dickens and Dumas preceded Jules Verne in serials being turned into novels.
But Asimov’s short stories weren’t a serialized novel from the start. They were individual short stories that he later combined with small changes to form novels. It’s different from what Dickens, Dumas, and Verne did.
Another even more modern example is The Martian. Weir published it chapter by chapter on his website, even updating previous chapters based on (mostly technical) feedback from his readers. Once completed, his readers encouraged him to publish an eBook, it took off on Amazon, and the rest is history.
I reread it last year and I needed to give it a lot of grace, mostly from it's treatment of women. To Asimov's credit, there's no overt sexism - he manages to bypass that by having almost no female characters at all. There's a single female character who has no agency, every other character is white and male. I understand it's a product of it's time, and avoid judgment. However, the lack of women feels weird and makes it hard to enjoy.
To be fair, the later books in the series which were written in the 70s are much better in this regard.
Female characters are not exactly exceptional in classical literature. And that statement includes fairly sexist works. Even Odyssey has multiple female characters - you do not get older then that. Shakespeare has them and that is as English language classic as it gets. Women are literally all around classics.
I dont buy it. You have to cherry pick among classics hard to come with the "much of it does not have female characters" conclusion.
Much of it do have women in it. As I go through them in my head, almost everything has some women in it, at least existing in larger world. Except "Old Man and the Sea" one character against the world kind of things. Hemingway has women in other books tho.
The ideas in it are fascinating (if also dated). The characters, though, are insanely 1 dimensional. It's very obviously a 1 micron thin story layered over the scaffold of ideas. After looking at it that way, I could get through the series without groaning or laughing a lot.
I've just read through the entire documentation end-to-end. It's very clear and well written, thank you for the time and love.
One thing that's unclear to me in how I might manage this "side-by-side coexistence": how you manage potential route conflicts, e.g., You have a Hologram "page" that defines `route "/hello-world"`, and the Phoenix application router.ex also defines a route, `live "/hello-world', MyApp.HellowWorld, :index`.
I could imagine the lack of a central router may be offset through conventions of how you organize pages (perhaps a directory-based-routing convention). I saw in the Installation section that it's common to organize under `app/`, and `app/pages`. Maybe an expansion on best practices for larger project organization, and how you keep Hologram routes straight, would be interesting to other people as well.
Regardless, I've just started dipping my toes in the elixir and phoenix ecosystem about 3 months ago, and it's been a real joy. I'm throwing every hobby project I can think of at it to learn more. I'll give hologram a spin -- thanks again for such clear documentation.
Thanks for the kind words about the documentation! I'm glad it came across as clear - I put a lot of effort into making it accessible.
You raise an excellent point about route conflicts. I'm actually thinking about detecting these at compilation time and throwing an error with details about which routes are conflicting and where they're defined. That should catch these issues early and make them easy to resolve.
The best practices guide is definitely a great idea and something I've been thinking about. I already have some ideas regarding project organization and routing conventions, but I want to ship a few more core features first before diving deep into that documentation. Hologram really obsesses over developer experience, and comprehensive docs are a big part of that :)
It's awesome to hear you're enjoying the Elixir/Phoenix ecosystem! Three months in and already exploring different frameworks shows great curiosity. I'd love to hear how your experience goes with Hologram when you give it a spin. Thanks again for reading through all the docs and providing such thoughtful feedback! :)
Absolutely. And I’m finding the same with “agent” coding tools. With the ever increasing hype around Cursor I tried to give it a go this week. The first 5 minutes were impressive, when I sent a small trial ballon for a simple change.
But when asking for a full feature, I lost a full day trying to get it to stop chasing its tail. I’m still in the “pro” free trial period so it was using a frontier model.
This was for a Phoenix / Elixir project; which I realize is not as robustly in the training data as other languages and frameworks, but it was supposedly consuming the documentation, other reference code I’d linked in, and I’d connected the Tidewave MCP.
Regardless, in the morning with fresh eyes and a fresh cup of coffee, I reverted all the cursor changes and implemented the code myself in a couple hours.
A tip for new users: The default theme is a bit harsh. I was able to port my Alacritty theme and other config by feeding the config file to an LLM (along with the Foot documentation). It generated a configuration that was 80-90% correct and only required about five minutes of manual fixes.
The result is now visually identical to my Alacritty setup, but Foot feels faster.