

Zen Writing Mode - rjsamson
https://github.com/blog/1379-zen-writing-mode

======
troygoode
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 __.

~~~
up_and_up
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
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...](http://tomayko.com/writings/adopt-an-open-source-
process-constraints)) than the size of our team.

~~~
arikfr
What the other engineers work on? (Besides the enterprise version)

~~~
bkbleikamp
A few of the other projects that people are working on: GitHub for Mac, GitHub
for Windows, libgit2, internal tools, ops, Gist, Git

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timdorr
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.

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

~~~
dhruvmittal
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.

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mfonda
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
On a related note, this plugin has been invaluable to me in the past:
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/lazarus-form-
recov...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/lazarus-form-
recovery/loljledaigphbcpfhfmgopdkppkifgno?hl=en)

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yid
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.

~~~
sp332
I think it would be funny if they replaced that icon with a yin-yang symbol :)

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

~~~
sp332
Hm, interesting. <http://www.shaolin.org/zen/word-tao.html> I think I had been
confused by some modern "Zen Yoga" which refers to yin and yang more
extensively.

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

Cool feature, though!

~~~
Falling3
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
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."

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iambot
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....](https://github.com/christopherdebeer/zen/blob/master/README.md)

~~~
imjared
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!

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

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

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

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tesmar2
This is excellent. I wonder if they can open source it so I could use it on my
sites :)

~~~
imjared
Open sourced: <https://gist.github.com/4627220>

~~~
kordless
That made me laugh!

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jimmytucson
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.

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

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

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

~~~
Scriptor
Nice, thanks!

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marcrosoft
This news worthy?

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6d65
Finally, this was one of the most wanted features for me. Congrats to the team
for the amazing work.

~~~
imjared
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).

~~~
6d65
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.

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

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

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jasonm23
I just found it by accident... "Oh my god!" ;)

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

