Definitely, I feel like anything that strengthens the connection between the page and the editor will be a really big deal, because it will invite drawing and interacting on the page itself, and designing the text around the drawings.  In addition to cursor highlighting, I can imagine rendering the entire active text on the page at print-size.  It'll be too small to read directly, but it'll give you the sense that that is what you're editing, and that the editor is just a "fatbits" zoomed-in portal into a section of the physical page.  Feel free to prototype in this direction!

On May 6, 2020, at 5:58 PM, Omar Rizwan wrote:

Cool! I like that trick of scanning along the horizontal / vertical when you have a rough idea of where a mark will be.

Feels like it makes a lot of things possible in Realtalk that we would need a shader to do globally in a responsive-enough way.

I wonder if a stopgap for making `Here` more usable would be to highlight the current code editor line / code editor cursor position on the page itself (wherever it would print).

I feel like I've suggested things like this before (current line, possibly current scrolled viewport), maybe played around with it also.

It's interesting that the trace printing and the live box detection are apparently completely independent systems -- one uses the general tracing stuff, the other uses your new custom line-following-to-find-boxes stuff.

On Wed, May 6, 2020 at 5:11 PM Bret Victor wrote:

Printing with traced appearance, and recognizing marked boxes.

[marked-boxes.mov]