HACKER Q&A
📣 seany62

An IDE that lets you add photos as comments?


I always catch myself screenshotting stuff and trying to drop it in as code comments, much like one would when writing up technical docs on Notion or Google Docs.

Anyone that currently does this / is working on it? I guess this would need to be supported by version control as well? The programming language too maybe?

  👤 bbb651 Accepted Answer ✓
Picotron[1] has this feature, I don’t remember the exact format but essentially you have a special comment syntax that includes a base64 encoded lz4 compressed string that stores the image, every text widget on the system supports it and renders it as an image, and it turns back to text when your cursor is on that line.

[^1]: https://www.lexaloffle.com/picotron.php

👤 gus_massa
The IDE of Racket can do that. I can't find an example in the official docs, but I found this in google https://www.teach.cs.toronto.edu/~heap/Racket/values.html
👤 mattl
You’d need to provide a text alternative for those images too. Given that idea, I’d embed the screenshots into documentation/wiki pages where you can embed them in their entirety and provide the alternative text needed as well as any other information needed.