Hi, OP here.

My friend and I created this because we think the current state of how we share programming knowledge on the internet is broken and mostly neglected. We just got frustrated by reading another Medium article with code in it.

We think the best place to read something with code has already been invented - IDE. We started with an extension for Visual Studio Code.

The core idea is that you can keep your codebase separated from the text and at the same time, you can create bindings between smaller parts of code and parts of the text. This way you can have growing codebase and reveal the story behind it.

The extension is kinda buggy but usable and shows the core idea. Feel free to ask any questions.

You might be interested in this https://ourcodestories.com/

Any plans to add importers for common code annotation formats?

By importers do you mean importing code into the text?

We want to add more rich text functionality. We just didn’t want to spend more days building this without any feedback.

Like being able to convert off the shelf code annotations into your format: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20382841

How do you share the text with bindings?

Currently, you can only share the whole project. Codelines creates .codelines folder when first activated. So by sending someone the whole project, they can start the extension and read what you wrote.

Obviously, this isn't ideal but we didn't want to spend another week building sharing capabilites.

This feels like a great solution to a different problem - documentation of a codebase for internal team usage.

We have been thinking about that for the whole time we have been working on this MVP, haha.

We feel like both problems maybe aren't that different after all. It's about effectively sharing programming knowledge.

The reason we focused on articles is that it was a problem we had ourselves.

Will this project stay closed source?

(because I couldn't find any reference to a repo on the website and on your github, assuming that's you: https://github.com/mlejva?tab=repositories)

Currently, we don't mind open-sourcing it in the future. It'll probably stay closed source for a while. At least until we clean up the project a little bit. :)

Makes sense!

Love this project. And thanks for trying to solve something that I also struggled with.

Thank you!

As the next step, we want to launch on VSCode Marketplace like a proper extension.

Would you mind sharing an email (or Twitter handle, or anything else) so I could let you know once we are on the marketplace?

I might be missing something, but why not just use line comments. It will help you and the person you share it with. You can then show the comments in the separate view if needed.

I'll suggest decreasing the speed of gifs, it becomes rather difficult to understand what exactly is going on.

Great insight. Thank you, fixed.

I'd like to see an example of an article and how to share it

Looks interesting. Noticed a typo: “bindigs”

Just fixed it. Thank you!

ERR_CONNECTION_REFUSED :(

Should be working now?

I was pushing some changes so maybe it was that.