183201627
submission
KeithCu writes:
At Microsoft, I spent five years working on the text components RichEdit and Quill, and came to understand the “physics” of word processing: the file formats, data structures, and algorithms that provided fast access to text and properties, independent of the length of the file. When I decided to add an async AI grammar checker to my LibreOffice plugin WriterAgent, I knew what I was getting into, but I underestimated the trickery of LibreOffice’s UNO.
181027594
submission
KeithCu writes:
I’ve been calling this project Cursor for LibreOffice to myself, but I knew I couldn’t use the name forever, so I researched and chose WriterAgent. It supports Calc, and Draw as well, but I didn’t like OfficeAgent, which sounds like some Soviet-era KGB job title. Last week’s post was how I took John Balis’s clean little Localwriter and bolted on threading, tool-calling, chat, and enough other stuff that it started to feel like a powerful chatbox inside LibreOffice.
180924876
submission
KeithCu writes:
How I turned John Balis’s localwriter, and code from LibreCalc AI and LibreOffice-MCP, into one unified, optimized extension in a week.
71660699
submission
KeithCu writes:
Other than the hardware-specific issues, I’ve been amazed by how well Arch Linux works, given that it doesn’t have release cycles, or a big team with a lot of money supporting and marketing it. I’ve heard only 30 developers maintain the core Arch packages, with most of them having a full-time job doing something else! At the same time, it shouldn’t be a total surprise things work so well because free software doesn’t just fall off a turnip truck:
