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Show HN: Phi-editor, a text editor implemented in Go and SDL

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Re: Show HN: Phi-editor, a text editor implemented in Go and SDL

#11

Post by coldtea »

rkangel wrote: post #10

Text editors and terminals seem to be an interesting space: nobody is quite happy with the status quo, but the status quo is too well established to be dislodged. Everybody keeps attempting their own implementation, but the existing players are good enough (or can be tweaked to be good enough) that no-one gets serious traction.

>* Everybody keeps attempting their own implementation, but the existing players are good enough (or can be tweaked to be good enough) that no-one gets serious traction.*

The problem is that not enough people/money are thrown at the problem.

Microsoft has done wonders with VSC with its big team -- but in the end of the day it's Node and DOM based.

Imagine what something like ST would be, if it wasn't an one-man effort.

Re: Show HN: Phi-editor, a text editor implemented in Go and SDL

#12

Post by zippoxer »

aorth wrote: post #5
ishaanbahal wrote: post #3

"Phi is a minimal text editor designed to look pretty, run fast, and be easy to configure and use. It's primary function is for editing code." "The editor is written as if it's a game, so it will probably eat up your battery, as well as run possibly quite slow - especially if you dont have a dedicated GPU - and probably crash frequently." Can't quite understand what it wants to be, a fast editor that's minimal or one…

My guess (hope) is that Phi is just very new and alpha, and that the author was trying to say "it might eat your homework." Nevertheless, contrast that with Xi, another new, modern text editor written in Rust: > Incredibly high performance. All editing operations should commit and paint in under 16ms. The editor should never make you wait for anything. > Reliability. Crashing, hanging, or losing work should never hap…

Xi is orders of magnitudes more mature than Phi. You can't compare 76 contributors and 1128 commits vs 1 contributor and 103 commits.

Re: Show HN: Phi-editor, a text editor implemented in Go and SDL

#13

Post by rntksi »

jimmies wrote: post #7

A text editor that renders text the hard way... Cool! Talking about editors that do crazy stuff, I have a story about the de-facto text editor in Vietnam in the 80s-90s called BKED. That editor runs on MS-DOS and looks just like edit.com [1], except for it displays and allows the user to input text in Vietnamese. Nothing really quite special at the first glance. The Vietnamese alphabet is Latin-extended, and it needs…

That was unexpected, to see BKED being mentioned here! I was about 6 years old when I first used it (that, and a nice game called "bum"). This brings back so much memories. And to think that it had this much history behind its programming! Amazing. Definitely should poke the author into releasing the source code for next generations to have a look at it.

Re: Show HN: Phi-editor, a text editor implemented in Go and SDL

#14

Post by jacquesm »

jimmies wrote: post #7

A text editor that renders text the hard way... Cool! Talking about editors that do crazy stuff, I have a story about the de-facto text editor in Vietnam in the 80s-90s called BKED. That editor runs on MS-DOS and looks just like edit.com [1], except for it displays and allows the user to input text in Vietnamese. Nothing really quite special at the first glance. The Vietnamese alphabet is Latin-extended, and it needs…

The hard part about a text editor in graphics mode is not the character drawing (that had been figured out in the 8 bit days) but the scrolling. Unless you had hardware support for scrolling by being able to set the start-of-screen address scrolling could take forever.

Re: Show HN: Phi-editor, a text editor implemented in Go and SDL

#16

Post by lancebeet »

rkangel wrote: post #10

Text editors and terminals seem to be an interesting space: nobody is quite happy with the status quo, but the status quo is too well established to be dislodged. Everybody keeps attempting their own implementation, but the existing players are good enough (or can be tweaked to be good enough) that no-one gets serious traction.

Gary Bernhardt (Destroy All Software) has an interesting talk on this phenomenon for anyone who is interested:

https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/a-whole-new-world

Re: Show HN: Phi-editor, a text editor implemented in Go and SDL

#17

Post by felixangell »

ishaanbahal wrote: post #3

"Phi is a minimal text editor designed to look pretty, run fast, and be easy to configure and use. It's primary function is for editing code." "The editor is written as if it's a game, so it will probably eat up your battery, as well as run possibly quite slow - especially if you dont have a dedicated GPU - and probably crash frequently." Can't quite understand what it wants to be, a fast editor that's minimal or one…

It's mostly a disclaimer for the time being. I'm making no guarantees that the editor will meet those claims at it's current state - but that's the end goal.

Re: Show HN: Phi-editor, a text editor implemented in Go and SDL

#18

Post by Chris2048 »

zippoxer wrote: post #12
aorth wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess (hope) is that Phi is just very new and alpha, and that the author was trying to say "it might eat your homework." Nevertheless, contrast that with Xi, another new, modern text editor written in Rust: > Incredibly high performance. All editing operations should commit and paint in under 16ms. The editor should never make you wait for anything. > Reliability. Crashing, hanging, or losing work should never hap…

Xi is orders of magnitudes more mature than Phi. You can't compare 76 contributors and 1128 commits vs 1 contributor and 103 commits.

Of course you can compare them. One is way more mature, use that.

Re: Show HN: Phi-editor, a text editor implemented in Go and SDL

#19

Post by jimmies »

jacquesm wrote: post #14
jimmies wrote: post #7

A text editor that renders text the hard way... Cool! Talking about editors that do crazy stuff, I have a story about the de-facto text editor in Vietnam in the 80s-90s called BKED. That editor runs on MS-DOS and looks just like edit.com [1], except for it displays and allows the user to input text in Vietnamese. Nothing really quite special at the first glance. The Vietnamese alphabet is Latin-extended, and it needs…

The hard part about a text editor in graphics mode is not the character drawing (that had been figured out in the 8 bit days) but the scrolling. Unless you had hardware support for scrolling by being able to set the start-of-screen address scrolling could take forever.

Was it? Smooth scrolling like what in Commander Keen was hard. Janky scrolling by one line at a time like a text editor probably wasn't that bad if I recall correctly.

I guess I really just meant tedious when I mentioned that kind of work. It's not the kind of usual engineering solution when one first thought about the issue at hand. It breaks most usual assumption about how you solve the problem. It's like when someone writes the whole website in javascript and canvas just to display text because they can't do certain things in HTML.

Re: Show HN: Phi-editor, a text editor implemented in Go and SDL

#20

Post by codetrotter »

aorth wrote: post #5
ishaanbahal wrote: post #3

"Phi is a minimal text editor designed to look pretty, run fast, and be easy to configure and use. It's primary function is for editing code." "The editor is written as if it's a game, so it will probably eat up your battery, as well as run possibly quite slow - especially if you dont have a dedicated GPU - and probably crash frequently." Can't quite understand what it wants to be, a fast editor that's minimal or one…

My guess (hope) is that Phi is just very new and alpha, and that the author was trying to say "it might eat your homework." Nevertheless, contrast that with Xi, another new, modern text editor written in Rust: > Incredibly high performance. All editing operations should commit and paint in under 16ms. The editor should never make you wait for anything. > Reliability. Crashing, hanging, or losing work should never hap…

There’s and interesting video about Xi called Xi: An editor for the next 20 years. I remember it was a good talk and I would recommend watching it. https://youtu.be/4FbQre9VQLI
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