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Lime Text – Open Source Sublime Text alternative (2014)

limetext.org

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Re: Lime Text – Open Source Sublime Text alternative (2014)

#91
post #80

The headline on the Landing Page says "Elegant Free Open-Source". I for one applaud these great selling propositions. And I'm speaking after using Emacs and VIM for 15 years having not seen one other editor concept that was ultimately superior. Sublime Text was horrible in that it offered an easy refuge so many young and inexperienced people. But ultimately it was a closed source prison that they got pulled into. And…

The problem with Emacs and vim, to me, is that they don't fit in.

I'm currently trying to take up Emacs (I pick up one of vim and Emacs every few years. Not sure why. Feels like a thing I should do). Here is some of my list of Emacs problems.

* The big one. Every other app on my Mac uses the same shortcut keys for cut, copy, paste, save, open, search, search + replace, spell check. That's probably 95-99% of the keys I press, and Emacs has to be special and support none of the standards. I know there are good historical reasons for this, but that's no use to a new user.

* Server mode doesn't seem to "understand" Macs -- when I shut down my Mac it just hangs and I have to force kill it. Without server mode I end up with loads of Emacs which seem to load slower than atom can open a window.

* I like editting text ,(as opposed to code) in a variable width font. Doesn't seem well supported.

* The default settings seem very limited, so then I wonder if I should use something like spaceman's, but that is massive and brings it's own bugs.

I can be comfortable, and fairly productive, instantly in sublime, atom, lime and vscode. Why can't Emacs, by default, have a "be like a Mac app" mode?

Re: Lime Text – Open Source Sublime Text alternative (2014)

#92
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last I checked, Sublime is easily extensible with Python. What is this "lock in" you speak of? What "prison"? This reads like FSF.org hyperbole. Here comes the snark in reply to the snark: Someone had to come along and show that text editing didn't require the inscrutable complexity of Vim or Emacs, the kind of overwrought, overcomplicated, elitist and impractical user-hostility that absolutely dominates Open Source…

Good luck my good friend with having tied your professional fortune to a small company that you are not affiliated with. This is not politics, this is simply dangerous and I do feel that way every time I see someone with a copy of Sublime. Since I'm a lecturer, I see this issue of lock-in and easy vs. simple/powerful a lot. I'm not taking this lightly, I want the best for my fellow professionals that are just too you…

VIM's modal editing isn't remotely simple. There is a huge language to learn, and most keys do not form useful patterns which are easy to remember.

The problem with "you need to invest the time, trust me", I'd the same argument can be used for vim, Emacs, sublime, atom, vscode, eclipse, intellij, and any other editor. I can't invest the time in all of them to become expert.

The difference with Emacs and vim is that they require a sizable time investment just to become competent, as they refuse to fit into the OSes they are running in (in the case of windows and Mac).

Re: Lime Text – Open Source Sublime Text alternative (2014)

#93

Am I the only one sick of projects declaring, "written in rust", "primarily developed in go", etc? Why do your users care about your implementation language? Do you have any features worth mentioning? If your main selling point is that you used the shiny new language, I'm already doubting the usefulness of the endeavor. Just the straw that finally broke the camel's back . . .

Considering one of the selling points is 100% open source, it makes sense to point out the language.

Re: Lime Text – Open Source Sublime Text alternative (2014)

#94
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good luck my good friend with having tied your professional fortune to a small company that you are not affiliated with. This is not politics, this is simply dangerous and I do feel that way every time I see someone with a copy of Sublime. Since I'm a lecturer, I see this issue of lock-in and easy vs. simple/powerful a lot. I'm not taking this lightly, I want the best for my fellow professionals that are just too you…

VIM's modal editing isn't remotely simple. There is a huge language to learn, and most keys do not form useful patterns which are easy to remember. The problem with "you need to invest the time, trust me", I'd the same argument can be used for vim, Emacs, sublime, atom, vscode, eclipse, intellij, and any other editor. I can't invest the time in all of them to become expert. The difference with Emacs and vim is that t…

Well, to make a long story and potential flame war short: My original post was not about VIM or Emacs. It was stating happiness about an editor (Lime) that tries to be easy to get started, yet is open source.

Re: Lime Text – Open Source Sublime Text alternative (2014)

#96
post #80

The headline on the Landing Page says "Elegant Free Open-Source". I for one applaud these great selling propositions. And I'm speaking after using Emacs and VIM for 15 years having not seen one other editor concept that was ultimately superior. Sublime Text was horrible in that it offered an easy refuge so many young and inexperienced people. But ultimately it was a closed source prison that they got pulled into. And…

The problem with Emacs and vim, to me, is that they don't fit in. I'm currently trying to take up Emacs (I pick up one of vim and Emacs every few years. Not sure why. Feels like a thing I should do). Here is some of my list of Emacs problems. * The big one. Every other app on my Mac uses the same shortcut keys for cut, copy, paste, save, open, search, search + replace, spell check. That's probably 95-99% of the keys…

My post wasn't to be about Emacs, but let's give it a try. I'm happy to help.

Actually some of the things you mentioned are super awesome strengths to me.

1. key bindings. I understand your point and you are right. But hear me out^^

I'm using Emacs on the Mac and Linux daily. Sometimes I fire up Windows for some cross platform app. Those three OSs have usually different key bindings and would have so in a regular GUI tool. Not in Emacs, though. They are all the same. Muscle memory win^^ Plus, I changed _many_ key bindings in Emacs to that they work better for me - across all OSs.

2. Server mode. Hm, I'm not having an issue here, but I cannot say that with confidence, because I rarely shut down, I always suspend (closing the lid on the MBP).

3. Variable Width Font. Have no expertise here. I tried that once, but it messed with how the code looks aligned which seems important to me. Again, sorry, would love to help, but just don't have expertise in this.

4. Default settings. You're right spot on! This is not an accident, but on purpose. The reason is that they are General Text Editors opposed to most others. That means that could do anything if you teach them. The others can do specific things faster. This approach has served me well and I have huge configurations in VIM and Emacs. Now I'm actually doing everything in Emacs, Mail, writing Books, PDFs, Todos and so on. Of course you don't need that to get going. It's just awesome that you can continue to improve your main tool for ever and ever^^

I learned how to do these things by reading other people's config. If you'd like to look at my Emacs config, it has lots of prose documentation for other people to read: https://github.com/munen/emacs.d/blob/master/configuration.o...

I hope some of that was helpful. One more thing, it's OK if you only seem to vaguely get that VIM and Emacs are worth it. Took me a couple tries, too. Same with most things that are worth it. Like getting to know the right Woman^^

Re: Lime Text – Open Source Sublime Text alternative (2014)

#97
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a Vim addict/user. All I really want is a bit more modernization. I mean single threaded text editor in 2016.. NeoVim is supposed to be the savior.. But I don't feel like it gets a lot of support...

Why does your text editor need multiple threads?

Because some tasks like autocompletion take a relatively long time. This leads to your editor blocking.

Re: Lime Text – Open Source Sublime Text alternative (2014)

#98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Atom (hear me out): + runs graphically + runs linux, macos, windows (nothing else?) + open source + ridiculously, easily extensible + not riddled with bugs (slowness is not a bug) + for small files, comparably quick to Sublime on my machine + major dev community; already much better than 6 months ago - slow in some instances, esp. large files - doesn't run in terminal - doesn't run in less-popular OSes +/- moderate R…

Honestly I don't get the Atom hate. It's a great editor. I came to Atom from Sublime because the plugin ecosystem was growing much faster and the community felt more active. I haven't looked back since. And no, Atom not designed to open 30Mb files. Complaining about this is akin to stomping on a land mine and complaining that your Timberland boots didn't save your foot. Just use Atom for its intended purpose: editing…

Last time I checked (I might be wrong), Atom didn't have default behavior of auto save and it made me to lose some work. Not that I am saying that this can't be the default behavior but that expectation should be cleared to the users.

Re: Lime Text – Open Source Sublime Text alternative (2014)

#99
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A possible (very early) start for this could be https://github.com/google/xi-editor UIs and actual functionality are completely separate implementations. Loading and displaying text are entirely decoupled, so the display doesn't have to care if the actual file is 10kb or 2gb in size.

Yet another with a client server architecture. It makes no sense in a desktop application to add the performance overhead of IPC and serialization to every user interaction.

I'd take the overhead of a client-server architecture over the overhead of rendering the whole UI in HTML (electron apps) any time.

Also I think that the marshalling you need for IPC is not so different than the boxing and conversion that you have under the hood if you write in an interpreted language, e.g. Python or JavaScript.

Re: Lime Text – Open Source Sublime Text alternative (2014)

#100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly I don't get the Atom hate. It's a great editor. I came to Atom from Sublime because the plugin ecosystem was growing much faster and the community felt more active. I haven't looked back since. And no, Atom not designed to open 30Mb files. Complaining about this is akin to stomping on a land mine and complaining that your Timberland boots didn't save your foot. Just use Atom for its intended purpose: editing…

I just want to be able to look at the first 10 lines of a 15MB JSON I downloaded of the internet without having the entire application crash. It doesn't seem like too much to ask. There's a big difference between asking for a 15MB file and a 500MB file. 15MB is a pretty reasonable size for a text editor to be able to open without crashing, IMO. Unfortunately, I have to peek at those in Vim instead. Nothing wrong with…

If it's just JSON, can't you do this:

head -10 myfile.json

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