Live data from Hacker News

Lime Text – Open Source Sublime Text alternative (2014)

limetext.org

161–170 of 186 posts

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

#161
post #125

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…

>And no, Atom not designed And that's exactly one of it's problems. It's not designed to be a damn text editor. Instead - it's just another "hipster editor". You can find a growing number of useless plugins, but can't open log file sent to you, or connect via proxy without a trouble. Not to mention the speed and ram usage. My IDEA instance with a large project opened up use less memory than Atom without any files ope…

> And that's exactly one of it's problems. It's not designed to be a damn text editor. Instead - it's just another "hipster editor". You can find a growing number of useless plugins, but can't open log file sent to you, or connect via proxy without a trouble.

since when do you need to edit log files? you don't need an editor for that, you need a log explorer. there are other tools for hat.

what exactly do you mean with proxy problems? i'm behind a proxy at work and didn't have any problems?

> Not to mention the speed and ram usage

that thats its only real problem. especially if you're on a laptop without a power outlet nearby. i tend to just use vim in that situation notice a significant increase in battery life.

> I just do not understand how people can go from Sublime [...] to something like this js crap.

at least its fully extensible. i love the linting, auto-beautification, Markdown Preview, extensible autocompletion, useful autosave, Git-WIP support, extensive git integration and so much more.

its just not meant to be used as anything beside editing small code files. and most people don't have to code monolithic code files beyond a few MB in size.

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

#162
post #115
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…

> 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. This is just wild exaggeration. It doesn't take more than a few weeks or so to become reasonably productive with another text editor. We like to think that the many plugins and s…

>My conclusion is that overly simple languages like LISP just transfer complexity from the language itself to the code that you're writing.

Can you give some examples please? Python is even simpler than CL however I don't regard it to be transferring any complexity to the programmer.

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

#163
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Emacs has long been riddled with bugs that can cause daemonized emacs to crash if the display disconnects (yes, even with the Lucid toolkit). term-mode is hacks on hacks on hacks; and slow ones at that. There's a bug in Emacs 24's sh-mode that can cause it to deadlock if you move the point to a wrong place in an incomplete if/while/for block start (IDK if it's fixed in Emacs 25). All point-releases of Emacs 24 shippe…

Emacs 19 was a model of low-defect, stable software, and my experiences reinforced that widespread notion. Over time and subsequent major releases, it grew and grew, and the complexity got too big to perform adequate QA, now nearing the point of unmaintainability. I also love it and use it daily, but I really wish the developers would show some restraint when considering whether to add new features (i.e., packages).…

Well, I'm sure you'd concede that read-file-name is part of Emacs's core, and its been buggy for years. (Have not checked to see yet if it is still buggy in version 25.) Specifically, if the current buffer is visiting an image file, pressing down arrow during a read-file-name will often cause read-file-name to try to insert the whole image as a text string into the minibuffer after the prompt, which will make Emacs unresponsive for a few seconds and will sometimes crash Emacs.

Before that there were years during which there was no way to configure Emacs that I was able to find to refrain from asking the user what coding system he wants to use every time a buffer containing a non-ascii character is saved. Not strictly a bug since maybe there are users who do not mind regularly getting into the same dialog with their text editor, but certainly, so many occurrences of the same monotonous dialog is unusual behavior in a user-facing application in this decade and very tedious at least to this particular user.

One reason Emacs is difficult to debug is because of the widespread use of global variables.

That said, I haven't found anything worth leaving Emacs for. (If I were a web dev, maybe I would've left it for vscode by now, but I don't like how text looks in vscode: I prefer the native OS X text rendering used by almost all text editors except the Electron-based ones.)

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

#164
post #161
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>And no, Atom not designed And that's exactly one of it's problems. It's not designed to be a damn text editor. Instead - it's just another "hipster editor". You can find a growing number of useless plugins, but can't open log file sent to you, or connect via proxy without a trouble. Not to mention the speed and ram usage. My IDEA instance with a large project opened up use less memory than Atom without any files ope…

> And that's exactly one of it's problems. It's not designed to be a damn text editor. Instead - it's just another "hipster editor". You can find a growing number of useless plugins, but can't open log file sent to you, or connect via proxy without a trouble. since when do you need to edit log files? you don't need an editor for that, you need a log explorer. there are other tools for hat. what exactly do you mean wi…

> since when do you need to edit log files?

Any time I want to re-hydrate escaped control sequences like newlines, or explore the log using a host of tools available in a text editor.

> at least its fully extensible

As are most text editors and IDEs. Atom's only difference here is that the extensions must be written in Javascript. Not everyone sees this as a good thing.

> its just not meant to be used as anything beside editing small code files

And that's the problem. Why should a user be forced ahead of time to consider their usecase for editing a file just to choose which gimped file editor they want to use?

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

#165
post #150

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…

> + major dev community... Do you mean major as in "large", or as in "possessing some positive quality"? While I'm not commenting on Atom's dev community in particular, the two don't have a causative relationship. A particular downside I see with Atom is it's performance - the perception of which is in some cases arguably approaching that of its competitors - and hence its energy impact, which affects my battery life…

It's large... Perhaps, not as high-quality as some other development communities... But quantity may help over quality.

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

#166
post #125

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…

>And no, Atom not designed And that's exactly one of it's problems. It's not designed to be a damn text editor. Instead - it's just another "hipster editor". You can find a growing number of useless plugins, but can't open log file sent to you, or connect via proxy without a trouble. Not to mention the speed and ram usage. My IDEA instance with a large project opened up use less memory than Atom without any files ope…

I don't feel one way or the other about Atom, but agree that "text editor" as a category is a superset of "editor of texts smaller than Xmb."

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

#167
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…

IIRC, Aquamacs tries to remedy some of these problems for Mac users. I don't how how well, though. :-/

(Also, macOS has some of Emacs' default keybindings like Ctrl-A, Ctrl-E, ... in all text editing widgets, which IMHO makes Emacs quite a nice fit on OS X in some ways.)

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

#168
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…

> Good luck my good friend with having tied your professional fortune to a small company that you are not affiliated with

You say that as if Sublime HQ Pty Ltd were to suddenly go out of business, the editor is immediately and completely useless.

This is obviously not the case, in any way, shape or form. It could go out of business tomorrow, and Sublime Text would be perfectly usable (and extensible) until the OSes changed in a way which stopped it from working.

Being open source provides no more guarantee of future development than being closed source does.

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

#169
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do any of these text editors you mention include a screensaver? I was just trying BREEZE for MS-DOS today and found that feature really appealing. I came back to my desk and the entire UI had just vanished and turned into a field of twinkling stars. I would love it if one of my more modern text editors did that.

Does anyone use desktop screen savers anymore? It used to be amazing how much customization some people put into to something that only appeared when they weren't using it. More apps need boss mode though.

I do, to lock my mac on demand. I think there's another way to do it now, but I'm stuck in old habits.

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

#170
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…

That's just it - I've done nothing of the sort. Sublime has no "unique" features that don't have equivalents in form and function on other editors.

So this "lock in" simply does not exist in the case of Sublime.

That naturally leads to the question of "Why it, and not a free alternative?"

I said it elsewhere in this thread, but the main reason I'm on Sublime and not Atom or an equivalent competitor is speed. It's fast, it's developed conservatively, and watching other editors hitch and stutter when they open large files or scrolling or start up or process syntax highlighting probably doesn't have much time impact on my productivity, it does cause a great deal of annoyance, hence stress, which probably does impact productivity in some way.

The other reason is that it lacks in bloat, which to me, means it lacks a ton of features I will never use, something I cannot say about Vim (macros, registers, hundreds of ancillary commands) or Emacs (an entire Lisp vm) and their associated complexity. However, it can be trivially extended with Python, which means any functionality it lacks has likely been worked around by someone in the community.

On top of all that, the author has made indication that he'd rather see the editor go open source than be abandoned[1], but I don't share the common belief that no updates for years means "abandoned" either.

[1] https://forum.sublimetext.com/t/whats-happening/139/9

Post reply on HN