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Show HN: Lite – A small, fast text editor

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Re: Show HN: Lite – A small, fast text editor

#61

Looking at the screenshot in full size [1], it looks really cool but the text is visibly blurry (look at the = signs for example). Text rendering is hard, and especially for a text editor it's a good idea to just use the current platform's text rendering instead of rolling your own. Of course SDL "rolls its own" because it focuses on being exactly the same on every platform. SDL seems to offer font hinting which woul…

That could possibly be a result of the image compression as well, no?

Shouldn't PNG be lossless by default ? (you could do some lossy pass to optimise but in that case you're probably better off using JPEG ?)

Re: Show HN: Lite – A small, fast text editor

#62
post #37
post #9

Fast and small is how they all start out. Feature complete and fast, now that is impressive.

There was a moment, years ago, when I used VS Code to edit text files because it was faster than Sublime and Notepad++. These days I open it begrudgingly.

Thats weird. I have never seen sublime slowdown unless there is a buggy extension

Re: Show HN: Lite – A small, fast text editor

#63

This is a very nice piece of work, and I think very important: it shows that it's very much possible to make slick interfaces without using javascript/web technologies. It's also just as hackable as something like vscode or vim. I hope there's a shift back to native or semi-native applications as opposed to web-based stuff. It's certainly not perfect yet (it has some scaling/rendering issues and is slow to open large…

I 100% agree with you, but the R&D time for something like this would eclipse an equivalent effort in Javascript/web tech.

There needs to be focus on building tooling that enables rapid development of native applications. GTK is a good example. Glade is a perfectly fine editor, but the underlying tooling for GTK is a mixed bag.

Re: Show HN: Lite – A small, fast text editor

#64
post #59

Could you share what data structure you use to keep the text in? I'm curious how text editors work, since you need fast inserts anywhere, is the text a linked list?

Check out this paper. It talks about the different ways to manage the data structures for text editors.

https://www.cs.unm.edu/~crowley/papers/sds.pdf

Re: Show HN: Lite – A small, fast text editor

#66

Very impressive. Font Rendering does not seem to be as crisp as needed for a text editor. (on Windows at least) I know Sublime is using DirectWrite to render fonts on Win32, this might be something to explore. Also, TrueType with subpixel antialiasing should give good results but might need some tweaking. I'll follow this project and I might use it as my main editor once it is more mature :)

When I run this editor on Windows 10 the text appears to me as crisp as in any other editor I have available.

Re: Show HN: Lite – A small, fast text editor

#68
See also howl, written in lua/moonscript and damn fast. Both of these seem to have a bit more of a community than textadept (and no dependency on scite).

I used textadept for a while, bought the book to support the author. It didn't work out for me.

Re: Show HN: Lite – A small, fast text editor

#69
It seems a lot faster than most.

But what it still doesn’t replace is my favorite editor EmEditor [0] (Windows only). Like every alternative I’ve checked out, Lite blocks for a long time when opening a multi-gb file. They aren’t FOSS and probably more expensive than any other text editor, but I’d love to know what they do to have such superior large file performance (the free version is fast, the paid version even supports streaming-loading of parts of the file).

[0]: https://www.emeditor.com/

Re: Show HN: Lite – A small, fast text editor

#70
post #59

Could you share what data structure you use to keep the text in? I'm curious how text editors work, since you need fast inserts anywhere, is the text a linked list?

My Lua isn't strong, but I think this is what you're looking for:

Data structure initialization: https://github.com/rxi/lite/blob/master/data/core/doc/init.l...

How insertion works here, which illuminates how the table is used: https://github.com/rxi/lite/blob/143f8867a13a35f5688ad7c9771...

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