Show HN: Lite – A small, fast text editor

Post by cwyers » Sat, May 09, 2020, 7:25 PM UTC

mmm_grayons wrote: post #56

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…

Post by [deleted] » Sat, May 09, 2020, 7:29 PM UTC

rxi wrote: post #35

tambourine_man wrote: post #20

So there's no GUI toolkit? Everything is drawn with Simple DirectMedia Layer?

Not even that: SDL just provides a pixel buffer, the application draws everything itself per-pixel. Lite uses a technique I refer to as "cached software rendering" which allows the application code to be written as if it's doing a fullscreen-redrawn when it wants to update, the renderer cache (rencache.c) then works out which regions actually need to be redrawn at the end of the frame and redraws only those. You can…

Post by [deleted] » Sat, May 09, 2020, 7:30 PM UTC

badsectoracula wrote: post #42

rxi wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not even that: SDL just provides a pixel buffer, the application draws everything itself per-pixel. Lite uses a technique I refer to as "cached software rendering" which allows the application code to be written as if it's doing a fullscreen-redrawn when it wants to update, the renderer cache (rencache.c) then works out which regions actually need to be redrawn at the end of the frame and redraws only those. You can…

FWIW this is basically "dirty rectangles" which was a very common technique for avoiding full screen updates in games back when the hardware wasn't fast enough to do that.

Post by [deleted] » Sat, May 09, 2020, 7:34 PM UTC

cwyers wrote: post #71

mmm_grayons wrote: post #56

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…

It's written in Lua and doesn't use the OS GUI APIs and widgets anywhere. I'm not sure I understand what makes this more "native" than Javascript.

Post by tzekid » Sat, May 09, 2020, 7:36 PM UTC

johnchristopher wrote: post #7

Looks nice. But upon starting it up I lost all windows decorations (KDE), had to restart my session and lost the things I was working on in my terminals. How can launching an app cripples the whole desktop ? (not that this have anything to do with the app to me, it's a plasma thing) First thing I look for was support for vim keybinding, could neovim be used as the backend editor ?