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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

#261

Post by crazygringo »

jiggawatts wrote: post #245
crazygringo wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno why you haven't encountered it, but it's a real thing. I remember using one editor perhaps 8 years ago, and if I tried multi-cursor mode with more than ~40 insertion points (totally reasonable to edit 40 similar lines at a time), it took a couple of seconds to register each keypress. Similarly, other editors wind up choking on syntax highlighting, or large files, or find & replace, or documentation lookup, or…

I regularly use Notepad, Notepad++, TextPad, VS Code, Visual Studio, and the PowerShell ISE. I haven't had any issues with any of them, even when block-selecting or multi-cursor editing. Notably, they're all Windows native apps written in C++, with the exception of VS Code, which is partially JavaScript. I've noticed that some of them struggle with huge (1 GB) files, but editing such as large file is a somewhat stran…

I mean, that's great for you. You're just lucky I guess.

But I hope what I described makes sense to you. It's not about 1 GB files at all, it's about regular files. My suspicion is that it's mostly "side features" that start to grind when they get beyond a certain point.

To be more specific with one example, I've used another code editor that a simple "find all" operation will populate a results box. If you mess up your regex to be accidentally super-generic and it finds 100,000 results in your 20K-line file, it takes half a minute to load the results into the results box and become responsive again, with no "cancel" button.

Similarly weird edge cases in a syntax highlighter interacting with a half-finished line of code of yours causes something to choke up. That kind of thing.

Do you understand now? Again, you seem to just be lucky that you haven't encountered this kind of thing.

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

#262

Post by ilrwbwrkhv »

urlwolf wrote: post #74

Typing latency as measured by typometer is quite high on kwin (no compositing). Both kate and Howl do much better. And pycharm. Great start, but it's not defeating vscode in the one aspect I care about: typing latency. Kate is a surprisingly good/fast editor nowadays.

do you mean vs code has low latency?

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

#263

Post by crazygringo »

the_hoser wrote: post #219
crazygringo wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're missing the point. When it comes to products, people's average evaluation is the objective answer. Because people's evaluations are what lead to usage, purchase, subscriptions, etc. There is no other "objective" answer. There's nothing subjective about it. What users think about your product is your product in the marketplace. That's the entire meaning of "the customer is always right". Satisfying user demand…

"The customer is always right." was a marketing slogan used by retailers in the late 19th century to convince people to shop in their stores. It doesn't mean anything.

That's its origin, but it's certainly been repurposed today in product design to mean a very real thing, which is that the customer will buy what the customer wants, regardless of whether you think they should or not.

In other words, there's no objective product goodness/badness. Only what the customer wants. In that sense, the customer (market) is always right.

Inexperienced restauranteurs often experience the same shock. You don't cook the food you want to make, or that you think people ought to eat -- you cook the food people want to eat. Otherwise you'll go out of business.

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

#265

Post by nwienert »

jcelerier wrote: post #165
nwienert wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to be the one drawing the line saying Electron isn’t vs something like this is. Is a WASM app that renders to WebGL native? I guess the point is native should probably mean “using the toolkit the OS provides” and we should just use “performant” in most cases.

just having the UI definition given in native code already is a gigantic boost in terms of latency since you don't have to setup a whole javascript engine and HTML DOM to reach actual UI code though, just pass a pointer to the root of your widget tree to your paint function and see magic happening. e.g. compare Telegram made in Qt Widgets with Signal made with Electron - the latter is incredibly slow to come up (and…

Again you just hand waved “native”. The UI definition here is in Lua, it then calls a backend that renders to the system, not sure if that part is C or not.

But... this setup may be a lot simpler, but no different from Electron in that they are both scripting languages that eventually use C to render.

Also, you can’t just cherry pick an example. It’s very possible to write pretty fast interfaces using v8. Certainly going straight html/css is slow, but that’s not necessary and VSCode is a great counter example (not crazy fast, but faster than many “native” apps).

I think the HN crowd has invested so much emotional energy into hating electron they literally can’t think straight about it, including just admitting that this is no more native than any electron app.

In fact, if you take native to mean some combination of “using OS APIs” and “accessibility support and behavior similar to the OS”, then electron wins hands down because of the latter part: font rendering, text selection, input controls, copy and paste, everything mostly just works like native. It’s the Lua app that I’d say is far less native. It’s just a bit faster.

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

#266

Post by z3t4 »

jiggawatts wrote: post #244
leeoniya wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you may find this interesting: "Why are 2D vector graphics so much harder than 3D?" https://blog.mecheye.net/2019/05/why-is-2d-graphics-is-harde...

I think I've read that article already! Computer graphics has always been an interest of mine, and I've written 3D engines before. Admittedly, not a 2D text engine, but I keep up with the research. The difference between the blog post you linked and a programmer's text editor is night & day. There's a huge difference between arbitrary 2D graphics and fixed-width text rendering. The former has crazy complex corner-cas…

We are very sensitive when it comes to text. 3d games doesn't need to be accurate, compared to text that needs sub pixel perfection. 3d is closer to the metal and thus faster. Ive made a web based text editor that parse the entire file on each key press to get language intellisense and semantic coloring, that however only takes 1ms. Rendering one full screen of text takes around 10ms. That's how slow text rendering is. Taking into account random GC pauses and graphics layering overhead there's little budget left for parenthesis matching highlighting, auto completion suggestions, auto quote insertion, spellchecking, etc.

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

#267

Post by fareesh »

pradeepchhetri wrote: post #229
fareesh wrote: post #106

I would really like something as simple as windows notepad which syncs to my devices, where the app is equally simple. A no frills fulltext search feature would be nice too. I currently use Google Keep, which is incredibly slow

Have you tried Notion( https://www.notion.so/ )?

- No linux client

- Too many frills

- Too slow

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

#270

Post by the_hoser »

crazygringo wrote: post #263
the_hoser wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The customer is always right." was a marketing slogan used by retailers in the late 19th century to convince people to shop in their stores. It doesn't mean anything.

That's its origin, but it's certainly been repurposed today in product design to mean a very real thing, which is that the customer will buy what the customer wants, regardless of whether you think they should or not. In other words, there's no objective product goodness/badness. Only what the customer wants. In that sense, the customer (market) is always right. Inexperienced restauranteurs often experience the same…

It's created an inappropriate sense of entitlement for many consumers. You're absolutely right that a product will fail if people don't want it, but it's also true that people often don't get the products that they want because there's no way to deliver that product to them and turn a profit. In these cases, the customer is most certainly not always right.

It's a bad slogan that only portrays half of the reality of the situation.

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