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Lite: A lightweight text editor written in Lua

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Re: Lite: A lightweight text editor written in Lua

#61

Post by Accacin »

kamaal wrote: post #59
nextaccountic wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To get Neovim kind of things to be anywhere near usable for modern day development work, you need to bolt a file browser, intellisense, command line section, remote editing section, container plugins, plugin installer, settings section etc etc on top of it Why? Neovim has multiple package managers. It has GUIs like https://github.com/neovide/neovide , it has support for LSP which can do something? Many people are c…

Yeah its basically a Do it Yourself kit, not sure if you got the message I wrote in my comment. That is a negative, not a positive. Majority of the people don't have the time, or in many cases competence to spend several man months/years building things like these. Even if you do, you still won't be close to the complete vscode experience.

It's a negative for you, but not for me :) I guess that's why different editors exist.

Re: Lite: A lightweight text editor written in Lua

#62

Post by likeclockwork »

kamaal wrote: post #59
nextaccountic wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To get Neovim kind of things to be anywhere near usable for modern day development work, you need to bolt a file browser, intellisense, command line section, remote editing section, container plugins, plugin installer, settings section etc etc on top of it Why? Neovim has multiple package managers. It has GUIs like https://github.com/neovide/neovide , it has support for LSP which can do something? Many people are c…

Yeah its basically a Do it Yourself kit, not sure if you got the message I wrote in my comment. That is a negative, not a positive. Majority of the people don't have the time, or in many cases competence to spend several man months/years building things like these. Even if you do, you still won't be close to the complete vscode experience.

You're not the target audience.

Re: Lite: A lightweight text editor written in Lua

#63

Post by KronisLV »

brettermeier wrote: post #6
stefanos82 wrote: post #3

The community decided to work on a fork of it and extend it further: https://github.com/lite-xl/lite-xl

There are many such projects, like Atom.io, whose support ends this year. I can't imagine this project will continue much further, even if I hope so. The only real open source project that is up today is Visual Studio Code, but that will continue to be maintained, I hope. Edit: Oh wait, I forgot Eclipse... That heavy thing :P

> There are many such projects, like Atom.io, whose support ends this year. I can't imagine this project will continue much further, even if I hope so.

I think I get what you mean here: over time there have been many editors that might have contributed ideas to others, yet didn't quite make it themselves, due to either competition, failing to capture a significant market share, or any number of other factors.

In my eyes, this is especially prevalent in regards to browser based (e.g. Electron) editors.

Atom, which you mentioned, fits into this category: https://atom.io/

There was also Brackets, which similarly fell by the wayside: https://brackets.io/

Here, Visual Studio Code largely got a large market share and quickly displaced other options in the eyes of most developers: https://code.visualstudio.com/

Even in regards to native editors, there are many smaller projects.

CudaText: https://cudatext.github.io/

Geany: https://www.geany.org/

Lite: (which this post is about)

Here, however, there are more platform-specific options, and many older projects that are still going strong: Sublime Text, Notepad++, Vim, Emacs and so on. Not all of those are open source, though.

That said, while using a lesser known editor always comes with the risk that it'll be deprecated and won't see language integrations/features/plugins that you need, an editor's popularity isn't the only measure of success.

Some people don't mind using niche projects, because they feel comfy or fit their workflows well and that's good enough.

> The only real open source project that is up today is Visual Studio Code, but that will continue to be maintained, I hope.

I wouldn't say that the larger projects are the only "real" ones, though. Admittedly, it is also reasonable to generally go for the larger projects, if you want a more stable long term experience, though.

Re: Lite: A lightweight text editor written in Lua

#64

Post by rob74 »

aethy wrote: post #49
tines wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any idea why it was forked?

rxi, lite's original author, considers lite to be complete, and isn't accepting new feature prs, which is fair enough. lite-xl was forked to keep the same general principle of simplicity but going a bit further with features.

So, keep it simple, but make it juuuust a little bit more complicated?

Re: Lite: A lightweight text editor written in Lua

#65

Post by anyfactor »

cturtle wrote: post #4

Lite (and lite-xl) is an amazing little editor. I especially love how fast the program opens. There’s just a few small things that bother me enough to keep me from using it, but I remain impressed by the code and how lightweight it is.

Exactly how fast is the startup time?

Faster than Sublime Text? Faster than gVim? Faster than Notepad.exe?

I don't like the word "fast" when it comes to describing the startup time of a text editor. Cold boot startup is a reasonable metric to benchmark reliably.

Some text editor out there is being marketed as "blazingly fast" because of the sole merit of the language they used to write it. But on a personal level, I found it to be as fast if not a bit slower than VS Code.

Re: Lite: A lightweight text editor written in Lua

#66

Post by jmiskovic »

rob74 wrote: post #64
aethy wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

rxi, lite's original author, considers lite to be complete, and isn't accepting new feature prs, which is fair enough. lite-xl was forked to keep the same general principle of simplicity but going a bit further with features.

So, keep it simple, but make it juuuust a little bit more complicated?

Original lite is a clean and elegant Lua implementation of text editor with quite a few features. Lite-xl does the last mile to better integrate with OS and does many features that were out of scope of lite, for example multiple cursors. In that sense lite-xl is like you say a bit more complicated, to make it actually useful for everyday tasks.

I use lite embedded in my own application, and lite-xl as a quick and competent note-taking application (with custom plugin to set filename to date + document header). Both are great to me in their own ways.

Re: Lite: A lightweight text editor written in Lua

#67

Post by jmiskovic »

anyfactor wrote: post #65
cturtle wrote: post #4

Lite (and lite-xl) is an amazing little editor. I especially love how fast the program opens. There’s just a few small things that bother me enough to keep me from using it, but I remain impressed by the code and how lightweight it is.

Exactly how fast is the startup time? Faster than Sublime Text? Faster than gVim? Faster than Notepad.exe? I don't like the word "fast" when it comes to describing the startup time of a text editor. Cold boot startup is a reasonable metric to benchmark reliably. Some text editor out there is being marketed as "blazingly fast" because of the sole merit of the language they used to write it. But on a personal level, I…

Here it opens faster than Sublime Text and much much faster than VSCode. Between Notepad and lite-xl I'd say the startup time difference isn't perceivable, and lite is far far more powerful.

It might not make a difference when using it as IDE - you fire it up in the morning and keep it opened. I use lite-xl as a second editor for occasional note entry and it starts up instantaneously. I found that using a second dedicated editor just for notes is excellent for window management and for cognitive context switching; I hated having notes buried somewhere in main editor tabs among open source code files.

Re: Lite: A lightweight text editor written in Lua

#69

Post by aethy »

rob74 wrote: post #64
aethy wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

rxi, lite's original author, considers lite to be complete, and isn't accepting new feature prs, which is fair enough. lite-xl was forked to keep the same general principle of simplicity but going a bit further with features.

So, keep it simple, but make it juuuust a little bit more complicated?

Yeah, lol. It's a balancing act. Ideally we give it just enough juice to allow for things like native plugins, and the easy expected core stuff like nice font rendering , process management, multicursors, etc.. and then leave the rest to a really robust plugin ecosystem that wasn't possible to the same degree under lite.

Re: Lite: A lightweight text editor written in Lua

#70

Post by engfan »

bbkane wrote: post #45
brettermeier wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean open source IDE's, real full featured developer environments for writing code. I don't talk about Open Source projects in general, but about competition for VS Code or Eclipse. There is something like Sublime Text, but it's not really open source and free. Edit: With Vim and stuff I get your point, but I would say it's not really comparable to an UI-based IDE, it is command line stuff. Even if many people pref…

https://lapce.dev/ is looking better every time I check

If a code editor does not support custom binding to sequences of keys (rather than single key presses), then its not really good for programmers.
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