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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

#71

Post by camgunz »

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.

There's not much difference between installing LSPs in VSCode and adding plugins to Vim using Pathogen, vim-plug, or the built-in plugin manager. It's not as if I wrote Pylint myself, I added "dense-analysis/ale" to my config and I was done.

I think you're coming from a place of strong familiarity with IDEs, but less familiarity with Vim. From my point of view, if you asked me to switch to VSCode, I probably wouldn't ever be as productive as I am now. This isn't because I was forced to spend hundreds of hours configuring--I was one of those people with a 5 line .vimrc for years--rather, it's because I have the ability to conform Vim to my way of thinking and working.

Some people do go ham with their configs, and it's super cool that that's possible (something you can't really do with IDEs). But I think most people probably install a few plugins/language servers, set a few variables for modelines or whatever, and they're good.

Re: Lite: A lightweight text editor written in Lua

#72

Post by xaduha »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #7
encryptluks2 wrote: post #2

This appears to be unmaintained.

So? It's a text editor. It's not like it's dependent on continued uptime of cloud services to function...

> It's a text editor.

It's a code editor. Without Language Server support.

EDIT: fork does support it though https://github.com/lite-xl/lite-xl-plugins, proving the point

Re: Lite: A lightweight text editor written in Lua

#73

Post by kamaal »

camgunz wrote: post #71
kamaal wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's not much difference between installing LSPs in VSCode and adding plugins to Vim using Pathogen, vim-plug, or the built-in plugin manager. It's not as if I wrote Pylint myself, I added "dense-analysis/ale" to my config and I was done. I think you're coming from a place of strong familiarity with IDEs, but less familiarity with Vim. From my point of view, if you asked me to switch to VSCode, I probably wouldn't…

>>There's not much difference between installing LSPs in VSCode and adding plugins to Vim using Pathogen, vim-plug, or the built-in plugin manager. It's not as if I wrote Pylint myself, I added "dense-analysis/ale" to my config and I was done.

You just explained the difference in this very statement yourself. Installing a plugin in vscode is a one step process. Installing it in vim is going on shopping spree for a car first, then using the car to go on shopping spree using that car. Along the way being knowledgeable enough to occasionally service the car.

>>I think you're coming from a place of strong familiarity with IDEs, but less familiarity with Vim.

Nearly my whole career is basically writing ginormous quantities of Perl/Python/C over terminals, and I happen to be one of the heaviest users of vi(m)/emacs, on Solaris/AIX machines, then FreeBSD and now Linux. I still believe macros are the most magical things you can every touch in any piece of tech.

These days I do nearly every other kind of development, and on several different platforms. And honestly speaking, merely hours of using vscode was enough to convince to use better tools to do my job, nothing wrong with that. Its just vscode does a lot more than being a code palette.

>>This isn't because I was forced to spend hundreds of hours configuring--I was one of those people with a 5 line .vimrc for years--rather, it's because I have the ability to conform Vim to my way of thinking and working.

As a old vi(m) user, my biggest productivity steals come from learning the native design choices, and learning to use them well.

This is the same philosophy I carry over to vscode as well. The thing here is magically enough vscode does a lot of things really well out of the box.

Re: Lite: A lightweight text editor written in Lua

#74

Post by aethy »

keyle wrote: post #58
aethy wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair enough; totally understand. If you ever can think of anything please don't hesitate to fire up an issue on the tracker. We're (very slowly) going through them.

any plans for an M1 native build?

Yes; people have built these before, so it's not really a problem with the source (I've even cross-compiled it for arm android); it's more just not part of the pipeline yet.

Given the prevalence of mac, this makes sense to support; but apple makes it really tricky to do things if you don't actually have mac hardware; even getting the x86_64 mac build built properly is a real struggle. So, we'll certainly try.

Re: Lite: A lightweight text editor written in Lua

#75

Post by anyfactor »

jmiskovic wrote: post #67
anyfactor wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 dedi…

Thank you for the recommendation. Just installed it is indeed fast. Will use it for a couple of weeks to see how things goes.

I have a separate 2009 ear 2 gb ram laptop which I am using as my note/comm device. I am using "mouse without borders" to control that device. I have a github repo as my note repo with VS code online. But I am looking for a better solution. I need to sync notes on both devices with vim bindings.

Re: Lite: A lightweight text editor written in Lua

#76

Post by aethy »

anyfactor wrote: post #75
jmiskovic wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 dedi…

Thank you for the recommendation. Just installed it is indeed fast. Will use it for a couple of weeks to see how things goes. I have a separate 2009 ear 2 gb ram laptop which I am using as my note/comm device. I am using "mouse without borders" to control that device. I have a github repo as my note repo with VS code online. But I am looking for a better solution. I need to sync notes on both devices with vim binding…

If you're at all interested (though I'm not doing releases yet), I have a fork called 'write-xl' (https://github.com/adamharrison/write-xl), which does have a git plugin that autocommits+pushes to git on double save (double ctrl+s), as well as a bunch of other standard markdown creative writing stuff (bolding on ctrl+b, spellcheck, etc..) . I use it on my android tablet for creative writing, and have disabled a bunch of the more expensive computations to get a smoother experience.

Are you interested in releases for something like that?

Re: Lite: A lightweight text editor written in Lua

#77

Post by camgunz »

kamaal wrote: post #73
camgunz wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's not much difference between installing LSPs in VSCode and adding plugins to Vim using Pathogen, vim-plug, or the built-in plugin manager. It's not as if I wrote Pylint myself, I added "dense-analysis/ale" to my config and I was done. I think you're coming from a place of strong familiarity with IDEs, but less familiarity with Vim. From my point of view, if you asked me to switch to VSCode, I probably wouldn't…

>>There's not much difference between installing LSPs in VSCode and adding plugins to Vim using Pathogen, vim-plug, or the built-in plugin manager. It's not as if I wrote Pylint myself, I added "dense-analysis/ale" to my config and I was done. You just explained the difference in this very statement yourself. Installing a plugin in vscode is a one step process. Installing it in vim is going on shopping spree for a ca…

> Installing it in vim is going on shopping spree for a car first, then using the car to go on shopping spree using that car.

Again, I think you're coming from a place of a lot of experience w/ VSCode and less in Vim. I needed PlantUML for something, so I:

- Googled for 'vim plantuml'

- Went to https://github.com/weirongxu/plantuml-previewer.vim

- Added "Plug 'weirongxu/plantuml-previewer.vim'" and "Plug 'akit/plantuml-syntax'" to my init.vim

- Ran ":source ~/.config/nvim/init.vim"

- Ran ":PlugInstall"

At least to me, this is the same as opening up the plugin catalog in VSCode and picking stuff.

---

I do a lot of varied development across different tech too: React, C, Svelte, Python/FastAPI/Django, Go, Lua, various SQLs, protobufs, JSON, CSVs... just all kinds of stuff. I've found Vim to not only be adequate, but excel. Maybe VSCode is great at all of these things, but that's not my point. My point is Vim works for me in the case you're describing, lots of different kinds of development on several different platforms.

> The thing here is magically enough vscode does a lot of things really well out of the box.

I think this is maybe the crux of our disagreement: you're pretty anti-config. I'm not wild about config either, some people's .vimrc files make me shudder, and when I learned about EMACS config bankruptcy I laughed out loud haha. But like, I like that I can set my default tabstop and shiftwidth, or change it per-language. I like that I can set hlsearch and incsearch. And I like that I can drop my config on almost any machine running and I'm in my element. There's a balance to strike, for sure, and maybe it is nice to sort of live out of a suitcase for your work life as it were. But for me, I've enjoyed decorating my work home.

Re: Lite: A lightweight text editor written in Lua

#78

Post by mega_tux »

samatman wrote: post #38
aethy wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair enough; totally understand. If you ever can think of anything please don't hesitate to fire up an issue on the tracker. We're (very slowly) going through them.

Personally, I'd like to see Lpeg integration, and support for Scintillua lexers: https://github.com/orbitalquark/scintillua Which would give fairly complete syntax coverage, and a good foundation for building more sophisticated tools. Lua patterns are fairly primitive, while the opposite is true of Lpeg.

If remember correctly, the [Howl editor](https://howl.io/about.html) has Lpeg and use of scintillua. It looks great and it's older but I'm not sure why Lite got more press coverage.

Re: Lite: A lightweight text editor written in Lua

#79

Post by anyfactor »

aethy wrote: post #76
anyfactor wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for the recommendation. Just installed it is indeed fast. Will use it for a couple of weeks to see how things goes. I have a separate 2009 ear 2 gb ram laptop which I am using as my note/comm device. I am using "mouse without borders" to control that device. I have a github repo as my note repo with VS code online. But I am looking for a better solution. I need to sync notes on both devices with vim binding…

If you're at all interested (though I'm not doing releases yet), I have a fork called 'write-xl' ( https://github.com/adamharrison/write-xl ), which does have a git plugin that autocommits+pushes to git on double save (double ctrl+s), as well as a bunch of other standard markdown creative writing stuff (bolding on ctrl+b, spellcheck, etc..) . I use it on my android tablet for creative writing, and have disabled a bun…

Sorry, for the late reply. I would definitely be interested. How can I try it?

I am not super familiar with lite-xl's plugin system and have only installed one plugin yet (the vim plugin).

Re: Lite: A lightweight text editor written in Lua

#80

Post by engfan »

aethy wrote: post #23
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.

Hey; I'm part of the dev community over at lite-xl; what're your top asks? I can see if we can throw it into the feature queue (though the queue is already pretty long).

Emacs standard/core key sequences (not just single keystrokes), e.g. C-x C-f to open files.
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