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Show HN: Elecxzy – A lightweight, Lisp-free Emacs-like editor in Electron

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Re: Show HN: Elecxzy – A lightweight, Lisp-free Emacs-like editor in Electron

#31

Post by throwaway27448 »

hypersoar wrote: post #22

I don't mean to tear down your project at all. If you want to make an editor, I think that's great. I'm actually working on a text editor of my own. But I think that you've fundamentally misunderstood the appeal of Emacs. It has little to do with the key-bindings, or even any particular part of the user interface. Many people don't even use them. Doom, a very popular Emacs distribution, enables Vim-like bindings by d…

> But I think that you've fundamentally misunderstood the appeal of Emacs. It has little to do with the key-bindings, or even any particular part of the user interface.

You mean the default keybindings for readline and macos? I think you're greatly overestimating the extent to which you can speak for other emacs users. I love the default keybindings and never even thought to change them, and I very much understand being leery of the lisp runtime. The modal editing of vim, doom etc always struck me as pointless typing and too much like issuing commands rather than making typing an extension of your fingers.

This isn't for me (electron—blah; I have microemacs etc), but I 100% get it.

Re: Show HN: Elecxzy – A lightweight, Lisp-free Emacs-like editor in Electron

#33

Post by mrweasel »

rasur wrote: post #14

With respect, you should learn Lisp - it will allow you to turn Emacs into whatever you want. In my opinion just keeping the Emacs keybindings but dropping all the other advantages of Emacs is missing the point entirely, and using Electron instead is just - as the saying goes - "adding insult to injury".

I was going to ask. I'm not big on Emacs, but ripping out Lisp isn't that removing the part that makes Emacs Emacs? Like, they removed the important part.

Re: Show HN: Elecxzy – A lightweight, Lisp-free Emacs-like editor in Electron

#34

Post by xigoi »

throwaway27448 wrote: post #31
hypersoar wrote: post #22

I don't mean to tear down your project at all. If you want to make an editor, I think that's great. I'm actually working on a text editor of my own. But I think that you've fundamentally misunderstood the appeal of Emacs. It has little to do with the key-bindings, or even any particular part of the user interface. Many people don't even use them. Doom, a very popular Emacs distribution, enables Vim-like bindings by d…

> But I think that you've fundamentally misunderstood the appeal of Emacs. It has little to do with the key-bindings, or even any particular part of the user interface. You mean the default keybindings for readline and macos? I think you're greatly overestimating the extent to which you can speak for other emacs users. I love the default keybindings and never even thought to change them, and I very much understand be…

Vim keybindings are not optimized for typing, but for editing.

Re: Show HN: Elecxzy – A lightweight, Lisp-free Emacs-like editor in Electron

#35

Post by kurouna »

maybewhenthesun wrote: post #5

lisp-free emacs to me is like tomato-free ketchup? I mean, the main reason to use an editor with such arcane keybindings is the way you can live-edit the running editor? So for me personally there's no demand. But still, if it scratches your personal itch, there are most probably others who would like that itch scratched. It might also because I rarely have to use windows these days and in linux there's not much 'set…

You might be right! For those who love Emacs for its Lisp environment, this editor is probably not useful at all.

I just made this for people like me, who instinctively press C-f instead of the right arrow key, but just want to start typing immediately without any setup.

As for the input latency, it might indeed be slower than native editors like Notepad. However, by using a custom Piece Table and virtual rendering, I personally don't feel the delay on a modern PC, and I am very satisfied with the responsiveness for my daily use.

Re: Show HN: Elecxzy – A lightweight, Lisp-free Emacs-like editor in Electron

#36

Post by megamalloc »

Many, many years ago I was a dedicated Emacs user.

My recollection is that there was a very lightweight binary that would launch a single window utilising an existing Emacs process that (of course) you usually alrwady had running, to show a dedicated window for editing a single file - which is Notepad's raison d'etre. So as a Notepad replacement I can't really see a place in the world for something like this.

I am not in any way competent to comment on CJK issues in Emacs as I can't do any of those languages. I can appreciate the desire to address those.

To answer OP's question, I doubt there is much demand for a knobbled Emacs like this, but on the other hand, I think you should do open source software primarily for yourself because doing it for others' sake will grind you down. But if what really pleases you is to make an impact for a lot of other people, directing your energies into solving CJK issues in Emacs itself would be a lot more impactful (though I am sure a lot more challenging too).

Re: Show HN: Elecxzy – A lightweight, Lisp-free Emacs-like editor in Electron

#37

Post by rpdillon »

stevekemp wrote: post #25
hypersoar wrote: post #22

I don't mean to tear down your project at all. If you want to make an editor, I think that's great. I'm actually working on a text editor of my own. But I think that you've fundamentally misunderstood the appeal of Emacs. It has little to do with the key-bindings, or even any particular part of the user interface. Many people don't even use them. Doom, a very popular Emacs distribution, enables Vim-like bindings by d…

I have to agree, if only because when I hear "the emacs keybindings" I wonder, does that mean the defaults that nobody uses, or the ones I've carried around for 20+ years? As a quick example "M-g" ("Esc" [pause] "g") has been bound to "goto-line" in my emacs startup file for at least 20 years, and is something I press without even really thinking about. There are many default keys (such as C-x C-f for finding a file)…

I use default keybindings, FWIW. But I agree that my ability to shape Emacs into exactly the tool I want with lisp is the main draw for me.

Re: Show HN: Elecxzy – A lightweight, Lisp-free Emacs-like editor in Electron

#39

Post by kurouna »

throwa356262 wrote: post #9

What I need is an emacs with more lisp and less javascript. If you want a really lean emacs-like editor, there is always mg and microemacs. Edit: not trying to be a dick or a gatekeeper. This is HN, all ideas should be welcome including the one that dont make sense to some people. And always interesting to see contributions from Japan.

Thank you for the warm welcome!

To answer the "Why Electron and JS?" question from the thread: honestly, it didn't start as a strict technical decision. It started purely out of my curiosity as a software engineer.

I use VS Code at work, and I just wanted to see what its underlying technology (Electron) was like to build with. Once I started playing with it, I realized it was a remarkably solid and flexible platform. That inspired me to try building something I had always wanted: a zero-setup, lightweight Emacs-like editor.

As a happy side-effect, using web technologies allowed me to use the Japanese IME without any stress, just like Windows Notepad. Unlike Windows Emacs, which sometimes requires special configurations, I was able to make it work just by running elecxzy.exe.

So while it lacks the beautiful Lisp ecosystem of true Emacs (like Lem), it started as a fun technical exploration that eventually became my daily driver!

Re: Show HN: Elecxzy – A lightweight, Lisp-free Emacs-like editor in Electron

#40

Post by sanskritical »

gozzoo wrote: post #24
sanskritical wrote: post #15

If you want an example of an actually lightweight modern desktop editor to take inspiration from, try zed.dev Zed is written in Rust, insanely fast, consumes virtually no resources, has an Emacs input mode (which I use exclusively) and despite not having the greatest support for Emacs LISP (only via limited third party extension, its singular flaw) has replaced emacs-ng as my daily driver.

I’ll never get why people hype up Zed. Sublime Text already has all the same perks—and beats Zed at the very things it claims to improve. Sure, it might not have every advanced feature, but for “vibe coders” who don’t need a full IDE and just want to skim or tweak generated code, Sublime Text is the better choice.

Someone already mentioned the hoarderware issue, which is big for me, so I'll give my other concern.

Years ago on Twitter I believe it was lcamtuf that asked "Would you pipe a text file into less?" and Dan Kaminsky (RIP) replied -- "Not now that you asked if I would, no." The obvious implication is that people largely didn't think of simple text parsing utilities as places of concern for security issues, but that is not really in line with reality. I work with crypto and it seriously matters if I got owned in that I can lose amounts of money entrusted to me that I could never hope to recover or repay. I believe it is a basic fiduciary duty to use as much code as possible written in safer languages. Sublime Text is a massive C++ app and I can't look at the code. I am going to preferentially treat the Rust app as better. There's plenty of CVEs in editors. If I could I would replace every binary written in an unsafe language on every machine I ever use.

My editor touches every bit of infrastructure I have. I use it every day to change the behavior of production machines. I have no choice to treat my editor as trusted. So it needs to be trustworthy to the maximum degree possible.

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