Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Fine, I'll build my own text editor

dbushell.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 264 posts

Re: Fine, I'll build my own text editor

#21

Post by stillpointlab »

I literally just got Fable to write me a text editor. Well, I'll be honest, I got it to wrap the KDE KTextEditor library which is like 90% of a text editor.

I had been using Kate which was what an LLM suggested was the closest to something like Sublime Text on Fedora. But even Kate, which was great, had too much going on.

So I asked Fable to take the text editor part (KTextEditor) and wrap it using Rust with an LSP server. It took about 2 days but I have a tiny, super fast little editor. I use Sway to manage things like tabs, fuzzel stands in for fuzzy file search, broot stands in for an explorer view. I've already added Markdown preview support. I might get around to some basic git integration.

Then I got it to turn that little editor into a note-taking interface that I have bound to a Mod-m key binding to keep notes in ~/Notes.

We live in wild times. I hope everyone is taking advantage while they can.

Re: Fine, I'll build my own text editor

#22

Post by 01100011 »

anon291 wrote: post #3

I am being pushed to use vs code right now by my team, but we already have a fully programmable and scriptable editor called emacs that is 100000x better. I don't understand why everyone just switches to these random tools. Text editing is a solved problem. Most of the supposed advantages of these tools is just a configuration of vim or emacs.

90% of software is just new people not learning from the past and making/using some new thing.

Get off my lawn.

Re: Fine, I'll build my own text editor

#23

Post by globalnode »

The problem with writing an editor if you intend to use it for coding, is not the text editor itself, that's rather simple. The problem is code completion and syntax highlighting. Then whatever system you try to implement becomes just as bloated as the bloatware you're trying to replace.

Re: Fine, I'll build my own text editor

#25

Post by kstenerud »

anon291 wrote: post #3

I am being pushed to use vs code right now by my team, but we already have a fully programmable and scriptable editor called emacs that is 100000x better. I don't understand why everyone just switches to these random tools. Text editing is a solved problem. Most of the supposed advantages of these tools is just a configuration of vim or emacs.

Because very few people actually care about the things that emacs has to offer.

Tools like VS Code do the job well enough for the majority of people, with just enough configurability and much greater ease-of-use.

Emacs has a similar problem to Lisp: Infinite configurability and expandability (plus the lack of a "blessed set" standard that people actually like enough to use out-of-the-box) means that everyone's environment and tooling ends up becoming incompatible with each other.

Re: Fine, I'll build my own text editor

#26

Post by card_zero »

roarcher wrote: post #8
pmkary wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

A word of unsolicited advice: HNers are a prickly lot and will downvote without explanation because you stepped on some unknowable pet peeve of theirs that probably nobody else in the world shares. This happens all the time but you likely only notice when you happen to get downvoted before any upvotes and end up at 0 or -1. If your comment is reasonable, it will usually come back up. But complaining about downvotes w…

I don't think that's certain at all. What affects votes is:

1. Being near the top of the page

2. Having a downvote already

You can curtail the bandwagon effect by complaining.

Re: Fine, I'll build my own text editor

#28

Post by inatreecrown2 »

stillpointlab wrote: post #21

I literally just got Fable to write me a text editor. Well, I'll be honest, I got it to wrap the KDE KTextEditor library which is like 90% of a text editor. I had been using Kate which was what an LLM suggested was the closest to something like Sublime Text on Fedora. But even Kate, which was great, had too much going on. So I asked Fable to take the text editor part (KTextEditor) and wrap it using Rust with an LSP s…

do you want to share your text editor?

Re: Fine, I'll build my own text editor

#29

Post by qsera »

pmkary wrote: post #7
pmkary wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Literally I only praised and wrote how much I love something and how beautiful text editors are. And there are people who cannot stand this :))) oh wow!

Seriously. What is so beautiful about text editors? (I am not the downvoter btw).

Re: Fine, I'll build my own text editor

#30

Post by boxed »

inatreecrown2 wrote: post #28
stillpointlab wrote: post #21

I literally just got Fable to write me a text editor. Well, I'll be honest, I got it to wrap the KDE KTextEditor library which is like 90% of a text editor. I had been using Kate which was what an LLM suggested was the closest to something like Sublime Text on Fedora. But even Kate, which was great, had too much going on. So I asked Fable to take the text editor part (KTextEditor) and wrap it using Rust with an LSP s…

do you want to share your text editor?

I also had Claude write me an IDE: https://github.com/boxed/TurboKod

It's obviously not for everyone, but if you fork that repo and prompt your favorite model to make it look and feel like you want, you can get something extremely useful very fast.

Post reply on HN