61–70 of 264 posts
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.
So which one?
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…
I dunno, hey. I'm not about to yolo my way for all things that are important. For things that are unimportant I will just use the existing stuff.
The goldilocks zone (things that an irritation, but not important), sure, I'll vibe a little Python/shell whatever, but pre-LLMs, I was already reducing my friction with little scripts anyway.
For example, in a recent comment of mine I posted a little wish script that I created in 2002, to have a simple GUI mp3 player, which I have been using daily since 2002.
I still miss NEdit. Around 2001 when I started getting into Linux seriously, I was also reading a lot about cults - Scientology had recently, infamously, forced Slashdot to take down a comment about their secret practices. One of the things I read was that a common cult trick was to demand that people re-learn basic skills so that they do them the "right" way, like reading (Scientology did that), eating (chew X times…
GUIs are more intuitive but the options have to be visual so they are always cluttered in my opinions. For most software it doesn't really matter but I want my text editor to let me type without latency or visual clutter and almost nothing else is anywhere near as important. I've tried GUIs many times (vscode, sublime, atom, zed, bbedit, intellij) but I always end up back in vim with CLI git to the point that I get asked in screen share sessions to just use a GUI.
It's all personal preference
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What features did you end up implementing? I assume tree-sitter based highlighting, lsp, and maybe fuzzy search? Did you implement anything different that you didn't get out of existing editors that you tried?
Very few features on purpose. Every editor I tested had all the features I added and more. It is worth noting that KTextEditor is a fully-featured library. Like, line numbers+gutter (for eventual git status icons), undo/redo, save, warn on exit for unsaved changes, syntax highlighting, color theming. It does 95% of what we'd all call "editing". But it doesn't do things like tab interface, project explorer, terminal p…
Not a criticism just an interesting sign of the times that this is ambiguous and before vibe coding it would have been obvious from the context which you mean (deliberately minimal) but now it could just as easily mean that Fable implemented features without asking you
Text editors are like mechanical watches or fountain pens. There is just so much beauty in the machinery that makes them. For me, there are hardly any other modules that are this satisfying to watch being made. Each time I find a new one (a good one like this), with everything on ropes and rendering and I-beam placement computations and ... it feels like a Christmas gift.
Yes, but... On one otherwise tranquil morning Master Foo's meditations were disturbed by cries of distress. Finding that they came from one of the novices, he inquired "What is the difficulty here?" The novice replied, "I am frustrated by my tools. Every day I must use many different editors because neither Emacs nor vi nor any of these other random editors has all the features I require." Master Foo nodded. "How," h…
Sometimes there are genuine reasons to build a text editor. It's really hard to build a full WYSIWYG graphics editor without modelling text layout yourself, especially for more advanced work like properly curving the text.
Recent and related: They don't make 'em like Sublime Text anymore - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49209354 - Aug 2026 (13 comments)
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.