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Fine, I'll build my own text editor

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

#71

Post by shjssusuus »

lelanthran wrote: post #62
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…

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

You being able / willing to maintain the same routine for over twenty years is not something I want to condemn or anything, but it is IMO a good indication that our lives are very different.

My whole life swifts gears every five years or so. I can’t imagine living in a world where I’d be needing a “script” to handle my “MP3 playing”. Besides vast changes in hardware and OS realities I regularly go from not listening to music for months to listening every day and besides getting those “MP3”s will get tiring because I won’t listen to the same music for years, I want variety, stuff I don’t know. Spotify is the only real option these days. In five years it will be different I’m sure.

If your life’s substrate is so stable and unchanging it supports decade long unaltered daily habits.. Let’s just say it’s not universal.

If we simplify everyone’s life to “just do X unaltered for twenty years” much if not all of modern life’s complexities would fall away. I can see how you can be dismissive of AI; it doesn’t change your underlying reality at all in fact it only introduces noise into your perfectly stable bubble.

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

#73

Post by graemep »

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 quite often upvote comments I disagree with that have been downvoted for no apparent reason. Sometimes I vouch for flagged comments for the same reason too. That said, the last one I vouched for was flagged again and so were all the commentor's other comments.

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

#74

Post by golf1052 »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #35
nxc18 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you work on web tech (and who doesn’t these days?) VS Code has the advantage of using the same tech stack you’re already familiar with. If you need to debug a problem, just open devtools. If you want to run a performance profile, do the same. If you want to fix a bug in the extension you’re using, just open a PR and fix it. It is a very flexible system and still quite fast and easy to configure. I’ve been trying Z…

VSCode's problem isn't that it's slow, it's that it's bloated . It takes a bit over 1GB memory (in my testing) to open the same files that Sublime can do in just 200-300 MB. In my book, it is simply not acceptable to waste my memory like that.

I just tried opening a 730 MB file in both and VSCode's usage was just around 2 GB while Sublime's usage (fresh install) was over 3 GB. This is even with my normal VSCode extensions enabled (91 currently).

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

#75

Post by rfgplk »

boxed wrote: post #30
inatreecrown2 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Actually looks really good

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

#76

Post by Cthulhu_ »

cwnyth wrote: post #17
asabla wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used sublime text over so many years. Still find it to be a marvel when it comes to large text files, and how well it still handles them

I still don't see a point in switching from Sublime to VS Code. If I need to SSH in to my server, I have options there. But Sublime does everything I need it to do and it does it faster and cleaner and just better than the alternatives.

At this point the main advantage VS Code has is its ecosystem. I tried to switch back to VS Code a while ago but most of its plugins are outdated / haven't been updated in five years. It's not the whole story of course, but it just feels like it's no longer able to keep up.

In hindsight, part of me wishes I stuck with it for longer. I enjoyed working in it in a way that later editors didn't capture. That said, counterpoint, that was when I wrote a lot of JS in the early NodeJS days, when things like typing or even cmd+clicking on references didn't reliably work because there was no standard module system. Memorizing filenames and the like was still important then.

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

#78

Post by rfgplk »

self_awareness wrote: post #6

Text editing is a solved problem. It's not about the style of cursor, or if rope is used or not. We already have answers to that. It's about remote editing, LSP support.

> Text editing is a solved problem.

Not even close. Obvious from the fact that about >90% of text editors out there have visible _lag_ when inputting or modifying text. Visible _LAG_. (see emacs, nvim in certain configurations, vscode, sublime, etc)

A text editor should be running at DRAM read/write speeds nowadays (amortized), which effectively means that any form of edits you do should be imperceptible to you.

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

#79

Post by zahlman »

Oddly enough, I've recently started doing a text editor myself. (I'm using Tkinter, and I am implementing a Vim-like editing system with key commands and modes and such, but substantially different from actual Vim.)
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