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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

#91

Post by Mashimo »

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #34
xedrac wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use emacs daily (with vim keybindings of course), but I completely understand why vscode is so popular. It's extremely easy to get started with, has features galore, and sane defaults. Emacs takes much more effort to get productive with, although this is improving with each release.

In general, I find that good defaults are rather undervalued and downplayed in the FOSS world. Configurability is great but without good defaults it can also be a liability. Would-be users will bounce off long before they like the software enough to pore through pages of options.

You speak from my heart. How many years did it take Debian to activate syntax highlighting for nano? Is the bash history still very short? So many low hanging fruits.

Same with no screenshots on github projects (For GUI projects)

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

#94

Post by shoobiedoo »

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.

To do what exactly? Everyone can churn out their own "kinda different but mostly the same" app thing?

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

#95

Post by Mashimo »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #47
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.

They jump to such tools, because they are not that invested in making and having the optimal tool for their job, and don't want to spend time setting things up. Especially, not in their own time, if they even do any projects in their own time at all. Lots and lots of people in IT are not that dedicated or passionate about the work.

Also another reason for having a single tool for a whole team: I can go to my coworkers desk for pair programming and have the same setup. I know the shortcuts, everyone has the same "run configurations" (start app, remote debug etc.), starting gradle tasks from UI, git comment style.

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

#96

Post by roarcher »

card_zero wrote: post #26
roarcher wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> You can curtail the bandwagon effect by complaining.

I've observed the opposite--complaints are often more heavily downvoted than the original downvoted comment. The one I originally replied to is an example, at least at the moment.

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

#97

Post by nxc18 »

jotato wrote: post #16
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…

I’m trying to phrase this to not be “that guy” but have you used Code on large code bases? Vscode on my m2 Mac routinely crashed when doing file search. That is why I switched to zed. I do miss the configurablity though

What counts as large? There can be some perf issues if you don’t exclude node_modules and build outputs from search, but I’ve never seen it crash.

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

#98

Post by boxed »

rfgplk wrote: post #75
boxed wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Heh thanks. It started as a joke idea, but now it's my daily driver. Especially the review mode is useful now that so much work goes through LLMs.

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

#99

Post by rootlocus »

wolletd wrote: post #43
ameminator wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes people down vote for no reason. Unfortunately, when one complains about it, they look like a whiner.

That's because they are whining about worthless internet points.

They're asking about a reaction. "What did I say wrong?" is a valid question IMO, even if wrong is subjective, it's part of the question.

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

#100

Post by gushogg-blake »

rfgplk wrote: post #81

The single most disappointing fact about (more or less) all text editors on the market today is how god awful their performance is. For most text editors, and when I say most I really do mean _most_, you can very easily start seeing noticeable lag and stuttering when making modifications, or even outright INPUT LAG when entering text. For very tiny buffers 1MB, 99% of them are unusable due to a) writes taking SECONDS…

Having written a canvas-based editor with some non-trivial features like Tree-sitter based multi-language syntax highlighting, performance is actually what impresses me the most about VS Code. Maybe my standards are different but I don't think I've ever noticed it lag even on large files.
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