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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

#101

Post by hk__2 »

shoobiedoo wrote: post #94
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?

> "kinda different but mostly the same"

Isn’t that the description of our whole lives?

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

#103

Post by socksy »

tzs wrote: post #31

Sometime around 1980-81 I had a part time job while an undergraduate in college doing system programming/admin for the Caltech High Energy Physics department. Rob Pike was the system programmer/admin before me when he was a grad student in high energy physics, but he left to go work at Bell Labs. One day another student, Karl Heuer, and I both were engaging in the common programmer pastime of complaining about the sc…

It's amazing just how many stories of Rob Pike seem to show him being both a dick and wrong

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

#104

Post by kodoman »

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.

The terribleness of emacs defaults is over done. I still use p n postfix key combinations to go to previous and next and f b postfix for forwards and backwards, it's just what you get used to, C-w to c-y to kill and yank are also fine and it's not that much to ask the user to change things if they don't like them.

Not to mention all the emacs distros that now exist for people who do want a very different configuration. I maintain that default emacs is fine though and if the user wishes to get really in tune with emacs, emacs is one of the most pleasant environments to learn thanks to help pages and how flexible elisp is to evaluate and poke and prod around with and how easy it is to debug.

I think most modern editors will try and introduce mutlithreading and other features that emacs did not do due to it's age and is better for it as it means elisp code just works together and less worry about synchronization and other bits that would exist with more modern ways of approaching the problem (not saying the approach it's self is bad, but for an editor emacs and the decisions around it are largely very good and surprisingly so)

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

#105

Post by gushogg-blake »

qbane wrote: post #36

Hope the author finds CodeMirror 6 to be a solid foundation. It uses the same contenteditable-based approach but abstracts away all the browser-specific edge cases and quirks for you.

It's an amazing project but I always found the docs lacking. Maybe you'd have to sit down with the code for a while or ask AI to explain it, but there were concepts, like "facets", that seemed crucial but were never really explained. I also found the way the docs sites were structured to be really frustrating and confusing - it always felt like there were pages missing and I was never sure if I was on the right page for the thing I was trying to read about (or even on the right site, as it's split into multiple projects).

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

#106

Post by badsectoracula »

vintermann wrote: post #37

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…

I still use nedit pretty much daily whenever i want to note something down - basically kinda like Notepad (though obviously nedit is much more featureful... not that i use the extra features though). Win+R (my Window Maker shortcut for showing the Run dialog) -> nedit is something that i do pretty much automatically when i want to take a quick note.

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

#107

Post by dist-epoch »

socksy wrote: post #103
tzs wrote: post #31

Sometime around 1980-81 I had a part time job while an undergraduate in college doing system programming/admin for the Caltech High Energy Physics department. Rob Pike was the system programmer/admin before me when he was a grad student in high energy physics, but he left to go work at Bell Labs. One day another student, Karl Heuer, and I both were engaging in the common programmer pastime of complaining about the sc…

It's amazing just how many stories of Rob Pike seem to show him being both a dick and wrong

He created Go because he believed that the average Google programmer is too stupid to program in C++, and he didn't like Java, the other language created to address this problem.

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

#109

Post by somat »

lynx97 wrote: post #80

So apparently every half-serious coder will write at least one chess engine and a text editor. Any other program type which gets implemented over-and-over again?

Static-site generators.

Nothing wrong with that, I like to think there are some apps you should probably make yourself, like the blacksmith apprentice making their own tools.

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

#110

Post by kodoman »

nxc18 wrote: post #14
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.

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…

using a js engine is anything other then a selling point IMO. I don't hate javascript but sure hate the ecosystem and the tendencies of js or ts developers today. I would not want that approach in my editor at all. elisp and js actually share some things in common and their is no reason a developer would struggle to learn elisp and once they do they will probably like it and the very light weight emacs rendering system, everything is text is a fantastic paradigm for a text editor or an IDE. web technologies like Html/js are actually too complex and can do things you don't actually want your editor to do when rendering bits of interface. I want text and nothing else and I want to hook into text renders easily and without having to worry about timings asyncs and other features of the modern web interface. It's that emacs is simpler and understands that one does not want everything a modern browser can do.
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