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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

#111

Post by boxed »

self_awareness wrote: post #59
boxed wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can prompt yourself all the way to that. I don't have remote editing in my custom IDE because I never need that personally, but LSP/DSP, syntax highlighting, a built-in lazygit clone, git blame, soft wrap, find-in-files, etc all there: https://github.com/boxed/TurboKod

By "LSP support" I didn't mean "editor should call this API over HTTP and interpret whatever LSP server responds". It's a lot more than that, and LSP support in editors if often times broken. It's like saying that editor can have full AI support because it can send HTTP requests to an MCP server. But MCP server isn't the end of the problem, it's just a gateway to problems, just like LSP. For example, jdtls is often t…

Hmm. I guess there needs to be some kind of general test suite editors and LSPs can validate against?

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

#112

Post by kodoman »

__patchbit__ wrote: post #85
kstenerud wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 enviro…

Emacs and AI go hand in glove.

work amazingly well, almost perfect. I have not see anything come close to what you can do with emacs and the easy to which ai can be integrated and slotted into emacs.

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

#113

Post by not-so-darkstar »

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.

>Text editing is a solved problem.

I have this sentence so much.

Ken Thompson wrote UNIX using a line-editor (QED), judging by his work does it mean text editing was already solved in the 60s?

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

#114

Post by iso1631 »

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.

Defaults really shouldn't change. Each time I upgrade my OS, I get a new version of vim, and have to add more

Until about 2022 this was fine, then they introduced things like shifting the scrolling window, breaking mouse support, I think changing search to highlight text etc.

That's fine, but that means everytime I run it on any machine I have to now deploy a vimrc to fix it.

(I think I noticed the regressions starting in vim 8)

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

#115

Post by lynx97 »

somat wrote: post #109
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.

I wasn't trying to imply there is anything wrong with these practice projects. I have written at least two chess engines maybe. And I am seriouly considering to write an editor, so, there you have it. I kind of got sidetracked by implementing my own rope...

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

#116

Post by self_awareness »

rfgplk wrote: post #78
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.

https://pavelfatin.com/typing-with-pleasure/

It only means that >90% of text editors use the wrong UI toolkit for the job. We already had faster editors on the Amiga 500 (CygnusEd) than we have now. The fact that we don't have them now is that we regressed. We had it, and we lost it. It's an entirely different matter from not knowing how to do it!

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

#119

Post by rezonant »

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…

Don't forget the post score is a balance of up votes and down votes. This mean 2 down votes and 0 up votes registers the same (-1) as 10 down votes and 8 up votes (-1).

So there's no sense treating it like the community has forsaken you.

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

#120

Post by krzyzanowskim »

the Web is probably the most limited platform today to build custom text editor, in terms of text layout, interaction and all the small bits that may matter. It is still lacking proper API to interact with the OS input system outside the browser built-in text capabilities. That's why the approach is so painful, and everything else is "limited" by the HMTL and Browser implementation details.
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