Presenter here, feel free to ask questions.
Also thanks to the awesome Recurse Center for inviting me to speak and making the recording, and the audience for their great questions.
Xi: an editor for the next 20 years [video]
11–20 of 306 posts
Re: Xi: an editor for the next 20 years [video]
#12There finally starts to be consciousness about input and output latency for GUI applications. Xi sounds like an editor I'd love to use. Latency while typing is a jarring experience.
Xi backend repo: https://github.com/google/xi-editor Fuschia front-end client for Xi: https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/topaz/+/master/app/xi/
The official frontend is a Cocoa/Swift app: https://github.com/google/xi-mac
Re: Xi: an editor for the next 20 years [video]
#13VI(m) has been around for a long time now....
Indeed, and so has Emacs, in various forms (TECO, pure Lisp, and the modern C-and-Elisp version people use now).
Re: Xi: an editor for the next 20 years [video]
#14Xi looks great, has a very clever design, and clearly is a next generation platform for building a useful and powerful editor.
I'd love to see this project continue and be a success. I think there is plenty of room for yet another text editor.
Here's where I'm going to be a bit of a party pooper.
Pragmatically speaking all of the great stuff Raph is talking about doesn't really matter. What Raph cares about are the kind of things people who build text editors like to geek out on and again that's all great.
Imma let you finish but VSCode and Atom and the entire Electron ecosystem have once again proven that a sub-optimal but powerful platforms with low barriers to entry win most of the time.
I'm rarely impressed by software projects (close or open) and I'm even less often impressed by Microsoft but what they've been able to do with VSCode in such a short amount of time, and the VELOCITY with which they are continuing to move means that for all practical purposes I will probably be in an Electron based editor for the foreseeable future.
I'm not saying I don't want Xi to continue to grow and be as great as it can be, I'm just being pragmatic.
Re: Xi: an editor for the next 20 years [video]
#15Presenter here, feel free to ask questions. Also thanks to the awesome Recurse Center for inviting me to speak and making the recording, and the audience for their great questions.
Is there any particular reason json-rpc was used compared to more performant gRPC?
Re: Xi: an editor for the next 20 years [video]
#16I'm glad `xi` is separating the editor core from the UI. This feels more correct. So the GUI authors can work on the chrome and polish, while the editor team focus on performance and all the nitty-gritty memory operations.
NeoVim is moving towards this goal too. If you are a vimmer you should keep an eye on Oni (https://github.com/onivim/oni)
Re: Xi: an editor for the next 20 years [video]
#17Presenter here, feel free to ask questions. Also thanks to the awesome Recurse Center for inviting me to speak and making the recording, and the audience for their great questions.
Is there any particular reason json-rpc was used compared to more performant gRPC?
Universal out-of-the-box support in almost every language. The actual performance impact is subtle - for most core/front-end interactions, the messages are very small (because we put so much effort into minimizing the deltas). It's also the case that there are ridiculously fast JSON implementations out there. We did discover that Swift's is not one of them though. I have a prototype of a faster one using Codable; I'd consider upstreaming it to Swift but just need to find the time.
I'd consider a different serialization format, but it doesn't seem to be on the critical path for either performance or functionality, so I feel there are a lot of other things ahead of it.
Re: Xi: an editor for the next 20 years [video]
#18Xi creator did an amazing work implementing ropes ( https://github.com/google/xi-editor/tree/master/rust/rope ) The design documents ( https://github.com/google/xi-editor/tree/master/doc/rope_sci... ) explaining the concepts and implementation details is a must for those who want to understand its core. But I still have my regards regarding input latency being accredited only to the text editor. I recently switched b…
I must concur. With an equivalent vim setup and code files, nothing beats X11/suckless terminal on my OpenBSD machine. Comparing to that, even Alacritty looks like a slug.
I must say however that things are looking a bit better in iTerm2 when switching the Metal renderer on. It's just a shame that an Nvidia GPU on OSX is necessary to compete with my $1000 Lenovo with its crappy Intel chip on OpenBSD when it comes to text editing latency.
Re: Xi: an editor for the next 20 years [video]
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
Xi backend repo: https://github.com/google/xi-editor Fuschia front-end client for Xi: https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/topaz/+/master/app/xi/
The official frontend is a Cocoa/Swift app: https://github.com/google/xi-mac
> Native UI. Cross-platform UI toolkits never look and feel quite right. The best technology for building a UI is the native framework of the platform. On Mac, that’s Cocoa.
Thumbs up!
Re: Xi: an editor for the next 20 years [video]
#20Xi looks great, has a very clever design, and clearly is a next generation platform for building a useful and powerful editor. I'd love to see this project continue and be a success. I think there is plenty of room for yet another text editor. Here's where I'm going to be a bit of a party pooper. Pragmatically speaking all of the great stuff Raph is talking about doesn't really matter. What Raph cares about are the k…
You named some random things that have been around for short periods of time and claimed that "they won". I don't get it.