Live data from Hacker News

A new Light Table experience

chris-granger.com

141–150 of 152 posts

Re: A new Light Table experience

#141
post #97
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and ParEdit

Seconded. If you're going to have any success in converting people who write Clojure code away from Emacs, you're going to need to copy its good parts. Nice redesign though.

"If you're going to have any success in converting people who write Clojure code away from Emacs"

I'd say it would already be great if they could bring newcomers to Clojure: people who are rebutted because of Emacs.

As to me I'd need, at least: ace-jump-mode, paredit, the powerful macro system and the ability to create my own rules for highlighting / overlaying text as easily as from Emacs.

Short of that I'll keep using Emacs. Now what I think: it's probably easier to add LT's "instarepl" to Emacs than to add one million lines of elisp code to LT so...

I fully expect someone to hack a "Clojure instarepl" Emacs mode one of these days.

Re: A new Light Table experience

#142

This is a very pretty editor. That said, I have no freaking idea what I'm supposed to do. I've been messing around with it for around 15 minutes now, and I still don't understand it. I added a PHP website folder and got no code hinting or anything else beyond "here is the match for your parenthesis" for either PHP or Javascript. This also resulted in my "navigate" tab being filled with SVN meta-files. I am quite conf…

I haven't tried this version yet, but I had the same experience with the previous release.

Why not spending a bit of time releasing a simple tutorial, showcasing the differences with normal editors ?

Right now it's really too "metaphysic".

Re: A new Light Table experience

#143

Apart from the other obvious praises, I just want to thank you for making something so beautiful with Clojure as a first class citizen.

I have completely the opposite opinion. Clojure is not as widely used as some other languages. Python springs to mind; I know it was part of the Kickstarter pledge. Support for compiled languages would be nice, although I realise this is difficult.

There's already an awesome editor that has Python as a first class citizen, Sublime Text 2.

Re: A new Light Table experience

#144

You gotta be kidding on the sideways text as an important part of the UI. Also adding the vim integration is a waste of time as long as you don't have buffers, registers, ranges and can't parse my .vimrc nor use my modules you might as well not do it.

Well parsing the vimrc might be too much as it would require a full compatibility layer and I highly doubt it'll ever happen. Using vanilla lighttable config wouldn't bother me, even if I have to rewrite most of it. It's a different editor after all.

But yeah, all the "vim" layers around are basically just the bindings, in normal and insert mode which just half of vim. If we can't change buffers with :b, :A or anything, it's just painful as a vim user. Same goes for what you listed.

I have great respect for the guys at code mirror, it's just that I view it as just a quick hack to add vim bindings that a real vim like solution. If LightTable advertises about being vim friendly, there should be an implementation that keeps the vim workflow, not just small bindings.

As a vim user, I'll just skip the "vim" mode if it's done like that (and sadly I'll stick to Vim even if I really crave for a modern "vim" with a decent scripting language).

Is there any plan to address that in the future ?

Re: A new Light Table experience

#145
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is, but that's because we have to have a solid editing experience for the "simple" stuff before we can do the more interesting things. What good is it to have these awesome function oriented editors when you can't even modify a file efficiently? :) We use tabs as a simple way of wrapping up a context. In the future they will include all sorts of neat things - and they aren't limited in any way. If we want, we can…

I for one am glad you're nailing the editor part first. Because if this is ever to replace my usage of emacs, you have to at least get that part right. This hasn't yet replaced my emacs, but i'm more optimistic now. Some editing features missing are paredit, viewing source code of a clojure core function. (Alt-. in emacs.) When you eval something and it never terminates, you need a way to kill that thread. For IDE li…

Even getting all of paredit is not essential imo - I'd settle for just slurp and barf support.

Re: A new Light Table experience

#146
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think of LT as something more akin to an editor in spirit - you won't see watch windows and all the craziness you often see in "big" IDE's. In that regard, you use it like you use any editor. If you're working with Clojure, ClojureScript, or Javascript code, however, you can evaluate a block inline by pressing Cmd-Enter (or Ctrl-Enter). Now that we have an experience we plan to stick with more documentation and getti…

Chris, are you planning to submit a demo for LIVE 2013?

LIVE: 2013 http://liveprogramming.github.com/2013/index.html

ICSE 2013 http://2013.icse-conferences.org/

Re: A new Light Table experience

#147
If you're going to make it vi-like, please put some effort into introducing the modal-concept, and lots of help for new users. There are reasons that many people avoid vi. You may not think that you need to make it a teaching tool, but everything else about lighttable makes it well-suited as a teaching tool.

Re: A new Light Table experience

#148

If you're going to make it vi-like, please put some effort into introducing the modal-concept, and lots of help for new users. There are reasons that many people avoid vi. You may not think that you need to make it a teaching tool, but everything else about lighttable makes it well-suited as a teaching tool.

You have to toggle Vim mode - then it is modal.

Re: A new Light Table experience

#150
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It'll definitely be before 1.0, but I'm not exactly sure when. Right now it's still just me on the code side, so it depends a bit on how hiring goes.

How many people are working on this project ?

Currently 2: Robert and I.

I code, Robert makes sure I'm just coding.

Post reply on HN