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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

#41

Post by CamperBob2 »

pmkary wrote: post #5
pmkary wrote: post #4

Text editors are like mechanical watches or fountain pens. There is just so much beauty in the machinery that makes them. For me, there are hardly any other modules that are this satisfying to watch being made. Each time I find a new one (a good one like this), with everything on ropes and rendering and I-beam placement computations and ... it feels like a Christmas gift.

[flagged]

It's unfortunately all too easy to hit the downvote arrow when you're aiming for the other one, especially for people using touchscreens.

I don't know who thought it was a good idea to put those character-size icons on adjacent lines, or who thinks it's a good idea to leave them there, but... this is one of those cases where it's better to assume it's an accident rather than an attack.

It's also true that there are a lot of asshats^H^H^H^H^H^H^H empty boats around here, but the above advice still applies, I think.

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

#42

Post by LtWorf »

bigiain wrote: post #38
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…

I was hoping for this to end with "I wrote emacs, and Karl wrote vi."

If Rob Pike is in the story, it happened like yesterday.

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

#44

Post by stillpointlab »

brailsafe wrote: post #39
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. Yep, I'm taking advantage of the times by using the exact same tools I have been for years, and if those fail me, I'll pay for one of the multitude of other high quality editors offered by companies who's business it is to make them, so I get back to writing things in them instead of paying even more to companies trying to persuade me to bel…

No shade on keeping using what is working. I was moving from Windows to Linux Fedora so I was in the market for a new editor. VSCode just wasn't working for me any more.

I considered a bunch of options, including vim or neovim or lazyvim, emacs, newer projects like zed. LLM gave a few more I can't recall including helix and Kate. There are so many good options these days, we're all spoiled for choice.

But the main thing is, and YMMV, I am not writing a lot of code anymore. I'm mostly reading/searching/navigating. So all of the powerful editing features are lost on me. No editors really match my current workflow, they all have too much.

So this was an opportunity to try something out, to experiment. See if I could do the real-deal vibe coding thing and judge the result. I just said "I want it to do ..." and then a few minutes later it did. I repeated this until it did enough to use as my primary editor.

I don't recommend it for anyone else, nor do I expect people to agree. Just describing my thought process.

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

#46

Post by alansaber »

pmkary wrote: post #4

Text editors are like mechanical watches or fountain pens. There is just so much beauty in the machinery that makes them. For me, there are hardly any other modules that are this satisfying to watch being made. Each time I find a new one (a good one like this), with everything on ropes and rendering and I-beam placement computations and ... it feels like a Christmas gift.

The implementation is usually pretty ugly, actually

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

#47

Post by zelphirkalt »

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.

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

#48

Post by alansaber »

globalnode wrote: post #23

The problem with writing an editor if you intend to use it for coding, is not the text editor itself, that's rather simple. The problem is code completion and syntax highlighting. Then whatever system you try to implement becomes just as bloated as the bloatware you're trying to replace.

This is just not true at all.

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

#49

Post by bruckie »

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…

Here's Rob's editor (or at least one of them): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acme_(text_editor)
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