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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

#81

Post by rfgplk »

The single most disappointing fact about (more or less) all text editors on the market today is how god awful their performance is. For most text editors, and when I say most I really do mean _most_, you can very easily start seeing noticeable lag and stuttering when making modifications, or even outright INPUT LAG when entering text. For very tiny buffers 1MB, 99% of them are unusable due to a) writes taking SECONDS (how?) b) scrolling/using the buffer physically lagging out the editor itself. Which is really basic functionality that editors should be able to handle since it's rather trivial to come across a multiMB json/config file. Try a simple benchmark

   cd /tmp && dd if=/dev/random of=big_file bs=4096 count=10000

   [editor of choice big_file]
This should really be _trivial_ for any modern CPU.

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

#85

Post by __patchbit__ »

kstenerud wrote: post #25
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.

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.

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

#86

Post by Mashimo »

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.

And then there is me, working on large java codebase with IDEA through remote desktop on wifi, on a 7 year old windows laptop that is slowed down by corporate crap.

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

#87

Post by gtr »

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 loved nedit back in the day. I wrote my entire PhD thesis in LaTeX using it. I think the only reason I picked it over emacs (which I was using for coding) was that the text line wrapping was sane out of the box.

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

#89

Post by globalnode »

alansaber wrote: post #48
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.

Which part is untrue? That theyre simple applications or that syntax highlighting and code completion are difficult?

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

#90

Post by zahlman »

stillpointlab wrote: post #44
brailsafe wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 th…

I don't understand why you'd want to get an LLM to wrap up a text-editing library in what sounds like a pretty straightforward way, when there are already text editors using that library.

The reason I'm making one is because I have a whole separate idea about the design and an at-least-somewhat-distinct one about the editing paradigm.

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