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Vis: A Vim-Like Text Editor

• C0d3r 11y ago
  That video needs sound, I have no idea about what's happening.
  • vim-guru 11y ago
    That would indeed be helpful.
  • martanne 11y ago
    As the producer of the "video" (it is actually ASCII, you can copy paste stuff out of it) I agree, here is an annotated version: - x/pattern/ extracts stuff from the text, creates a selection for every match - some normal vi motions are used to modify the selections, "o" to move the cursor from one end of the selection to the other, "w" to move the cursor to the start of the next word - y/,/ similar to x/ but create a selection for everything which does not match, hence splitting the existing selection into multiple ones - \ trim selections i.e. remove leading and trailing white space - v/Vis keep all selection not matching Vis - g/F|C keep all selection matching F|C - + rotate selection contents on the same line - v/Com keep all selection not matching Com - + rotate some more - ESC clear selections, ESC remove all cursors - x/pattern select different regions - .,/^\} extend selection by searching in forward direction until the first match of } at the start of a line - { i/#if 0\n/ a/\n#endif/ } insert some text before every selection with i/text/ and append some text after every selection with a/text/ - change file, select similarily indented code block using a text object: vi<Tab> - x/\w+ extracts all words from selection - Tab align selections - C-c remove first selection column (i.e. remove first selection on every line) - Esc clear selections, switch to normal mode, move to next { with f{ - i<S-Tab> goto insert mode and align cursors - search a variable, select it with C-n - C-n select next match - C-x skip this match, that is clear it and select next match - C-n select next match - c vi change operator, delete selection, switch to insert mode - rename the variable, switch back to normal mode - undo the changes
    • yoo1I 11y ago
      > it is actually ASCII, you can copy paste stuff out of it No offense to your texteditor, I'm a vim enthusiast and after installing vis just now I really liked it, but that I can copy paste from that screencast caught me really off guard, and it's the height of my day today. Sure, in hindsight it seems obvious, but ... that's pretty cool! ... not sure what that says about me, maybe I don't wanna know. thanks for pointing my eyes that way!
      • i336_ 11y ago
        I say it says you're an engineer. :D Only engineers see stuff like this and go "aw, cool!" Incidentally the "video" is a small pile of JSON - filter for XHR in the devtools to find it, the URL uses an expiration system so a direct link would break. (Aaaand I just learned they implemented VT100 in JavaScript... the JSON is full of actual, real, escape sequences...) (If you haven't seen it, you might also like: https://github.com/TheMozg/awk-raycaster https://github.com/TheMozg/awk-raycaster / https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10896901 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10896901)
• dhoe 11y ago
  Looks promising, and support for huge files is a weak point in vim, so I gave it a try. My usual workflow with big logfiles is to zoom into certain types of messages with e.g. :v/error/d and back out with u, and alternatively jump from one occurrence of a string to the next with *. That doesn't seem to work, so for the moment it's not the right 80% for me. But I do think it's a worthy project, so I'll keep an eye on this
  • chris_wot 11y ago
    What does :v do?
    • richy_rich 11y ago
      It's the same as :g!/error/d I believe
    • efaref 11y ago
      :help :v will tell you: :[range]v[global]/{pattern}/[cmd] Same as :g!. Where: :[range]g[lobal]!/{pattern}/[cmd] Execute the Ex command [cmd] (default ":p") on the lines within [range] where {pattern} does NOT match. So :v/error/d will delete all lines that don't contain the string "error".
      • creshal 11y ago
        Which neatly maps to grep's -v option that does the same.
        • amelius 11y ago
          I always thought "-v" meant "verbose" traditionally in Unix command line options.
          • creshal 11y ago
            No tradition without exceptions.
• pttrsmrt 11y ago
  But what does it got that vim doesn't?
  • vim-guru 11y ago
    Obviously, structural editing like that of SAM. Vim also does not have native support for multiple cursors.
  • boomlinde 11y ago
    The editor core is written in a reasonable amount of clean (your mileage may vary), modern and legacy free C code enabling it to run in resource constrained environments. The implementation should be easy to hack on and encourage experimentation (e.g. native built in support for multiple cursors). There also exists a Lua API for in process extensions.
  • cturner 11y ago
    Sam expressions for manipulating text. This is a blub thing - if you haven't seen them you might not realise what you're missing out on. Try to imagine an editor where the core idea is a better-sed-than-sed. Two well-known editors to come from the ed tradition: vi and sam. Vi is an obvious evolution - make it 2d. Sam did this as well, but its main focus was developing the expression language. For example, so you can chain expressions together for text manipulation. Another comment mentions multiple cursors. But sam also has plan9 culture. It strongly encourages the mouse with an interaction that I've found to difficult to adjust to. Vis seems to unify the best bits of vi and sam, from a unix user's perspective. If anyone reading this knows sam or vis fluently, it would be helpful to have a youtube video for each of sam and vis in the the style of the recent Russ Cox video on acme. [I'm struggling to get this vis thing to build and run, tips? Debian stable. I downloaded libtermkey, configure, make make install. Not thrilled about this - would rather it create .a and .h files I could copy it into the vis dir. Now when I run ./vis it says, "error while loading shared libraries: libtermkey.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory".]
    • nitrogen 11y ago
      Generalized library troubleshooting: make sure you installed the -dev of whatever package through apt-get, and try running sudo ldconfig (it is supposed to happen automatically). If you did not use apt, check your library search path.
• Mossisen 11y ago
  How would you compare this to the NeoVim project? https://github.com/neovim/neovim https://github.com/neovim/neovim
  • Ianvdl 11y ago
    Afaik NeoVim attempts to stay compatible with existing vim addons.
    • agumonkey 11y ago
      Neovim is one huge undertaking. So far they did wonders. Along libreoffice it's one of my favorite projects in spirit.
  • martanne 11y ago
    Reposting an answer from a related thread. The main difference is that vis is written from scratch while neovim inherited an old and hard to maintain code base. This allows vis to experiment with various ideas: - native multiple cursors/selection support - structural regular expression support - different core data structure resulting in efficient large file support - LPeg based syntax highlighting - Lua as an in process extension language - client/server design (not yet implemented) without having to care about backward compatibility and legacy systems. Of course this has also some drawbacks for example there is no existing plugin ecosystem etc
    • aktau 11y ago
      Great! I remember last time I looked at Vis it wasn't so far along (it had no Lua integration AFAIK). When I started submitting code to Neovim my biggest desires for it were (1) Lua extensibility (2) A clean codebase (3) Compatibility with (most) Vim plugins. Perhaps ZyX-l's Vim to Lua project (for Neovim) could help with (3) at some point, if that's desired. An LPeg based syntax highlighting was also something in the back of my mind, though way down the priority list. Fantastic to see it implemented, it truly is the right choice (Neovim uses Corsix's C99 LPeg parser for its testing framework, automatically exposing headers in a way LuaJIT's FFI groks). Does it build with LuaJIT? (Sorry for the perhaps stupid question, I've just glanced at your comments here and the terminal "video". Keep up the good work.
• Philipp__ 11y ago
  This looks nice! Will keep and eye on it, give it a shot for few weeks when I finish with faculty.
• geowwy 11y ago
  Sounds similar to Kakoune (http://kakoune.org/ http://kakoune.org/) but with Sam expressions
  • martanne 11y ago
    Yes from a design philosophy standpoint vis is closer to kakoune than {neo,}vim. The implementation is quite different though (no C++, no boost, no home grown scripting/extension/syntax highlighting language).
    • cm3 11y ago
      I don't use either, but to be fair, I wouldn't call vis's requirements lighter than kakoune. Vis needs Lua and libtermkey (which according to its author is EOL'ed) at build and run time.
      • martanne 11y ago
        Kakoune is a fine editor. Regarding vis, Lua is optional (you lose syntax highlighting though). libtermkey is a 3 file library and despite what the author claims it works, is useful and could be maintained in the vis repository if necessary. If you think anything C++ related is lighter than something C based, then we just have to agree to disagree.
      • ufo 11y ago
        Dunno about libtermkey but I wouldn't worry too much about the Lua dependency. Lua is very portable and lightweight and the entire Lua interpreter and standard library are just a couple hundred kbs. You always have the option of linking them statically if you really need to.
• 6d65 11y ago
  Looks very good. Definitely going to give it a try. Currently I'm using Neovim and I like a lot the embedded terminal feature. I wonder how easily this can be recreated using a Lua plugin.
  • exDM69 11y ago
    > I wonder how easily this can be recreated using a Lua plugin. It's probably a better idea to use tmux/screen/dtvm for terminals rather than embedding a terminal in a minimal editor. The TODO list mentions asynchronous event loops, that's necessary to do any plugins with external processes neatly.
    • 6d65 11y ago
      Well. Having a terminal as a buffer makes it possible to copy/paste into/from the terminal. Also autocomplete from all the buffers is working. It's really convenient. And implementing a repl integration is trivial.
      • mbrock 11y ago
        You can also make a command that inserts a file into the current tmux buffer, which is technically a much more straightforward solution than reimplementing terminal emulation, I think.
        • 6d65 11y ago
          Fair enough. Though, I've tried vim/neovim inside a tmux session, and the terminal in neovim. And I find the latter(my personal opinion) to be more fluent to use. There's only one .nvimrc to manage as opposed to also, tmux's file. Also, when I was using it, tmux it didn't support 24bit colors. Again, that's a trade off, for the maintainer of the editor, it makes sense to make it as simple as possible. But this means that the user of the app will have to manage a part of the complexity, of setting up and maintaining a tmux instance. About terminal integration, I think neovim does it by embedding libvterm, which takes care of handling the terminal part. This might be an oversimplification though.
• ageofwant 11y ago
  Excellent. The more vim the better. I would like to see many of the core vim patterns replicated in other editors: - modal over chords - text objects - the vim "language" which ties it together - all the other good stuff, did I mention text objects ? There is a reason vim has more users today then ever before: once you learn the deceptively simple language you can have deep conversations with your editor.
  • yoz-y 11y ago
    I am very glad that most IDEs have either native or plugin based vim-modes.
  • cyphar 11y ago
    I actually like the fact that NeoVim is working on VimL to Lua translation so you can write plugins in Lua. Emacs has had LISP from the beginning. Maybe we can soon fight back with a real programming language.
  • gnuvince 11y ago
    The vim language would be better if it wasn't full of exceptions that have no reason for existing (e.g. `Y` is `yy` rather than `y$`, or `cw` and `ce` being equivalent while `dw` and `de` perform different actions).
• StreamBright 11y ago
  What would be the advantage of using it over vim? I am just curious. One thing I found is huge file support that would be definitely good but not sure about the rest.
  • cloudhead 11y ago
    The promise is that given it's a new, modern codebase, it could quickly outpace vim in capabilities and usability. Vim's legacy is what is holding the editor back from major improvements.
    • deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    • Kurtz79 11y ago
      So, the better question would be what advantages there are over Neovim :), but it has already been answered in another post.
    • lolsal 11y ago
      It sounds like you are saying it is better just because it is being written from scratch. I don't plan on contributing or writing any plugins to Vis (or vim) so I don't really care about what the 'guts' of the project look like as long as it does what I use it for (text editing). What motivation would I have to install Vis and deal with the mental overhead of switching (I am sincerely asking)? I have the same concerns with NeoVim. Maybe I just need to wait a decade for the ecosystem to catch up.
      • cloudhead 11y ago
        Yes. I would absolutely not advise to switch over at this point in time, unless you want to support the project. In its current state, I suspect it will be a poorer experience than vim and neovim.
    • hyperbovine 11y ago
      What are the major improvements that cannot be added to Vim due to its legacy codebase? Honest question from a longtime vimmer.
• tambourine_man 11y ago
  Meta: I don't get HN's new deduplication algorithm. I submitted the same link yesterday. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11434195 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11434195
  • DanSmooth 11y ago
    I noticed similar problems with medium.com links where the stuff after the inserted hashtag leads to multple submissions of the same link.
    • tambourine_man 11y ago
      Not in this case. It's the exact same url
    • bootload 11y ago
      "similar problems with medium.com links where the stuff after the inserted hashtag" I always strip anything after the hash, checking the link still works. Medium adds this info, in my opinion, for tracking.
      • ChrisGranger 11y ago
        If you're a Chrome or Firefox user, there's an add-on that can do this for you. Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/pure-url/mphlceppeighhlbggdkmcoieeckjnfjj https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/pure-url/mphlceppe... Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/pure-url/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/pure-url/
• irremediable 11y ago
  One of these days, I'm going to sit down and try out this, emacs-evil, and neovim. Side-by-side. Need to figure out which one I like most.
  • ExceptionRaised 11y ago
    I feel you. I want to like neovim, I really do. Same thing with this. I even want to just use emacs+evil. But since I've picked up spacemacs (~3 months ago) I can't really use anything else. I'm already pretty hooked on orgmode, and the consistent keybindings that spacemacs provides are wonderful.
  • kromem 11y ago
    I just switched from vim to neovim to evil. I can't see myself ever going back. (Neovim was basically just vim with async support, and terminals, but as a tmux user, that didn't really grab my attention). There's a lot more polish in the integrations for emacs than vim, likely as a result of literally everything in the editor being a function call that can be hooked into. The only thing I miss is solid tab functionality (there's a short of hack I've seen so far, but feels too rough for me). But honestly, with projectile + heap, I barely miss that. Company-mode far outpaces the auto completion options in vim (though to be fair to the plugin authors, apparently they need to resort to major hacks to perform some of the things they do). Just as an example, when you autocomplete a function call, it populates the arguments and let's you tab through completing them. This same functionality sits as open tickets in the major vim autocomplete plugins, with a response of essentially "this is really hard to do in vim, hopefully we can figure something out in neovim". It's worth the 2-3 days to make the switch and set yourself up. Also, a recommendation -- autostart emacs in server mode and use enacsclient to connect to that for all your editing needs.
    • irremediable 11y ago
      Damn, thanks for the detailed comment. Pretty inspiring. I'm going to see whether I can switch over this weekend.
    • gcr 11y ago
• xiaopingguo 11y ago
  More people should definitely try out sam and 9term as examples of how much code/features you don't really need and can still get real work done. Personally, I wish sam had even less complexity and features than it currently does and thus be more understandable and hackable. Also, never going back to a normal terminal again, "dumb" terminals are awesome. And actually, this experience has lead to a philosophy of software where I think the "dumb"er a piece of software the better and more reliable/performant it is likely to be. So I'm also hugely skeptical of the current Deep AI efforts leading to anywhere good.
  • cced 11y ago
    As much as I love visualizing my code with Intellij, the thing is huge and clunky. Nothing beats the simplicity of Sublime and the good'ol Terminal.
    • andrewstuart2 11y ago
      Unless it's vim and the good ol' terminal. :-D
      • fit2rule 11y ago
        .. unless its vim+cscope.
    • Undertow_ 11y ago
      Quite a few IDE's have the inherent flaw of being super bloated.
      • cced 11y ago
        One of many reasons I prefer to build using Sublime as opposed to a big IDE.
  • mbrock 11y ago
    There are some "political" aspects too, in that AI and VR aim for maximal resource consumption—the more power, the cooler.
• starseeker 11y ago
  I note that with the exception of the sam code (which unfortunately uses the Lucent Public License Version 1.02, this editor is very liberally licensed (ISC/MIT/CC0). If the sam code is optional or easily replaced, this could evolve to become a serious, modern text editor with a truly liberal license (something surprisingly absent from the current landscape, to the best of my knowledge - I've done a couple searches for an editor that could be embedded with an LGPL project, and the choices were pretty limited. This looks quite interesting. From a portability standpoint, is there any chance of creating a native Windows version using something like http://www.projectpluto.com/win32a.htm http://www.projectpluto.com/win32a.htm ? That was another kicker when I was searching previously - only the really big editors like vim/emacs appear to have Windows ports...
  • falcolas 11y ago
    For a standalone piece of software, what about licensing matters for your use cases?
    • notzorbo3 11y ago
      It's right there in his comment: > I've done a couple searches for an editor that could be embedded with an LGPL project, and the choices were pretty limited.
  • sdkmvx 11y ago
    nvi? https://sites.google.com/a/bostic.com/keithbostic/vi/ https://sites.google.com/a/bostic.com/keithbostic/vi/ Sure it doesn't have the features of Vim or Emacs (and some would say that's a feature!), but it's perfectly serviceable if you're okay with vi's modality.
    • starseeker 11y ago
      Close, but it doesn't appear to be active (the version you get from the download link is from 1996?) and it's using the 4 clause BSD license, which (as I understand it) poses GPL compatibility problems.
  • 11y ago
• sebastic 11y ago
  NIH syndrome. Vain attempt at improving code quality. Very unlikely this person is a much better programmer than Bram. It's written in C, likely won't end up much better then vim. Less wasteful to improve vim.
• sebastic 11y ago
  You won't do it. You're too lazy and there is no immediate motivation for doing something like that.
  • gcr 11y ago
    (a meta-comment: please don't call people 'lazy' on hackernews. We're all here specifically because we enjoy thinking about the tools we use. It's like telling an artist not to paint a picture because they won't ever be able to capture the scene they want in the right way, or telling a student to they shouldn't bother trying their homework because they won't get every question right.)
    • sebastic 11y ago
      I'm not telling not to paint, I'm telling him that in all likelihood he won't paint because his motivations aren't good enough. I'm not trying to discourage him, I'm trying to encourage him to be a more productive person by taking a critical look at the flaws in how he motivates himself.
  • dang 11y ago
    We've banned this account for repeatedly breaking the site guidelines. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11446242 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11446242 and marked it off-topic.
    • sebastic 11y ago
      Dang, there is nothing negative about being critical. The user I responded to clearly has childish ways of motivating himself. Being critical helps him analyze the flaws in how he motivates himself. Hacker news is degrading quickly and you blocking me is helping that. This site needs inter-user critical comments. I doubt you have the insight to see that yourself and you're probably just following implied orders from Sam and Paul. This site is facing a leadership vacuum in this crisis and will likely implode. Good job.
  • deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
• loudmax 11y ago
  Kudos to the developers for listing non goals. Too many software projects lose focus and become bloated because they take on features that are secondary to the main purpose. Projects may refrain from listing non goals for fear of excluding people who may want some of those features. And looking at the list, there are some pretty nice features excluded. For example network support, or editing compressed or tar files. I guess the expectation is that these can still be accomplished by leveraging commands outside the editor. This is a clean approach. Okay, but no diff mode? vimdiff is fantastic! And I'm not sure how you recover that functionality without multiple workspaces. Maybe the answer is you don't. Use vis for normal editing and pull out vimdiff only when you need it.
  • aoloe 11y ago
    concerning vimdiff: one of the goal is to get vis to also work in server mode and be embeddable. it should then be possible to create a diff tool that uses vis for the editing.
    • rauljara 11y ago
      That sounds fantastic. Very often I find myself editing outside of vim and wishing vim style editing were there. Recreating optional vim key bindings for every app that has text is clearly not realistic. Getting as many things inside of vim as possible is just tantalizing enough that a lot of people (myself included) try it. It's better than nothing, but results in some very hacked together tools. Embedding vim (or in this case, vis) inside of other things would be a much better solution.
    • geoelectric 11y ago
      So instead of the vim philosophy of embedding every functionality within vim, this potentially embeds vis in every functionality? I actually like that--much more composable.
      • qu4z-2 11y ago
        I believe (and I may be wrong) that the vim philosophy is actually to embed vim in things rather than embed things in vim. They've just lost track of that a little over time. See also :help design-not: 'Vim is not a shell or an Operating System. You will not be able to run a shell inside Vim or use it to control a debugger. This should work the other way around: Use Vim as a component from a shell or in an IDE. A satirical way to say this: "Unlike Emacs, Vim does not attempt to include everything but the kitchen sink, but some people say that you can clean one with it. ;-)"'
• rplnt 11y ago
  I feared it would be written in javascript (it's on the front page of HN after all), but I was very positively surprised. There are projects where it's not appropriate to use node.js and the hell it comes with.
  • mbrock 11y ago
    Can we please try to stop talking about this specific language ecosystem as an awful deplorable hell hole or whatever?
    • benbenolson 11y ago
      It's not node.js that's horrible: it's great for what it does (web development). When taken out of that use case, it's awful, because it's simply not meant to do systems programming or to make local applications. It's kind of like people who knock Perl: it's made specifically for text parsing, nothing more, and too many people use it for much more. Since it's not meant for more complex things, it fails, understandably. I think what the comment was trying to point out is that oftentimes there are things on Hacker News that are written in JS that shouldn't be: systems programs, emulators, shells, etc. This is not the fault of the ecosystem itself, but rather the misunderstanding of the authors about the viable use cases of the tool that they're using (node.js).
      • eckza 11y ago
        "Hey guys, look what I did!" crickets "... with JAVASCRIPT!" thunderous applause and/or retweets
        • cardiffspaceman 11y ago
          I wrote a compiler for a toy functional (lazy) language. In bash.
      • pka 11y ago
        That's because it's a waste of time to write a program in a primitive language like C when you don't end-of-the-world absolutely need performance/hard realtime guarantees; even then it's a better idea to only write the 5% performance-critical parts in C/asm and the rest in a saner high-level language. C is definitely the wrong choice for a complex data-structure processing piece of software like a text editor. Even though vanilla JS is madness, it gives you a very nice base to build on - namely closures and a GC, which make languages like Clojure or Purescript possible. Still, for an editor I'd prefer pure Javascript over C every time.
• doki_pen 11y ago
  Why is this better than neovim? How many modern "vi"s do we need?
• bigtunacan 11y ago
  This seemed interesting and I'm glad they posted their "Non goals". For me, and I would assume many others, plugins (which apparently is part of the 20% they don't plan to support) is one of the most critical features to any good text editor. This is one area where I think they may want to reconsider.
  • SpaceCadetJones 11y ago
    I imagine this would be a non-starter for a lot of people, it definitely is for me
  • exDM69 11y ago
    "Plugins" can mean many things, ranging from dynamically loading parts of the app to having an embedded scripting language. I'm fine with a text editor without plugins as long as the editor can neatly interface with external applications. I used to use some Vim plugins but I found them to be more trouble than they're worth. Now I have vanilla Vim with only some syntax highlighting additions. Rather than embedding my workflows into the editor, I'd like to embed the editor in my workflows. I don't want to run terminal apps from inside the editor, but I do want to run external apps and get the results in the editor. E.g. Vim has :make and :grep that work with the quickfix list, but this can also be done by invoking make or grep in the shell and piping the output to vim (+ some command line options to read the quickfix from stdin). For my use, the feature that Vis needs the most is the client-server model, so I can use tmux to manage windows and open editor windows in any terminal session. That, coupled with some helpers to run external apps should do more than 80% of what I'd use editor plugins for.
• notzorbo3 11y ago
  I was gonna complain about the lack of binaries, which will instantly make me skip your project, until I saw this: > On Linux based systems make standalone will attempt to download, compile and install all of the above dependencies into a subfolder inorder to build a self contained statically linked binary. You'll still need the entire compiler toolchain, and 'libtool' on Ubuntu. I got as far as the ncursesw dependency before I gave up.
  • martanne 11y ago
    Yes the lack of binary packages is a known problem. The whole project is still somewhat in flux, feel free to contribute by filling a packaging request to your favorite distribution ... Historically it originates from a community which is comfortable building from source.
• be21 11y ago
  Probably I am wrong but there seems to be no folding support?
• jhallenworld 11y ago
  I'd like to suggest trying integrating the syntax highlighter from JOE for speed, but JOE is GPL... Also, I'm not sure how large the Lua/LPeg state is, but for JOE we found the highlighter is more accurate if you retain the state of each line (or every n lines), and start parsing from a real known state. It looks like Vis starts parsing 16K before the start of the window. https://sourceforge.net/p/joe-editor/mercurial/ci/default/tree/docs/hacking.md#syntax-highlighter https://sourceforge.net/p/joe-editor/mercurial/ci/default/tr...
  • isxek 11y ago
    Thanks for writing the JOE editor. I've been using it for simple text editing tasks (commit messages, etc.) now that I've moved over to a Linux system. I appreciate its simplicity.
    • lewiscollard 11y ago
      I shall add to your thanks. Joe's the first thing I install on any new box or server and has been my default "quickly edit this thing" editor for a decade and a half now. Thanks, Joe author!
  • martanne 11y ago
    Thanks for the hacking file, it is a good read for people like myself who are interested in text editor implementations. If time permits I will try delve a bit into the joe code base. As for the syntax highlighting in vis, yes it currently is stateless and only considers a fixed range of text prior to the start of the window. Having no state at all simplifies some things and allows vis to highlight even extremely large files at the expense of the occasional glitch. In practice it seems to work reasonably well. This approach also requires that the highlighting is fast, because nothing is cached, it is completely redone after every cursor motion. I'm quite happy with LPeg so far, it is convenient to express grammars in a high level language like Lua. It also supports nested grammars nicely, but due to the completely stateless approach taken by vis this is currently not fully exploited. As an added bonus there were already ~100 lexers (of admittedly varying quality) available for use.
• pklausler 11y ago
  Every good programmer should write their own text editor, I think, much as each Jedi must build their own light saber. It's the tool that a programmer will spend a disproportionate amount of their time using, and they should know it well. And it's fun to do, and easy (c. 7KLOC or so for mine).
  • vbit 11y ago
    Is your editor publicly available?
    • pklausler 11y ago
      Sure: https://github.com/pklausler/aoeui https://github.com/pklausler/aoeui
• zem 11y ago
  from https://github.com/martanne/vis/issues/140 https://github.com/martanne/vis/issues/140 it seems like vis doesn't yet support language-specific autoindentation. this is a must-have feature for me; i'm surprised it wasn't more of a priority for them given that this seems to be targeting programmers.
• msimpson 11y ago
  Tabs should not be a "non goal" if you support window splitting.