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Lime Text – Open Source Sublime Text alternative (2014)

178 points by type0 10y ago

sanketbajoria 10y ago
Pretty cool
kahrkunne 10y ago
OK, but what does it do that Emacs doesn't (yet - give it a week)
marknadal 10y ago
This looks really awesome... But how on earth do I start using it? No download, no install, nothing! That is going to be a major hurdle to adoption.
oridecon 10y ago
https://github.com/limetext https://github.com/limetext https://github.com/limetext/backend https://github.com/limetext/backend
Karunamon 10y ago
It'll be interesting to see how this stacks up performance-wise. My main reason for using Sublime over something like Atom is that Atom is a hog, both in the large (memory) and slow senses of the word.
nhaliday 10y ago
This was an interesting attempt but I think development kind of stalled. The original creator, quarnster, left the project.
- barbs 10y ago
  You're right. Blog and roadmap haven't been editted since 2014.
  - lightdot 10y ago
    Git commits to the project are from August this year. I see many projects with a similar public perception issues. Pages and blogs need to reflect their activities better.
keyle 10y ago
As much as this is refreshing, Sublime just works though. Even Sublime 2 wasn't that bad you'd want Sublime 3. For heavy projects I use IntelliJ. I was happy to pay for Sublime. I remember switching from Textmate to Sublime because it had compelling arguments. Sublime is the perfect editor between Notepad and IntelliJ. Anyway I hope this is just as good.
- themodelplumber 10y ago
  Do any of these text editors you mention include a screensaver? I was just trying BREEZE for MS-DOS today and found that feature really appealing. I came back to my desk and the entire UI had just vanished and turned into a field of twinkling stars. I would love it if one of my more modern text editors did that.
  - jaccarmac 10y ago
    M-x zone
  - flukus 10y ago
    Does anyone use desktop screen savers anymore? It used to be amazing how much customization some people put into to something that only appeared when they weren't using it. More apps need boss mode though.
    - falcolas 10y ago
      I do, to lock my mac on demand. I think there's another way to do it now, but I'm stuck in old habits.
  - tincholio 10y ago
    Of course, Emacs has zone-mode
- steveklabnik 10y ago
  What are your thoughts on VS: Code?
no_protocol 10y ago
> Lime Text is a powerful and elegant text editor primarily developed in Go It's very interesting to me that this is the most important statement the creators can make about their project. Of course anyone making a text editor will say it is powerful and elegant. As an end-user, I rarely care what language a text editor is written in. At least not right up front. It might matter if I'm interested in extending or modifying it. Maybe this fragment can be improved. The second half of the sentence actually gives me an idea what problem it is solving and why it exists: > that aims to be a Free and open-source software successor to Sublime Text. (Awesome!) The second paragraph is also very interesting and draws my interest. I love the "Roadmap" button, neat touch. It shows very clear goals and a reasonable amount of progress.
- flukus 10y ago
  I also want to know why it's better than the myriad of other text editors out there. Evaluating a text editor and it's extensibility is a time consuming task.
- matmann2001 10y ago
  For the people they are targeting by calling it a successor to Sublime, the language actually does matter. Many, likely most, Sublime users are taking advantage of the myriad of plugins written for Sublime in Python. I immediately discounted the usefulness of this product simply because it is written in Go, which would mean I need to find new equivalents for the plugins I use on a day to day basis, or write Go versions of them myself. I honestly don't have enough to complain about with Sublime that would make switching worth that amount of effort.
  - Arcsech 10y ago
    For what it's worth, it does aim to be (mostly) compatible with the Sublime Text Python API[0]. The base editor is written in Go, but the plugins are Python (much like Sublime itself is C++, but uses Python plugins). That said, I wouldn't get too excited about this - not much has really happened on it since April 2015. [0]: It's the fifth point on the roadmap: https://github.com/limetext/lime/wiki/Goals https://github.com/limetext/lime/wiki/Goals
wybiral 10y ago
Looks interesting. I'd recommend packaging some installation options instead of just source. I plan to check it out later, but it would sit higher on my queue if it were easier to try out.
yoosuf 10y ago
Textmate, Atom and Sublime were been successful editors, I've seen limeeditor since 2008 or something they've been there for windows only, and now trying to do with cross platform, very interesting.... the roadmap looks promising too. Hope we wil be able to get an nice editor soon
cyberferret 10y ago
Funny - Sublime has been taking a pounding from all angles over the years, but still seems to be bouncing back off the ropes and swinging hard. This project looked familiar, and I seem to recall coming across it a while back. As others have pointed out, the blog hasn't been updated since 2014, so it looks like a stalled project. Another points victory to Sublime perhaps? ;)
- cbHXBY1D 10y ago
  It's hard for these other Electron based editors to completely replace Sublime when they are so much slower. People say that they don't notice how slow Atom or VS Code are, but try running them on a 5+ year old laptop like mine.
  - pjmlp 10y ago
    I only use VSCode because currently it has the best experience for Rust.
  - izym 10y ago
    This one isn't Electron based, but rather it uses QML (i.e. Qt Quick).
  - pingec 10y ago
    I use VS Code on an x220 every day. If an old machine is the only thing keeping you stuck with Sublime you should invest in a new machine. Hardware is cheap compared to productivity gains.
- IsmaOlvey 10y ago
  If you took some time to check the commit histories of the two most important repositories (backend and lime-qml), you'd see that they both have commits as recently as August. Blog and website activity are not always indicative of project activity.
charlesetc 10y ago
People might be interested in this one too - got a weird name, and it's still under development, but it seems pretty good http://www.vim.org/ http://www.vim.org/
- nitemice 10y ago
  Really, this is more like [NeoVim](https://github.com/neovim/neovim https://github.com/neovim/neovim), in the way it's structured and with its aim to rebuild its namesake in a modular fashion with swappable UIs.
  - chmike 10y ago
    As an old prgrammer feeling the limit of neuron counts and possible premise of alzheimer, I avoid tools where you have to know by hart all the commands or have to read a long help text to find what you need. I use vim as editor for system files, but I only use the 1% of its capabilities I really need. All these shortcuts make me sick because I can't remember them and can't easily find them. That's also why I don't like Atom, sublime, Visual and all that kind of editors. I'll give a try to this Lime editor. The best IDE around, in my humble opinion, is QtCreator because the interface is remarkably simple and intuitive. I regret no one tries to copycat this one.
    - flukus 10y ago
      Vim is a language, not a bunch of commands to remember. A sufficient vim user would probably be unable to tell you how exactly they accomplished something. I gave QtCreator a try just a couple of weeks ago actually. I wanted to give qml a go and expected this to be where it shined. But the create project dialog wouldn't fit on the screen and the create button wouldn't enable for some reason (possible something off screen).
      - mullsork 10y ago
        > But the create project dialog wouldn't fit on the screen and the create button wouldn't enable for some reason (possible something off screen). This really reminds of using KDE3.x & QT in general a decade ago or so :)
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
jakobegger 10y ago
Something about the phrase "Successor to Sublime" rubs me the wrong way. It's condescending and misleading. I initially thought, did the author of Sublime open source his work like the author of Textmate? But no, it looks like this looks like an independent project, and since Sublime is still updated, can there be a successor yet?
- aplummer 10y ago
  I was also thinking this. The author of sublime is an indie developer and this seems proud of taking his best ideas.
- Camillo 10y ago
  It's what the French call a "dick move".
  - omginternets 10y ago
    If you're thinking of "coup de bite", that doesn't mean what you think it means.
- chuckdee 10y ago
  That was my thought also. A successor is created by the same team, or given easing by that team. This is not that.
dilap 10y ago
As an emacs addict/user, what I really want is a credible alternative to that cockroach of editors. Price of admission: run in a terminal, run graphically, run on every possible system, be open source, be ridiculously, easily extensible. What a successor might add: Not be riddled with bugs. Not be ridiculously, terribly bad at actually displaying text (quickly, smoothly, large amounts). Not be extended in a language that's so slow that most "intelligent" modes end up being piles of half-correct regex hacks. Not not care about correctness, in general. Hop to it, dear idealistic genius whiz-kid reader! Or fund me, overly-$-laden startup lottery winner. I'll take a crack at it.
- bauta-steen 10y ago
  Isn't the emacs core (excluding packages) known to be very stable? At least I've only had one crash in a year or so, most likely due to some package misbehaving.
  - LukeShu 10y ago
    Emacs has long been riddled with bugs that can cause daemonized emacs to crash if the display disconnects (yes, even with the Lucid toolkit). term-mode is hacks on hacks on hacks; and slow ones at that. There's a bug in Emacs 24's sh-mode that can cause it to deadlock if you move the point to a wrong place in an incomplete if/while/for block start (IDK if it's fixed in Emacs 25). All point-releases of Emacs 24 shipped with a TRAMP mode with broken /sudo:: that can cause /dev/null to become an ordinary file, causing the entire OS to slowly and mysteriously break (Fun on servers! Fixed in Emacs 25). I have a collection of emacs core dumps on one of my servers (where I use it like screen/tmux) that I have yet to try to diagnose. I mean, I love Emacs and use it daily. But it certainly has plenty of bugs; but what reasonably complicated piece of software doesn't?
    - peatfreak 10y ago
      Emacs 19 was a model of low-defect, stable software, and my experiences reinforced that widespread notion. Over time and subsequent major releases, it grew and grew, and the complexity got too big to perform adequate QA, now nearing the point of unmaintainability. I also love it and use it daily, but I really wish the developers would show some restraint when considering whether to add new features (i.e., packages). Having said that, the very core text editing engine, i.e., the part that's written in C and the basic Elisp editing functions around that are still rock solid as always, and for me this is still the ultimate model of what a text processing engine should be. It handles large files beautifully (and errors gracefully when it cannot), does file locking well, goes to great lengths to ensure the integrity of your file, all of that basic core stuff is just superb and well thought out, by a lot of brilliant people over a long time, and that's all very well optimized. I think the problem is that too many third-party extensions are included with the core release.
RKoutnik 10y ago
Given that the goal for the plugins API is "I’ll probably never implement this 100%, only the api bits I need for the plugins I use." [0] I don't see this getting traction. Piggypacking off an existing ecosystem is a great way to bootstrap a project but so long as it's wack-a-mole to discover if all your plugins work, this remains a pet project in my mind. [0] https://github.com/limetext/lime/wiki/Goals https://github.com/limetext/lime/wiki/Goals
poisonarena 10y ago
pretty cool seeing an opensource alternative to something I like so much
hossbeast 10y ago
Am I the only one sick of projects declaring, "written in rust", "primarily developed in go", etc? Why do your users care about your implementation language? Do you have any features worth mentioning? If your main selling point is that you used the shiny new language, I'm already doubting the usefulness of the endeavor. Just the straw that finally broke the camel's back . . .
- chmike 10y ago
  Another argument why I'm very interestd to know thta it's written in go is that go will be a first class language in thta IDE :)
- adrianratnapala 10y ago
  I care about it whether it pulls in big dependencies. So I tend to avoid things in Java or Node.js, and on Unix I would avoid .Net (Mono). On Windows I'm fine with .Net, but would want to avoid Python. For languages like Go and Rust which compile to native code, I don't give a damn -- except to note that it is such a language.
- erre 10y ago
  Interestingly, I am tired of most projects declaring the language in which they were written upfront, especially when they are a copy of something else, "but written in ${language}!" - however, I am interested in the language a text editor is written in. Or, rather, the language it's extensible in. I'm a long-time Emacs user, but have been growing increasingly tired of it. Whichever incarnation of Emacs I turn to, it just seems old-fashioned and outdated. And yet, whenever I try another editor, I end up coming back to Emacs. And one of the reasons is often the language (or ability at all) with which to extend it.
- chewxy 10y ago
  Perhaps not for this case, but for libraries, it'd be prudent to write the language that it's for
- nitemice 10y ago
  I don't think it's about the users at all. I'd speculate the main reason people write things like that, and so prominently, is because they hope it will attract contributors who either already know that language or are enthusiastic enough about it to progress the project significantly. Otherwise someone may just pass it over assuming it's another piece of junk written in <insert-your-least-favourite-language-here>.
jdefr89 10y ago
Don't enough text-editors exists, things are getting outta control now. Vim, Emacs, Sublime, Atom, Lime... Shit, pick one of the four and be happy damn. Same thing is happening with programming languages. There is a new one everyday that doesn't offer anything better than what we had before. Everyone just has their eye on the shiny new toys I guess...
- minitech 10y ago
  You’re not obligated to use it. All existing editors (and languages) also have their flaws* and room for improvement, and I’m happy to see people try. * Preempting the “then send a pull request”: sometimes the flaws are fundamental or otherwise unlikely to change, like VimL, Emacs’s keybindings, Sublime Text’s closed-sourcedness, Atom and VS Code’s Electron bloat…
- tikhonj 10y ago
  Enough text editors exist given just Emacs :). Seriously though, we need more competition and innovation in text editors. Even Emacs isn't perfect.
lucio 10y ago
Why "successor"? Has SublimeText died somehow? Last time I've check my copy was running happily.
- jayflux 10y ago
  To be fair, this was back in 2014 when people thought sublime was dead and abandoned by Jon. However now that's not the case and the dev team are rolling out releases again, and expect a stable v3 to come out soon
TheAceOfHearts 10y ago
I'm a very happy Sublime Text user, but I wish it were open source. I don't mind paying, since I get so much value out of it. If it were open, others could make contributions, and I wouldn't have concerns of my favorite editor dying off. From the activity graphs, it looks like development on Lime Text has stalled a little. There's some updates in the wiki entries, but not much more. Hopefully things pick up! In relation to editors, I've been playing around with Spacemacs and evil mode enabled, but so far I haven't found the time to give it an honest chance as my daily editor.
- usaphp 10y ago
  Being open source has really small relation to project not dying off. In your own example Lime Text stalled even tho its open sourced, same with textmate which went open source.
preek 10y ago
The headline on the Landing Page says "Elegant Free Open-Source". I for one applaud these great selling propositions. And I'm speaking after using Emacs and VIM for 15 years having not seen one other editor concept that was ultimately superior. Sublime Text was horrible in that it offered an easy refuge so many young and inexperienced people. But ultimately it was a closed source prison that they got pulled into. And yes, I'm a professional developer having founded multiple companies. I'm a capitalist, nothing wrong with selling software. However, having great tools that last a lifetime available is one of the most important point I learned and like to teach to my students (I'm a lecturer, too). Why lock yourself in? Just because it looks more shiny and is easier in the first week? That's a good reason to use many things, but not your primary driver as a professional software engineer. Hooray for these new editors that look shiny and are open source. And then, when the students ask how I did those crazy things in Emacs, they still get those huge eyes and want to gobble all the information in. This kind of curiousness happens rarely with people locked into proprietary systems.
- Karunamon 10y ago
  Last I checked, Sublime is easily extensible with Python. What is this "lock in" you speak of? What "prison"? This reads like FSF.org hyperbole. Here comes the snark in reply to the snark: Someone had to come along and show that text editing didn't require the inscrutable complexity of Vim or Emacs, the kind of overwrought, overcomplicated, elitist and impractical user-hostility that absolutely dominates Open Source user interface design. I'd like to think that the proliferation of Sublime is what caused people to roll up their sleeves and start putting together things like Atom and VSCode and even this project. But I still use Sublime. Why? Because it's still faster than every competitor, it's still extensible enough to do what I need it to do, and unlike Emacs, doesn't require a PhD to comprehend, and unlike Vim, isn't an evolutionary dead end that pretends the mouse was never invented. Snark off: Many users don't consider Open Source to be a selling point. I am one of them. I choose my tools based on their usefulness, not the political status of their code, not intangible theoretical posturing about good and evil in the context of a fucking text editor. And you'll forgive me for taking issue with weak attempts to shame people for choosing tools that work for them. Perhaps this post reads a bit angry, and this is why.
tomhoward 10y ago
Previously seen on HN 2 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8196245 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8196245
ForFreedom 10y ago
Is there a direct download link for the mac?
Philipp__ 10y ago
I am afraid this is project is stalling. I would like open source alternative to Sublime. I use Emacs as of now, but it is funny how so many years down the line, we can't make good, robust editor that is focused on performance. Sure eye candy should be present in some degree (I am bitch about colors and nice UI, since I spend a lot of time in it, I like to make it look cool to me, but I always put performance and function on first place). Xi looks like it has potential, but it is pretty early in development. I just hope Ralf sticks to it, and in few years I think we will have great editor, with right technology, right philosophy and hopefully right community.
anindha 10y ago
Why not just pitch Jon (creator of Sublime) on open sourcing his editor. A business model where there is a community version and a professional version could work. I am sure you would be able to hit a Kickstarter goal pretty easily. Disclosure: I've worked with Jon previously
damiien 10y ago
did Atom hasn't be open source Sublime alternative?

178 points by type0 10y ago

sanketbajoria 10y ago

Pretty cool

kahrkunne 10y ago

OK, but what does it do that Emacs doesn't (yet - give it a week)

marknadal 10y ago

This looks really awesome... But how on earth do I start using it? No download, no install, nothing! That is going to be a major hurdle to adoption.

oridecon 10y ago

https://github.com/limetext https://github.com/limetext https://github.com/limetext/backend https://github.com/limetext/backend

Karunamon 10y ago

It'll be interesting to see how this stacks up performance-wise. My main reason for using Sublime over something like Atom is that Atom is a hog, both in the large (memory) and slow senses of the word.

nhaliday 10y ago

This was an interesting attempt but I think development kind of stalled. The original creator, quarnster, left the project.

barbs 10y ago
You're right. Blog and roadmap haven't been editted since 2014.
- lightdot 10y ago
  Git commits to the project are from August this year. I see many projects with a similar public perception issues. Pages and blogs need to reflect their activities better.

keyle 10y ago

As much as this is refreshing, Sublime just works though. Even Sublime 2 wasn't that bad you'd want Sublime 3. For heavy projects I use IntelliJ. I was happy to pay for Sublime. I remember switching from Textmate to Sublime because it had compelling arguments. Sublime is the perfect editor between Notepad and IntelliJ. Anyway I hope this is just as good.

themodelplumber 10y ago
Do any of these text editors you mention include a screensaver? I was just trying BREEZE for MS-DOS today and found that feature really appealing. I came back to my desk and the entire UI had just vanished and turned into a field of twinkling stars. I would love it if one of my more modern text editors did that.
- jaccarmac 10y ago
  M-x zone
- flukus 10y ago
  Does anyone use desktop screen savers anymore? It used to be amazing how much customization some people put into to something that only appeared when they weren't using it. More apps need boss mode though.
  - falcolas 10y ago
    I do, to lock my mac on demand. I think there's another way to do it now, but I'm stuck in old habits.
- tincholio 10y ago
  Of course, Emacs has zone-mode
steveklabnik 10y ago
What are your thoughts on VS: Code?

no_protocol 10y ago

> Lime Text is a powerful and elegant text editor primarily developed in Go It's very interesting to me that this is the most important statement the creators can make about their project. Of course anyone making a text editor will say it is powerful and elegant. As an end-user, I rarely care what language a text editor is written in. At least not right up front. It might matter if I'm interested in extending or modifying it. Maybe this fragment can be improved. The second half of the sentence actually gives me an idea what problem it is solving and why it exists: > that aims to be a Free and open-source software successor to Sublime Text. (Awesome!) The second paragraph is also very interesting and draws my interest. I love the "Roadmap" button, neat touch. It shows very clear goals and a reasonable amount of progress.

flukus 10y ago
I also want to know why it's better than the myriad of other text editors out there. Evaluating a text editor and it's extensibility is a time consuming task.
matmann2001 10y ago
For the people they are targeting by calling it a successor to Sublime, the language actually does matter. Many, likely most, Sublime users are taking advantage of the myriad of plugins written for Sublime in Python. I immediately discounted the usefulness of this product simply because it is written in Go, which would mean I need to find new equivalents for the plugins I use on a day to day basis, or write Go versions of them myself. I honestly don't have enough to complain about with Sublime that would make switching worth that amount of effort.
- Arcsech 10y ago
  For what it's worth, it does aim to be (mostly) compatible with the Sublime Text Python API[0]. The base editor is written in Go, but the plugins are Python (much like Sublime itself is C++, but uses Python plugins). That said, I wouldn't get too excited about this - not much has really happened on it since April 2015. [0]: It's the fifth point on the roadmap: https://github.com/limetext/lime/wiki/Goals https://github.com/limetext/lime/wiki/Goals

wybiral 10y ago

Looks interesting. I'd recommend packaging some installation options instead of just source. I plan to check it out later, but it would sit higher on my queue if it were easier to try out.

yoosuf 10y ago

Textmate, Atom and Sublime were been successful editors, I've seen limeeditor since 2008 or something they've been there for windows only, and now trying to do with cross platform, very interesting.... the roadmap looks promising too. Hope we wil be able to get an nice editor soon

cyberferret 10y ago

Funny - Sublime has been taking a pounding from all angles over the years, but still seems to be bouncing back off the ropes and swinging hard. This project looked familiar, and I seem to recall coming across it a while back. As others have pointed out, the blog hasn't been updated since 2014, so it looks like a stalled project. Another points victory to Sublime perhaps? ;)

cbHXBY1D 10y ago
It's hard for these other Electron based editors to completely replace Sublime when they are so much slower. People say that they don't notice how slow Atom or VS Code are, but try running them on a 5+ year old laptop like mine.
- pjmlp 10y ago
  I only use VSCode because currently it has the best experience for Rust.
- izym 10y ago
  This one isn't Electron based, but rather it uses QML (i.e. Qt Quick).
- pingec 10y ago
  I use VS Code on an x220 every day. If an old machine is the only thing keeping you stuck with Sublime you should invest in a new machine. Hardware is cheap compared to productivity gains.
IsmaOlvey 10y ago
If you took some time to check the commit histories of the two most important repositories (backend and lime-qml), you'd see that they both have commits as recently as August. Blog and website activity are not always indicative of project activity.

charlesetc 10y ago

People might be interested in this one too - got a weird name, and it's still under development, but it seems pretty good http://www.vim.org/ http://www.vim.org/

nitemice 10y ago
Really, this is more like [NeoVim](https://github.com/neovim/neovim https://github.com/neovim/neovim), in the way it's structured and with its aim to rebuild its namesake in a modular fashion with swappable UIs.
- chmike 10y ago
  As an old prgrammer feeling the limit of neuron counts and possible premise of alzheimer, I avoid tools where you have to know by hart all the commands or have to read a long help text to find what you need. I use vim as editor for system files, but I only use the 1% of its capabilities I really need. All these shortcuts make me sick because I can't remember them and can't easily find them. That's also why I don't like Atom, sublime, Visual and all that kind of editors. I'll give a try to this Lime editor. The best IDE around, in my humble opinion, is QtCreator because the interface is remarkably simple and intuitive. I regret no one tries to copycat this one.
  - flukus 10y ago
    Vim is a language, not a bunch of commands to remember. A sufficient vim user would probably be unable to tell you how exactly they accomplished something. I gave QtCreator a try just a couple of weeks ago actually. I wanted to give qml a go and expected this to be where it shined. But the create project dialog wouldn't fit on the screen and the create button wouldn't enable for some reason (possible something off screen).
    - mullsork 10y ago
      > But the create project dialog wouldn't fit on the screen and the create button wouldn't enable for some reason (possible something off screen). This really reminds of using KDE3.x & QT in general a decade ago or so :)

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

jakobegger 10y ago

Something about the phrase "Successor to Sublime" rubs me the wrong way. It's condescending and misleading. I initially thought, did the author of Sublime open source his work like the author of Textmate? But no, it looks like this looks like an independent project, and since Sublime is still updated, can there be a successor yet?

aplummer 10y ago
I was also thinking this. The author of sublime is an indie developer and this seems proud of taking his best ideas.
Camillo 10y ago
It's what the French call a "dick move".
- omginternets 10y ago
  If you're thinking of "coup de bite", that doesn't mean what you think it means.
chuckdee 10y ago
That was my thought also. A successor is created by the same team, or given easing by that team. This is not that.

dilap 10y ago

As an emacs addict/user, what I really want is a credible alternative to that cockroach of editors. Price of admission: run in a terminal, run graphically, run on every possible system, be open source, be ridiculously, easily extensible. What a successor might add: Not be riddled with bugs. Not be ridiculously, terribly bad at actually displaying text (quickly, smoothly, large amounts). Not be extended in a language that's so slow that most "intelligent" modes end up being piles of half-correct regex hacks. Not not care about correctness, in general. Hop to it, dear idealistic genius whiz-kid reader! Or fund me, overly-$-laden startup lottery winner. I'll take a crack at it.

bauta-steen 10y ago
Isn't the emacs core (excluding packages) known to be very stable? At least I've only had one crash in a year or so, most likely due to some package misbehaving.
- LukeShu 10y ago
  Emacs has long been riddled with bugs that can cause daemonized emacs to crash if the display disconnects (yes, even with the Lucid toolkit). term-mode is hacks on hacks on hacks; and slow ones at that. There's a bug in Emacs 24's sh-mode that can cause it to deadlock if you move the point to a wrong place in an incomplete if/while/for block start (IDK if it's fixed in Emacs 25). All point-releases of Emacs 24 shipped with a TRAMP mode with broken /sudo:: that can cause /dev/null to become an ordinary file, causing the entire OS to slowly and mysteriously break (Fun on servers! Fixed in Emacs 25). I have a collection of emacs core dumps on one of my servers (where I use it like screen/tmux) that I have yet to try to diagnose. I mean, I love Emacs and use it daily. But it certainly has plenty of bugs; but what reasonably complicated piece of software doesn't?
  - peatfreak 10y ago
    Emacs 19 was a model of low-defect, stable software, and my experiences reinforced that widespread notion. Over time and subsequent major releases, it grew and grew, and the complexity got too big to perform adequate QA, now nearing the point of unmaintainability. I also love it and use it daily, but I really wish the developers would show some restraint when considering whether to add new features (i.e., packages). Having said that, the very core text editing engine, i.e., the part that's written in C and the basic Elisp editing functions around that are still rock solid as always, and for me this is still the ultimate model of what a text processing engine should be. It handles large files beautifully (and errors gracefully when it cannot), does file locking well, goes to great lengths to ensure the integrity of your file, all of that basic core stuff is just superb and well thought out, by a lot of brilliant people over a long time, and that's all very well optimized. I think the problem is that too many third-party extensions are included with the core release.

RKoutnik 10y ago

Given that the goal for the plugins API is "I’ll probably never implement this 100%, only the api bits I need for the plugins I use." [0] I don't see this getting traction. Piggypacking off an existing ecosystem is a great way to bootstrap a project but so long as it's wack-a-mole to discover if all your plugins work, this remains a pet project in my mind. [0] https://github.com/limetext/lime/wiki/Goals https://github.com/limetext/lime/wiki/Goals

poisonarena 10y ago

pretty cool seeing an opensource alternative to something I like so much

hossbeast 10y ago

Am I the only one sick of projects declaring, "written in rust", "primarily developed in go", etc? Why do your users care about your implementation language? Do you have any features worth mentioning? If your main selling point is that you used the shiny new language, I'm already doubting the usefulness of the endeavor. Just the straw that finally broke the camel's back . . .

chmike 10y ago
Another argument why I'm very interestd to know thta it's written in go is that go will be a first class language in thta IDE :)
adrianratnapala 10y ago
I care about it whether it pulls in big dependencies. So I tend to avoid things in Java or Node.js, and on Unix I would avoid .Net (Mono). On Windows I'm fine with .Net, but would want to avoid Python. For languages like Go and Rust which compile to native code, I don't give a damn -- except to note that it is such a language.
erre 10y ago
Interestingly, I am tired of most projects declaring the language in which they were written upfront, especially when they are a copy of something else, "but written in ${language}!" - however, I am interested in the language a text editor is written in. Or, rather, the language it's extensible in. I'm a long-time Emacs user, but have been growing increasingly tired of it. Whichever incarnation of Emacs I turn to, it just seems old-fashioned and outdated. And yet, whenever I try another editor, I end up coming back to Emacs. And one of the reasons is often the language (or ability at all) with which to extend it.
chewxy 10y ago
Perhaps not for this case, but for libraries, it'd be prudent to write the language that it's for
nitemice 10y ago
I don't think it's about the users at all. I'd speculate the main reason people write things like that, and so prominently, is because they hope it will attract contributors who either already know that language or are enthusiastic enough about it to progress the project significantly. Otherwise someone may just pass it over assuming it's another piece of junk written in <insert-your-least-favourite-language-here>.

jdefr89 10y ago

Don't enough text-editors exists, things are getting outta control now. Vim, Emacs, Sublime, Atom, Lime... Shit, pick one of the four and be happy damn. Same thing is happening with programming languages. There is a new one everyday that doesn't offer anything better than what we had before. Everyone just has their eye on the shiny new toys I guess...

minitech 10y ago
You’re not obligated to use it. All existing editors (and languages) also have their flaws* and room for improvement, and I’m happy to see people try. * Preempting the “then send a pull request”: sometimes the flaws are fundamental or otherwise unlikely to change, like VimL, Emacs’s keybindings, Sublime Text’s closed-sourcedness, Atom and VS Code’s Electron bloat…
tikhonj 10y ago
Enough text editors exist given just Emacs :). Seriously though, we need more competition and innovation in text editors. Even Emacs isn't perfect.

lucio 10y ago

Why "successor"? Has SublimeText died somehow? Last time I've check my copy was running happily.

jayflux 10y ago
To be fair, this was back in 2014 when people thought sublime was dead and abandoned by Jon. However now that's not the case and the dev team are rolling out releases again, and expect a stable v3 to come out soon

TheAceOfHearts 10y ago

I'm a very happy Sublime Text user, but I wish it were open source. I don't mind paying, since I get so much value out of it. If it were open, others could make contributions, and I wouldn't have concerns of my favorite editor dying off. From the activity graphs, it looks like development on Lime Text has stalled a little. There's some updates in the wiki entries, but not much more. Hopefully things pick up! In relation to editors, I've been playing around with Spacemacs and evil mode enabled, but so far I haven't found the time to give it an honest chance as my daily editor.

usaphp 10y ago
Being open source has really small relation to project not dying off. In your own example Lime Text stalled even tho its open sourced, same with textmate which went open source.

preek 10y ago

The headline on the Landing Page says "Elegant Free Open-Source". I for one applaud these great selling propositions. And I'm speaking after using Emacs and VIM for 15 years having not seen one other editor concept that was ultimately superior. Sublime Text was horrible in that it offered an easy refuge so many young and inexperienced people. But ultimately it was a closed source prison that they got pulled into. And yes, I'm a professional developer having founded multiple companies. I'm a capitalist, nothing wrong with selling software. However, having great tools that last a lifetime available is one of the most important point I learned and like to teach to my students (I'm a lecturer, too). Why lock yourself in? Just because it looks more shiny and is easier in the first week? That's a good reason to use many things, but not your primary driver as a professional software engineer. Hooray for these new editors that look shiny and are open source. And then, when the students ask how I did those crazy things in Emacs, they still get those huge eyes and want to gobble all the information in. This kind of curiousness happens rarely with people locked into proprietary systems.

Karunamon 10y ago
Last I checked, Sublime is easily extensible with Python. What is this "lock in" you speak of? What "prison"? This reads like FSF.org hyperbole. Here comes the snark in reply to the snark: Someone had to come along and show that text editing didn't require the inscrutable complexity of Vim or Emacs, the kind of overwrought, overcomplicated, elitist and impractical user-hostility that absolutely dominates Open Source user interface design. I'd like to think that the proliferation of Sublime is what caused people to roll up their sleeves and start putting together things like Atom and VSCode and even this project. But I still use Sublime. Why? Because it's still faster than every competitor, it's still extensible enough to do what I need it to do, and unlike Emacs, doesn't require a PhD to comprehend, and unlike Vim, isn't an evolutionary dead end that pretends the mouse was never invented. Snark off: Many users don't consider Open Source to be a selling point. I am one of them. I choose my tools based on their usefulness, not the political status of their code, not intangible theoretical posturing about good and evil in the context of a fucking text editor. And you'll forgive me for taking issue with weak attempts to shame people for choosing tools that work for them. Perhaps this post reads a bit angry, and this is why.

tomhoward 10y ago

Previously seen on HN 2 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8196245 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8196245

ForFreedom 10y ago

Is there a direct download link for the mac?

Philipp__ 10y ago

I am afraid this is project is stalling. I would like open source alternative to Sublime. I use Emacs as of now, but it is funny how so many years down the line, we can't make good, robust editor that is focused on performance. Sure eye candy should be present in some degree (I am bitch about colors and nice UI, since I spend a lot of time in it, I like to make it look cool to me, but I always put performance and function on first place). Xi looks like it has potential, but it is pretty early in development. I just hope Ralf sticks to it, and in few years I think we will have great editor, with right technology, right philosophy and hopefully right community.

anindha 10y ago

Why not just pitch Jon (creator of Sublime) on open sourcing his editor. A business model where there is a community version and a professional version could work. I am sure you would be able to hit a Kickstarter goal pretty easily. Disclosure: I've worked with Jon previously

damiien 10y ago

did Atom hasn't be open source Sublime alternative?