18 ms·

Show HN: Lite – A small, fast text editor

607 points by rxi 6y ago

mosselman 6y ago
Any instructions on how to run this on macos?
- tingletech 6y ago
  on catalina os x; I just went git clone https://github.com/rxi/lite.git cd lite ./build.sh ./lite and an app did start up, but the text gets cut off in the editor window, and I can't quit the app from the menu
  - njsubedi 6y ago
    Probably adding it to the dock works?
    - tingletech 6y ago
      it creates a 348K "Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64", but I'm not sure how I would add that to the dock. I tried to drag it there with finder, but it would not take it.
      - ratww 6y ago
        You need an App Bundle. This is normally handled by Xcode or your building script, but it's possible to do it manually. To make App bundles you have to create the following directory structure: Lite.app \- Content \- MacOS \- Lite (that's the executable file) Here's a script that automates all that: [1] To add an icon you need a plist and a icns file [2]. I know it looks cumbersome, but it pays off when you need to bundle multiple files with your app. - [1] https://gist.github.com/mathiasbynens/674099 https://gist.github.com/mathiasbynens/674099 [2] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1596945/building-osx-app-bundle https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1596945/building-osx-app...
  - rawland 6y ago
    The compiler might complain that it needs SDL. Fixed this with: sudo apt install libsdl2-dev on Ubuntu. Else it works as tingletech described also using Mint/Ubuntu.
    - rajasimon 6y ago
      How do I install this on Mac? apt is not available in mac. Update: I can install this using brew install sdl2 https://medium.com/@edkins.sarah/set-up-sdl2-on-your-mac-without-xcode-6b0c33b723f7 https://medium.com/@edkins.sarah/set-up-sdl2-on-your-mac-wit...
      - tolqen 6y ago
        brew install sdl2
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
  - tolqen 6y ago
    it seems to compile/run fine for me on catalina but everything is absolutely huge (hidpi compatibility issues?)
    - mmm_grayons 6y ago
      Same here; font is huge on catalina. It seems like this is the culprit: static double get_scale(void) { float dpi; SDL_GetDisplayDPI(0, NULL, &dpi, NULL); #if _WIN32 return dpi / 96.0; #elif __APPLE__ return dpi / 72.0; #else return 1.0; #endif } I found changing it to dpi / 192.0 to be fairly comfortable. It wouldn't be too hard to add a scale option and change to `return (dpi * scale) / 192.0`. The "right way" is probably to do that but also get scale by checking the screen resolution; I'd go by height due to the increasing adoption of ultra-wide monitors: static double get_scale(void) { SDL_DisplayMode dm; SDL_GetDesktopDisplayMode(0, &dm); return dm.h * scale / 786.0; } Edit: works on my win10 and arch boxes.
      - haddr 6y ago
        still, after changing the get_scale, fonts doesn't look like they are rendered in higher resolution. There should be a separate feature to handle higher-resolution screens. Anyway, it feels really easy to change anything in this editor.
  - haddr 6y ago
    same here, works on mac quite nice :) and it's super fast. also fonts are a bit big on retina screen.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- devy 6y ago
  Someone made a formula: https://github.com/lincerely/homebrew-tools https://github.com/lincerely/homebrew-tools brew install lincerely/tools/lite Or brew tap lincerely/tools; brew install lite
- lowwave 6y ago
  Nice project. Would be nice to change the key binding on mac to use the Command key instead of control. It is one of those habit and mental shift when using mac vs linux/windows. Is there a config file where this can be changed?
Skunkleton 6y ago
Its looking pretty impressive, especially for such a new project. Since you said it was fast, it got my huge log file test (1GiB of binary with lots of utf-8 text). It performed better than most editors do. It did have a few stalls though. Still, pretty impressive.
akavel 6y ago
If you are interested in small Lua-based text editors, I advise you to take a look at Textadept: https://foicica.com/textadept/ https://foicica.com/textadept/ . Specifically as to minimalism: "Relentlessly optimized for speed and minimalism over the years, the editor consists of less than 2000 lines of C code and less than 4000 lines of Lua code." I believe this is a limit that the editor's author self-imposed and keeps to it with an impressive strictness. edit: though it uses Scintilla for the "engine" and I would assume its LOC count is not counted towards this limit.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- bachmeier 6y ago
  Textadept is also very extensible with little effort.
- p4bl0 6y ago
  You might also be interested in kilo: https://github.com/antirez/kilo https://github.com/antirez/kilo
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - moonchild 6y ago
    Or, for something really minimal, two kilo - https://github.com/moon-chilled/Two_Kilo/blob/master/two_kilo.c https://github.com/moon-chilled/Two_Kilo/blob/master/two_kil...
  - aeosynth 6y ago
    Similar in rust: https://github.com/ilai-deutel/kibi https://github.com/ilai-deutel/kibi
  - stevekemp 6y ago
    I forked that to add support for Lua-based scripting, multiple buffers, etc. Fun exercise: https://github.com/skx/kilua https://github.com/skx/kilua
johnchristopher 6y ago
Looks nice. But upon starting it up I lost all windows decorations (KDE), had to restart my session and lost the things I was working on in my terminals. How can launching an app cripples the whole desktop ? (not that this have anything to do with the app to me, it's a plasma thing) First thing I look for was support for vim keybinding, could neovim be used as the backend editor ?
- jhasse 6y ago
  Sound to me that your DE sucks if an app can bring it down.
  - tom_ 6y ago
    No comment is made worse by adding a concrete, actionable suggestion! You should add one to your comment.
    - jhasse 6y ago
      Stop using KDE.
- SbEpUBz2 6y ago
  KDE disables compositing when SDL apps are opened to improve performance. It should return once the app is closed. You can disable this behavior in System Settings > Display and Monitor > Compositor and unchecking Allow applications to block compositing.
  - johnchristopher 6y ago
    Wow, thank you ! It's not the first time something like that happened to me but I would never have had the patience to investigate ! Can confirm unchecking that setting solved that problem.
    - the_pwner224 6y ago
      This will have very bad effects when playing video games and might(?) potentially increase battery usage when watching full screen videos. Compositing should only provide the fancy effects like Wobbly Windows and window previews in the alt-tab switcher etc. Not sure why this is causing KWin to crash... You can use Alt-Shift-F12 by default to toggle compositing. But if you're not doing anything more graphically intense than playing turn-based or slow-paced video games then I guess you can use that option to permanently leave on compositing.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Okkef 6y ago
Fast and small is how they all start out. Feature complete and fast, now that is impressive.
- ukyrgf 6y ago
  There was a moment, years ago, when I used VS Code to edit text files because it was faster than Sublime and Notepad++. These days I open it begrudgingly.
  - vijaybritto 6y ago
    Thats weird. I have never seen sublime slowdown unless there is a buggy extension
BubRoss 6y ago
Very cool. It looks like it is written in Lua using sdl and some stb single file libraries.
rfeague 6y ago
Since there are a lot of text editors, I'd like to see more detail on the motivations for yet another one. How does this compare to the current top-five open source editors?
- bachmeier 6y ago
  And Textadept, which is also written in Lua.
- david_draco 6y ago
  What would you say are top open source editors one would consider, and by what criteria should one benchmark the comparison? While subjective criteria are perhaps most important (usability, integration with favorite programming language, extensibility), for technical quality perhaps there can be some meaningful numerical benchmarks. For example, the lag and memory use when opening a many-GB text file and editing the middle of it with syntax highlighting. Supposedly editors using ropes are good at this.
  - jackhalford 6y ago
    how are "usability, integration with favorite programming language, extensibility" subjective? these all seem like very objective features.
    - janderland 6y ago
      They are subjective in the degree to which they are measurable. How would you measure how well a text editor “integrates with a programming language”? There are many ways to measure this, making any single measurement choice subjective to a degree.
      - crazygringo 6y ago
        There is absolutely an objective process for identifying criteria and identifying how well it meets those criteria. First, an open-ended survey among text editor users to identify the features/requirements that matter to them. Second, tag and categorize those responses into a standardized list of features/requirements. Third, survey users to determine both the relative importances of those features/requirements, as well as how well each editor meets their needs for each feature/requirement. Both of these can be done using Likert scales, most commonly giving a score between 1 (does not meet needs at all) to 5 (completely meets needs), with intermediate values being "mostly doesn't", "somewhat", and "mostly". Several hundred randomly chosen survey respondents will generally give you the statistical precision you need. Companies do this all the time. It's bread and butter for many product managers and user researchers, to justify to execs why a particular feature ought to be built rather than other ones (combined with other factors like cost, risk, strategy, etc.). And there you have it. To answer your specific question, to measure how well a text editor integrates with a programming language, you just ask its users to rate how well it does. Since user opinion is all that matters in the end, that's the objective answer.
tambourine_man 6y ago
So there's no GUI toolkit? Everything is drawn with Simple DirectMedia Layer?
- skrebbel 6y ago
  I didn't check but I would assume it's based on https://github.com/rxi/microui https://github.com/rxi/microui by the same author.
- bitexploder 6y ago
  Yep: https://github.com/rxi/lite/blob/master/src/renderer.c https://github.com/rxi/lite/blob/master/src/renderer.c
- rxi 6y ago
  Not even that: SDL just provides a pixel buffer, the application draws everything itself per-pixel. Lite uses a technique I refer to as "cached software rendering" which allows the application code to be written as if it's doing a fullscreen-redrawn when it wants to update, the renderer cache (rencache.c) then works out which regions actually need to be redrawn at the end of the frame and redraws only those. You can call `renderer.show_debug(true)` to show these redraw regions: https://youtu.be/KtL9f6bksDQ?t=50 https://youtu.be/KtL9f6bksDQ?t=50 I wrote a short article detailing the technique here: https://rxi.github.io/200402.html https://rxi.github.io/200402.html
  - badsectoracula 6y ago
    FWIW this is basically "dirty rectangles" which was a very common technique for avoiding full screen updates in games back when the hardware wasn't fast enough to do that.
    - rxi 6y ago
      You're equating the final stage of this approach to the entire approach. The point of this technique is that you get the benefits you typically would from dirty rectangles without the burden of the bookkeeping you would traditionally have. Using this technique your application "redraws" everything as if it's drawing it fresh each frame and the renderer cache takes care of determining what's actually changed. Typically with dirty rectangles you would have to manage this state in the application code, for example, determining that line X was edited then updating the region for that line, or determining that view Y moved and updating a dirty rectangle based upon it's previous and current positions.
Koshkin 6y ago
Very nice; some basic user's documentation would be helpful.
nem_pet 6y ago
I will definitely try it as vs code became so slow and has all not needed features for me.
iamcreasy 6y ago
It feels snappier then sublime! Is there any limitation in the plugin system?
- rxi 6y ago
  As the editor is written mostly in Lua, with C taking care of the lower level parts, plugins can typically customise anything limited to what is exposed by Lua and the C API. Beyond adding custom commands, plugins can also do things like patch straight in the DocView's line-drawing function to draw additional content: https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/3920290/80743752-731bd780-8b15-11ea-97d3-847db927c5dc.png https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/3920290/80743752-7... Or create their own custom "views": https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/3920290/81343656-49325a00-90ad-11ea-8647-ff39d8f1d730.gif https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/3920290/81343656-4... The treeview at the left of the screen is implemented as a normal plugin, and like any other plugin can be removed from lite by simply deleteing the `treeview.lua` file.
  - iamcreasy 6y ago
    Thank you for the response. I wanted to have a simple IDE for R because R studio is very slow. I think this is a nice base to built on top of.
    - phillc73 6y ago
      I support this! Have been trying to use VS Codium[1], but R Studio keeps pulling me back in. An alternative with some nice R plugins would be fantastic. [1] https://vscodium.com/ https://vscodium.com/
skywayter 6y ago
This software seems pretty cool.
russdpale 6y ago
Looks like a nice start, kind of confusing interface though. Needs an open folder command.
- IceCreamJonsey 6y ago
  Seriously. I'm all for lightweight text editors, but the ability to open a folder and a way to start a new text file is minimum viable product.
joan_kode 6y ago
Looking at the screenshot in full size [1], it looks really cool but the text is visibly blurry (look at the = signs for example). Text rendering is hard, and especially for a text editor it's a good idea to just use the current platform's text rendering instead of rolling your own. Of course SDL "rolls its own" because it focuses on being exactly the same on every platform. SDL seems to offer font hinting which would somewhat solve the immediate problem, but I'm not sure it's being used properly here. With that said, text rendering is optimized for the current device's DPI, so maybe I'm just reading too much into a screenshot taken at a different DPI. [1] https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/3920290/81471642-6c165880-91ea-11ea-8cd1-fae7ae8f0bc4.png https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/3920290/81471642-6...
- metalliqaz 6y ago
  That could possibly be a result of the image compression as well, no?
  - rubber_duck 6y ago
    Shouldn't PNG be lossless by default ? (you could do some lossy pass to optimise but in that case you're probably better off using JPEG ?)
    - SahAssar 6y ago
      Sites like github often "optimize" images to lower bandwidth costs. Basically any platform you share images on that is at scale will probably re-compress images. For PNG they often reencode the image in a lossy way.
      - IAmEveryone 6y ago
        GitHub doesn’t “optimize” your images, just as it doesn’t format your code. People would storm the barricades if Github changed their files.
        6y ago
taigi100 6y ago
I have to mention, I do love how this looks! I'd be looking in using it as my daily driver for quick / short text edits and maybe small projects! Since I really like the looks of it, in case you do need help with keeping it maintained, I would love to help! Feel free to contact me at contact@taigi100.com Good luck and I hope it all goes well with this text editor!
grep_it 6y ago
Really cool project! At what point in the development did you start to use lite as your editor to develop it? I'm sure that was a fun milestone to hit.
- rxi 6y ago
  I can't say exactly when, but I was writing it in itself before I made the initial commit on the public repo, so at least 6 months ago. Every change I made since then (in addition to the plugins I wrote) would have been written in lite itself.
stephc_int13 6y ago
Very impressive. Font Rendering does not seem to be as crisp as needed for a text editor. (on Windows at least) I know Sublime is using DirectWrite to render fonts on Win32, this might be something to explore. Also, TrueType with subpixel antialiasing should give good results but might need some tweaking. I'll follow this project and I might use it as my main editor once it is more mature :)
- daneel_w 6y ago
  When I run this editor on Windows 10 the text appears to me as crisp as in any other editor I have available.
  - seventh-chord 6y ago
    Do you have a high dpi display? Lite does neither supixel-aa nor hinting, which is very noticeable on a 24" 1080p display. The lack of hintig is most noticeable at the top of letters where sharp edges look blury.
mmm_grayons 6y ago
This is a very nice piece of work, and I think very important: it shows that it's very much possible to make slick interfaces without using javascript/web technologies. It's also just as hackable as something like vscode or vim. I hope there's a shift back to native or semi-native applications as opposed to web-based stuff. It's certainly not perfect yet (it has some scaling/rendering issues and is slow to open large files), but is still a pretty great start. My two cents.
- lykr0n 6y ago
  I 100% agree with you, but the R&D time for something like this would eclipse an equivalent effort in Javascript/web tech. There needs to be focus on building tooling that enables rapid development of native applications. GTK is a good example. Glade is a perfectly fine editor, but the underlying tooling for GTK is a mixed bag.
  - dazzawazza 6y ago
    I'm not sure I agree. There needs to be a focus on building "quality everything" and not "quickest to make anything". Move fast and break things has become the cancer of software engineering.
  - smolder 6y ago
    > the R&D time for something like this would eclipse an equivalent effort in Javascript/web tech. I think this is less true when you don't assume people know all about web tech already, IOW there would be less of a difference for someone coming into software dev completely naive of web tech. > There needs to be focus on building tooling that enables rapid development of native applications. Fully agree.
  - rplnt 6y ago
    The time and resources users waste on using such application eclipses the difference in development. One could be folding enzymes instead of waiting for syntax highlighting to finish rendering in vs code.
- cwyers 6y ago
nonbirithm 6y ago
Interesting that it uses SDL. It would be nice if Vim or Emacs had an SDL backend, so it could be used on more esoteric platforms. I remember there being a distinct desire for a good homebrew text editor for the Switch.
snissn 6y ago
Could you share what data structure you use to keep the text in? I'm curious how text editors work, since you need fast inserts anywhere, is the text a linked list?
- pkaye 6y ago
  Check out this paper. It talks about the different ways to manage the data structures for text editors. https://www.cs.unm.edu/~crowley/papers/sds.pdf https://www.cs.unm.edu/~crowley/papers/sds.pdf
- thedirt0115 6y ago
  My Lua isn't strong, but I think this is what you're looking for: Data structure initialization: https://github.com/rxi/lite/blob/master/data/core/doc/init.lua#L48 https://github.com/rxi/lite/blob/master/data/core/doc/init.l... How insertion works here, which illuminates how the table is used: https://github.com/rxi/lite/blob/143f8867a13a35f5688ad7c97717dddf8bc58cd2/data/core/doc/init.lua#L230 https://github.com/rxi/lite/blob/143f8867a13a35f5688ad7c9771...
  - aspaceman 6y ago
    And if you want to take that a step further down the rabbit hole, here's how Lua allocates the table in memory: https://stackoverflow.com/a/29930168 https://stackoverflow.com/a/29930168 It's two dynamic arrays, of hashes and values, whose sizes grow as powers of two.
  - dtf 6y ago
    Looks like an array of lines, which is a completely reasonable structure to use. There's a good post on the Visual Studio Code blog about why and when they moved on from an array of lines to a new structure based on a piece table. https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2018/03/23/text-buffer-reimplementation https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2018/03/23/text-buffer-r...
- moonchild 6y ago
  Look at ropes - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rope_(data_structure) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rope_(data_structure)
MacSystem 6y ago
That's a very nice piece of work. I'm very interest to get to know more how text editor/IDE works. How hard would be add something like a GUI designer?
pknerd 6y ago
Looks interesting. Hope plugins make it more wonderful to make it useful for many languages like Python, Go etc. Right now I am stuck with VSCode and PyCharm.
urlwolf 6y ago
See also howl, written in lua/moonscript and damn fast. Both of these seem to have a bit more of a community than textadept (and no dependency on scite). I used textadept for a while, bought the book to support the author. It didn't work out for me.
- mega-tux 6y ago
  I also think Howl is pretty nice unknown gem.
Semaphor 6y ago
It seems a lot faster than most. But what it still doesn’t replace is my favorite editor EmEditor [0] (Windows only). Like every alternative I’ve checked out, Lite blocks for a long time when opening a multi-gb file. They aren’t FOSS and probably more expensive than any other text editor, but I’d love to know what they do to have such superior large file performance (the free version is fast, the paid version even supports streaming-loading of parts of the file). [0]: https://www.emeditor.com/ https://www.emeditor.com/
- einpoklum 6y ago
  That's only because it doesn't do what editors have to do. Try writing some right-to-left text in lite and see what happens.
- ryenus 6y ago
  Wow, thank you for mentioning EmEditor, I used to keep it as a must-have app when used Windows, preferred it over UltraEdit, EditPlus etc, good memories. Nowadays it's all vscode though.
urlwolf 6y ago
Typing latency as measured by typometer is quite high on kwin (no compositing). Both kate and Howl do much better. And pycharm. Great start, but it's not defeating vscode in the one aspect I care about: typing latency. Kate is a surprisingly good/fast editor nowadays.
- zem 6y ago
  kate has always been a really good piece of software. I would have used it a lot back in the late 90s if it had only had good vim emulation, everything else was excellent.
- jonahbenton 6y ago
  Long time Kate user, though I dropped KDE years back in favor of Fedora XFCE. If one isn't in KDE world, Kate's paint latency when alt-tabbing back to a Kate window is incredibly, painfully slow.
- ilrwbwrkhv 6y ago
  do you mean vs code has low latency?
ludsan 6y ago
Beautiful. Would love to see this front a headless nvim.
devy 6y ago
Checking the Github repo, it says 92.3% C[1], 2.6% Lua[2], why does the author claim it's a "text editor written in Lua" instead? [1]: https://github.com/rxi/lite/search?l=c https://github.com/rxi/lite/search?l=c [2]: https://github.com/rxi/lite/search?l=lua https://github.com/rxi/lite/search?l=lua
- ccmcarey 6y ago
  It seems to include the entirety of Lua - https://github.com/rxi/lite/tree/master/src/lib/lua52 https://github.com/rxi/lite/tree/master/src/lib/lua52 Which is written in C.
  - moonchild 6y ago
    Odd that they chose lua 5.2. The most popular luas nowadays are 5.1 (the version that luajit implements), and 5.3 (which was for a long time the 'latest and greatest', though it's been superseded by 5.4).
    - aeosynth 6y ago
      5.4 hasn't officially released (it's in the RC stage) so 5.3 is still the latest stable/supported version.
- codemac 6y ago
  They have all of the lua implementation checked in, which they didn't write. Most of the implementation is oddly in the "data" folder.
- hawski 6y ago
  If you check the C sources you'll find that it's Lua itself and libSDL.
- pentlander 6y ago
  Probably because that C code is the embedded Lua interpreter. See the lua.h file, there's the copyright notice at the bottom.
GordonS 6y ago
Firstly, let me say that I'm in no way hating on Lite, these are just some fact-based observations. Thought I'd give this a quick try on my Windows machines, where my liteweight editor of choice is Notepad3. A fresh start of Lite uses 10MB of memory, vs 3MB for Notepad3. After opening a 27.5MB text file in each, Lite used 156MB of memory, vs 68 for Notepad3. The functionality available in Notepad3 is also vastly superior. Lite is pretty spartan - it doesn't even appear to have a file/directory selection dialog to open files/folders with. I really like the default colour scheme/theme Lite ships with though.
- userbinator 6y ago
  Lite has a slightly smaller binary, however; but as someone whose regular text editor on Windows is notepad (the stock one, which is <100KB), I still find the fact that a text editor's binary is >1MB rather disappointing. I do realise that both Lite and Notepad3 are significantly more featureful, but I'm not sure if the increase in resource consumption is proportional. (For comparison, regular notepad uses <1MB of memory when holding nothing, and I don't have a 27.5MB text file to test with, but a 6.5MB one takes 17MB when loaded. In other words, the expansion factor is close to Notepad3.)
  - sp332 6y ago
    Notepad is basically a wrapper around a text box provided by the Windows native UI libraries. The binary is so small because the heavy lifting (such as there is any to be done in Notepad) is handled by the platform.
    - barrkel 6y ago
      Precisely. And for the same reason, Windows 95 could only edit 64kb of text in Notepad because that was the most text that could be put in an EDIT control.
- compressedgas 6y ago
  The memory usage can be explained by what structure it uses for its buffer. It is a Lua table of lines. It is this splitting of the file into lines that causes the larger memory usage due to internal fragmentation.
fergie 6y ago
Whats the advantage of Lite over Vi or Emacs?
- snazz 6y ago
  I like Vim (and I've tried Emacs), but there's certainly still room for a small, hackable text editor that can be used with the same intuition that applies to the rest of a modern computer. Vim and Emacs keybindings require a time investment (that some people find worth it) to learn and get comfortable with.
fareesh 6y ago
I would really like something as simple as windows notepad which syncs to my devices, where the app is equally simple. A no frills fulltext search feature would be nice too. I currently use Google Keep, which is incredibly slow
- nonesuchluck 6y ago
  I love the mobile and web versions of Simplenote from Automattic--decent searching, basic markdown, perfect sync. But I do wish the Windows/Linux clients weren't Electron. There's a good native Mac client at least.
- einpoklum 6y ago
  Lite has far less functionality than notepad.
- c-smile 6y ago
  Try my Sciter Notes ( https://notes.sciter.com https://notes.sciter.com ). It uses database for storing stuff but you can map books to folders on hard drive. And those folders can be under control of DropBox, GoogleDrive etc. So you can read shared stuff on any device using browser there.
- pradeepchhetri 6y ago
  Have you tried Notion(https://www.notion.so/ https://www.notion.so/)?
  - fareesh 6y ago
    - No linux client - Too many frills - Too slow
greendude29 6y ago
Very cool. Any plans of getting this into the arch repo?
satvikpendem 6y ago
Something similar is Revery, written in ReasonML (OCaml) [0]. I saw some comments here about a WASM renderer-based editor, I think there is something in Flutter that is similar, where Flutter uses Skia to render its components. [0] https://github.com/revery-ui/revery https://github.com/revery-ui/revery
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
donquichotte 6y ago
Lite is written by rxi, who has made some excellent game jams with very impressive youtube videos showing him doing programming, artwork and sound effects, all at record time [1]. His other github repos are also excellent, for example fe, a minimal Lisp, is definitely worth checking out. [1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1eJk1sWcUYvBwnn7v5RLaQ/videos https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1eJk1sWcUYvBwnn7v5RLaQ/vid...
m1sta_ 6y ago
Any chance on a windows arm64 build?
- revnode 6y ago
  Yay! Someone else on a Windows ARM machine! I have a Samsung Galaxy Book S.
ivanfon 6y ago
Is there language server support/is it planned?
unixhero 6y ago
What is the most feature-full modern text editor for the console, with syntax highlighting?
- ZoomZoomZoom 6y ago
  GNU Emacs (If by modern you mean actively developed)
winrid 6y ago
Man, I love Webstorm. I'd love something like this with Intellisense for JS/Node.
einpoklum 6y ago
Sorry, but this editor is effective unusable. It doesn't respect your keyboard layout (on Linux, probably on Windows too) and won't accept non-Latin characters. It's not "lite", it just lacks the basic functionality of an editor. PS - It is either impossible or difficult to write a new file. An irrelevant endeavor, don't waste your time on it. PS 2 - It is difficult or impossible to write a new file rather than open one. And I could go on.
pxi 6y ago
ooh - didn't know it was possible to set an SDL window icon like that in a linux build, my project... updated :)
jiggawatts 6y ago
One thing that has mystified me is all these people talking about text editor responsiveness, whether it feels "snappy" or not. What are they talking about!? I mean that as someone who has grown up with 3D shooters and is obsessive about tuning networks to the lowest possible ping times to improve latency for competitive gaming. I always turn triple buffering off because I can definitely feel the difference over double buffering. Practically every editor I use updates with the maximum 60Hz refresh of my monitor, and that literally can't be improved upon any further through software alone. The exception is Microsoft Word, which does about 30Hz and I hate this, but it's a shitty WYSIWYG editor, not a simple fixed-width text editor. I mean, seriously: I'm playing Doom Eternal at 4K with a constant 60fps, no dips. That game is processing a decent chunk of a terabyte per second of data at that rate. What is this mysterious difficulty people have with editing ~100KB text files!? Either this forum is full of people editing insane multi-gigabyte files (By hand? Why!?) or they're doing it on their 486SX PCs for nostalgia reasons. I seriously don't get it.
- crazygringo 6y ago
  I dunno why you haven't encountered it, but it's a real thing. I remember using one editor perhaps 8 years ago, and if I tried multi-cursor mode with more than ~40 insertion points (totally reasonable to edit 40 similar lines at a time), it took a couple of seconds to register each keypress. Similarly, other editors wind up choking on syntax highlighting, or large files, or find & replace, or documentation lookup, or whatever. The "mysterious difficulty" you mention is often literally several seconds of latency with, say, a 30,000-line file, whether it's with opening, scrolling, editing, or the other more advanced features already mentioned. I'm honestly pretty baffled this isn't something you've encountered before. This isn't about hertz, it's literally about entire seconds or large fractions thereof.
  - jiggawatts 6y ago
    I regularly use Notepad, Notepad++, TextPad, VS Code, Visual Studio, and the PowerShell ISE. I haven't had any issues with any of them, even when block-selecting or multi-cursor editing. Notably, they're all Windows native apps written in C++, with the exception of VS Code, which is partially JavaScript. I've noticed that some of them struggle with huge (1 GB) files, but editing such as large file is a somewhat strange thing to do.
alexeiz 6y ago
For those who are already proficient with Vim/Emacs, is there any reason to consider this editor?
- chrisMyzel 6y ago
  Also does it come with.vim keybindings :D
ZeroClickOk 6y ago
I just think about use VSCode as text editor, but I cannot change from Notepad++ yet... and VSCode as code editor only.
T3RMINATED 6y ago
sublime text rip off... go invent something original scrub.
WalterBright 6y ago
Another one is Microemacs (I use it nearly exclusively): C version: https://github.com/DigitalMars/me https://github.com/DigitalMars/me D version: https://github.com/DigitalMars/med https://github.com/DigitalMars/med The source is so simple, the "extension language" is just editing the code.
matthewhartmans 6y ago
Nice one OP! looks great!
bootcat 6y ago
He says its coded in lua but it seems to be completely coded in C ?
- h-cobordism 6y ago
  See this thread. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23127741 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23127741
mythz 6y ago
Was a bit skeptical, but this is surprisingly fast & lite & supports multi-tab + tree view + syntax highlighting in a 1mb download. I've not seen any of the reported issues with the font which looks clean & crisp (on Win 10). I'm not expecting it to have any of the features I'm used to with VS Code or JetBrains products, but it's definitely going to replace notepad.exe for a fast look at any text file. Supports `lite <path>` to open any file/folder, e.g. `lite .` opens up the current folder in a tree view with beautiful dark mode by default, single click on each file loads it instantly. Seeing beautiful, matte-style syntax highlighting for all popular formats I've tried: .html, .css, .js, .md. Perfect minimal distraction-free editor for writing docs.
fouric 6y ago
A previous comment (I can't seem to find it) said that it didn't respect keyboard layout on Linux. Is this true?
amasad 6y ago
Very cool! I ran it on repl.it via x11 but not sure it does the perf justice because of the network lag: https://repl.it/@amasad/lite https://repl.it/@amasad/lite
nerdponx 6y ago
Does it support LSP?
extro 6y ago
Works on Haiku: http://0x0.st/i_3I.png http://0x0.st/i_3I.png
- extro 6y ago
  In src/main.c at line 33 i had to add an ;.
mrtweetyhack 6y ago
not https://appleple.github.io/lite-editor/ https://appleple.github.io/lite-editor/

607 points by rxi 6y ago

mosselman 6y ago

Any instructions on how to run this on macos?

tingletech 6y ago
on catalina os x; I just went git clone https://github.com/rxi/lite.git cd lite ./build.sh ./lite and an app did start up, but the text gets cut off in the editor window, and I can't quit the app from the menu
- njsubedi 6y ago
  Probably adding it to the dock works?
  - tingletech 6y ago
    it creates a 348K "Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64", but I'm not sure how I would add that to the dock. I tried to drag it there with finder, but it would not take it.
    - ratww 6y ago
      You need an App Bundle. This is normally handled by Xcode or your building script, but it's possible to do it manually. To make App bundles you have to create the following directory structure: Lite.app \- Content \- MacOS \- Lite (that's the executable file) Here's a script that automates all that: [1] To add an icon you need a plist and a icns file [2]. I know it looks cumbersome, but it pays off when you need to bundle multiple files with your app. - [1] https://gist.github.com/mathiasbynens/674099 https://gist.github.com/mathiasbynens/674099 [2] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1596945/building-osx-app-bundle https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1596945/building-osx-app...
- rawland 6y ago
  The compiler might complain that it needs SDL. Fixed this with: sudo apt install libsdl2-dev on Ubuntu. Else it works as tingletech described also using Mint/Ubuntu.
  - rajasimon 6y ago
    How do I install this on Mac? apt is not available in mac. Update: I can install this using brew install sdl2 https://medium.com/@edkins.sarah/set-up-sdl2-on-your-mac-without-xcode-6b0c33b723f7 https://medium.com/@edkins.sarah/set-up-sdl2-on-your-mac-wit...
    - tolqen 6y ago
      brew install sdl2
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
- tolqen 6y ago
  it seems to compile/run fine for me on catalina but everything is absolutely huge (hidpi compatibility issues?)
  - mmm_grayons 6y ago
    Same here; font is huge on catalina. It seems like this is the culprit: static double get_scale(void) { float dpi; SDL_GetDisplayDPI(0, NULL, &dpi, NULL); #if _WIN32 return dpi / 96.0; #elif __APPLE__ return dpi / 72.0; #else return 1.0; #endif } I found changing it to dpi / 192.0 to be fairly comfortable. It wouldn't be too hard to add a scale option and change to `return (dpi * scale) / 192.0`. The "right way" is probably to do that but also get scale by checking the screen resolution; I'd go by height due to the increasing adoption of ultra-wide monitors: static double get_scale(void) { SDL_DisplayMode dm; SDL_GetDesktopDisplayMode(0, &dm); return dm.h * scale / 786.0; } Edit: works on my win10 and arch boxes.
    - haddr 6y ago
      still, after changing the get_scale, fonts doesn't look like they are rendered in higher resolution. There should be a separate feature to handle higher-resolution screens. Anyway, it feels really easy to change anything in this editor.
- haddr 6y ago
  same here, works on mac quite nice :) and it's super fast. also fonts are a bit big on retina screen.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- deleted 6y ago
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devy 6y ago
Someone made a formula: https://github.com/lincerely/homebrew-tools https://github.com/lincerely/homebrew-tools brew install lincerely/tools/lite Or brew tap lincerely/tools; brew install lite
lowwave 6y ago
Nice project. Would be nice to change the key binding on mac to use the Command key instead of control. It is one of those habit and mental shift when using mac vs linux/windows. Is there a config file where this can be changed?

Skunkleton 6y ago

Its looking pretty impressive, especially for such a new project. Since you said it was fast, it got my huge log file test (1GiB of binary with lots of utf-8 text). It performed better than most editors do. It did have a few stalls though. Still, pretty impressive.

akavel 6y ago

If you are interested in small Lua-based text editors, I advise you to take a look at Textadept: https://foicica.com/textadept/ https://foicica.com/textadept/ . Specifically as to minimalism: "Relentlessly optimized for speed and minimalism over the years, the editor consists of less than 2000 lines of C code and less than 4000 lines of Lua code." I believe this is a limit that the editor's author self-imposed and keeps to it with an impressive strictness. edit: though it uses Scintilla for the "engine" and I would assume its LOC count is not counted towards this limit.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
bachmeier 6y ago
Textadept is also very extensible with little effort.
p4bl0 6y ago
You might also be interested in kilo: https://github.com/antirez/kilo https://github.com/antirez/kilo
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- moonchild 6y ago
  Or, for something really minimal, two kilo - https://github.com/moon-chilled/Two_Kilo/blob/master/two_kilo.c https://github.com/moon-chilled/Two_Kilo/blob/master/two_kil...
- aeosynth 6y ago
  Similar in rust: https://github.com/ilai-deutel/kibi https://github.com/ilai-deutel/kibi
- stevekemp 6y ago
  I forked that to add support for Lua-based scripting, multiple buffers, etc. Fun exercise: https://github.com/skx/kilua https://github.com/skx/kilua

johnchristopher 6y ago

Looks nice. But upon starting it up I lost all windows decorations (KDE), had to restart my session and lost the things I was working on in my terminals. How can launching an app cripples the whole desktop ? (not that this have anything to do with the app to me, it's a plasma thing) First thing I look for was support for vim keybinding, could neovim be used as the backend editor ?

jhasse 6y ago
Sound to me that your DE sucks if an app can bring it down.
- tom_ 6y ago
  No comment is made worse by adding a concrete, actionable suggestion! You should add one to your comment.
  - jhasse 6y ago
    Stop using KDE.
SbEpUBz2 6y ago
KDE disables compositing when SDL apps are opened to improve performance. It should return once the app is closed. You can disable this behavior in System Settings > Display and Monitor > Compositor and unchecking Allow applications to block compositing.
- johnchristopher 6y ago
  Wow, thank you ! It's not the first time something like that happened to me but I would never have had the patience to investigate ! Can confirm unchecking that setting solved that problem.
  - the_pwner224 6y ago
    This will have very bad effects when playing video games and might(?) potentially increase battery usage when watching full screen videos. Compositing should only provide the fancy effects like Wobbly Windows and window previews in the alt-tab switcher etc. Not sure why this is causing KWin to crash... You can use Alt-Shift-F12 by default to toggle compositing. But if you're not doing anything more graphically intense than playing turn-based or slow-paced video games then I guess you can use that option to permanently leave on compositing.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

Okkef 6y ago

Fast and small is how they all start out. Feature complete and fast, now that is impressive.

ukyrgf 6y ago
There was a moment, years ago, when I used VS Code to edit text files because it was faster than Sublime and Notepad++. These days I open it begrudgingly.
- vijaybritto 6y ago
  Thats weird. I have never seen sublime slowdown unless there is a buggy extension

BubRoss 6y ago

Very cool. It looks like it is written in Lua using sdl and some stb single file libraries.

rfeague 6y ago

Since there are a lot of text editors, I'd like to see more detail on the motivations for yet another one. How does this compare to the current top-five open source editors?

bachmeier 6y ago
And Textadept, which is also written in Lua.
david_draco 6y ago
What would you say are top open source editors one would consider, and by what criteria should one benchmark the comparison? While subjective criteria are perhaps most important (usability, integration with favorite programming language, extensibility), for technical quality perhaps there can be some meaningful numerical benchmarks. For example, the lag and memory use when opening a many-GB text file and editing the middle of it with syntax highlighting. Supposedly editors using ropes are good at this.
- jackhalford 6y ago
  how are "usability, integration with favorite programming language, extensibility" subjective? these all seem like very objective features.
  - janderland 6y ago
    They are subjective in the degree to which they are measurable. How would you measure how well a text editor “integrates with a programming language”? There are many ways to measure this, making any single measurement choice subjective to a degree.
    - crazygringo 6y ago
      There is absolutely an objective process for identifying criteria and identifying how well it meets those criteria. First, an open-ended survey among text editor users to identify the features/requirements that matter to them. Second, tag and categorize those responses into a standardized list of features/requirements. Third, survey users to determine both the relative importances of those features/requirements, as well as how well each editor meets their needs for each feature/requirement. Both of these can be done using Likert scales, most commonly giving a score between 1 (does not meet needs at all) to 5 (completely meets needs), with intermediate values being "mostly doesn't", "somewhat", and "mostly". Several hundred randomly chosen survey respondents will generally give you the statistical precision you need. Companies do this all the time. It's bread and butter for many product managers and user researchers, to justify to execs why a particular feature ought to be built rather than other ones (combined with other factors like cost, risk, strategy, etc.). And there you have it. To answer your specific question, to measure how well a text editor integrates with a programming language, you just ask its users to rate how well it does. Since user opinion is all that matters in the end, that's the objective answer.

tambourine_man 6y ago

So there's no GUI toolkit? Everything is drawn with Simple DirectMedia Layer?

skrebbel 6y ago
I didn't check but I would assume it's based on https://github.com/rxi/microui https://github.com/rxi/microui by the same author.
bitexploder 6y ago
Yep: https://github.com/rxi/lite/blob/master/src/renderer.c https://github.com/rxi/lite/blob/master/src/renderer.c
rxi 6y ago
Not even that: SDL just provides a pixel buffer, the application draws everything itself per-pixel. Lite uses a technique I refer to as "cached software rendering" which allows the application code to be written as if it's doing a fullscreen-redrawn when it wants to update, the renderer cache (rencache.c) then works out which regions actually need to be redrawn at the end of the frame and redraws only those. You can call `renderer.show_debug(true)` to show these redraw regions: https://youtu.be/KtL9f6bksDQ?t=50 https://youtu.be/KtL9f6bksDQ?t=50 I wrote a short article detailing the technique here: https://rxi.github.io/200402.html https://rxi.github.io/200402.html
- badsectoracula 6y ago
  FWIW this is basically "dirty rectangles" which was a very common technique for avoiding full screen updates in games back when the hardware wasn't fast enough to do that.
  - rxi 6y ago
    You're equating the final stage of this approach to the entire approach. The point of this technique is that you get the benefits you typically would from dirty rectangles without the burden of the bookkeeping you would traditionally have. Using this technique your application "redraws" everything as if it's drawing it fresh each frame and the renderer cache takes care of determining what's actually changed. Typically with dirty rectangles you would have to manage this state in the application code, for example, determining that line X was edited then updating the region for that line, or determining that view Y moved and updating a dirty rectangle based upon it's previous and current positions.

Koshkin 6y ago

Very nice; some basic user's documentation would be helpful.

nem_pet 6y ago

I will definitely try it as vs code became so slow and has all not needed features for me.

iamcreasy 6y ago

It feels snappier then sublime! Is there any limitation in the plugin system?

rxi 6y ago
As the editor is written mostly in Lua, with C taking care of the lower level parts, plugins can typically customise anything limited to what is exposed by Lua and the C API. Beyond adding custom commands, plugins can also do things like patch straight in the DocView's line-drawing function to draw additional content: https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/3920290/80743752-731bd780-8b15-11ea-97d3-847db927c5dc.png https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/3920290/80743752-7... Or create their own custom "views": https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/3920290/81343656-49325a00-90ad-11ea-8647-ff39d8f1d730.gif https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/3920290/81343656-4... The treeview at the left of the screen is implemented as a normal plugin, and like any other plugin can be removed from lite by simply deleteing the `treeview.lua` file.
- iamcreasy 6y ago
  Thank you for the response. I wanted to have a simple IDE for R because R studio is very slow. I think this is a nice base to built on top of.
  - phillc73 6y ago
    I support this! Have been trying to use VS Codium[1], but R Studio keeps pulling me back in. An alternative with some nice R plugins would be fantastic. [1] https://vscodium.com/ https://vscodium.com/

skywayter 6y ago

This software seems pretty cool.

russdpale 6y ago

Looks like a nice start, kind of confusing interface though. Needs an open folder command.

IceCreamJonsey 6y ago
Seriously. I'm all for lightweight text editors, but the ability to open a folder and a way to start a new text file is minimum viable product.

joan_kode 6y ago

Looking at the screenshot in full size [1], it looks really cool but the text is visibly blurry (look at the = signs for example). Text rendering is hard, and especially for a text editor it's a good idea to just use the current platform's text rendering instead of rolling your own. Of course SDL "rolls its own" because it focuses on being exactly the same on every platform. SDL seems to offer font hinting which would somewhat solve the immediate problem, but I'm not sure it's being used properly here. With that said, text rendering is optimized for the current device's DPI, so maybe I'm just reading too much into a screenshot taken at a different DPI. [1] https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/3920290/81471642-6c165880-91ea-11ea-8cd1-fae7ae8f0bc4.png https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/3920290/81471642-6...

metalliqaz 6y ago
That could possibly be a result of the image compression as well, no?
- rubber_duck 6y ago
  Shouldn't PNG be lossless by default ? (you could do some lossy pass to optimise but in that case you're probably better off using JPEG ?)
  - SahAssar 6y ago
    Sites like github often "optimize" images to lower bandwidth costs. Basically any platform you share images on that is at scale will probably re-compress images. For PNG they often reencode the image in a lossy way.
    - IAmEveryone 6y ago
      GitHub doesn’t “optimize” your images, just as it doesn’t format your code. People would storm the barricades if Github changed their files.
      - 6y ago

taigi100 6y ago

I have to mention, I do love how this looks! I'd be looking in using it as my daily driver for quick / short text edits and maybe small projects! Since I really like the looks of it, in case you do need help with keeping it maintained, I would love to help! Feel free to contact me at contact@taigi100.com Good luck and I hope it all goes well with this text editor!

grep_it 6y ago

Really cool project! At what point in the development did you start to use lite as your editor to develop it? I'm sure that was a fun milestone to hit.

rxi 6y ago
I can't say exactly when, but I was writing it in itself before I made the initial commit on the public repo, so at least 6 months ago. Every change I made since then (in addition to the plugins I wrote) would have been written in lite itself.

stephc_int13 6y ago

Very impressive. Font Rendering does not seem to be as crisp as needed for a text editor. (on Windows at least) I know Sublime is using DirectWrite to render fonts on Win32, this might be something to explore. Also, TrueType with subpixel antialiasing should give good results but might need some tweaking. I'll follow this project and I might use it as my main editor once it is more mature :)

daneel_w 6y ago
When I run this editor on Windows 10 the text appears to me as crisp as in any other editor I have available.
- seventh-chord 6y ago
  Do you have a high dpi display? Lite does neither supixel-aa nor hinting, which is very noticeable on a 24" 1080p display. The lack of hintig is most noticeable at the top of letters where sharp edges look blury.

mmm_grayons 6y ago

This is a very nice piece of work, and I think very important: it shows that it's very much possible to make slick interfaces without using javascript/web technologies. It's also just as hackable as something like vscode or vim. I hope there's a shift back to native or semi-native applications as opposed to web-based stuff. It's certainly not perfect yet (it has some scaling/rendering issues and is slow to open large files), but is still a pretty great start. My two cents.

lykr0n 6y ago
I 100% agree with you, but the R&D time for something like this would eclipse an equivalent effort in Javascript/web tech. There needs to be focus on building tooling that enables rapid development of native applications. GTK is a good example. Glade is a perfectly fine editor, but the underlying tooling for GTK is a mixed bag.
- dazzawazza 6y ago
  I'm not sure I agree. There needs to be a focus on building "quality everything" and not "quickest to make anything". Move fast and break things has become the cancer of software engineering.
- smolder 6y ago
  > the R&D time for something like this would eclipse an equivalent effort in Javascript/web tech. I think this is less true when you don't assume people know all about web tech already, IOW there would be less of a difference for someone coming into software dev completely naive of web tech. > There needs to be focus on building tooling that enables rapid development of native applications. Fully agree.
- rplnt 6y ago
  The time and resources users waste on using such application eclipses the difference in development. One could be folding enzymes instead of waiting for syntax highlighting to finish rendering in vs code.
cwyers 6y ago

nonbirithm 6y ago

Interesting that it uses SDL. It would be nice if Vim or Emacs had an SDL backend, so it could be used on more esoteric platforms. I remember there being a distinct desire for a good homebrew text editor for the Switch.

snissn 6y ago

Could you share what data structure you use to keep the text in? I'm curious how text editors work, since you need fast inserts anywhere, is the text a linked list?

pkaye 6y ago
Check out this paper. It talks about the different ways to manage the data structures for text editors. https://www.cs.unm.edu/~crowley/papers/sds.pdf https://www.cs.unm.edu/~crowley/papers/sds.pdf
thedirt0115 6y ago
My Lua isn't strong, but I think this is what you're looking for: Data structure initialization: https://github.com/rxi/lite/blob/master/data/core/doc/init.lua#L48 https://github.com/rxi/lite/blob/master/data/core/doc/init.l... How insertion works here, which illuminates how the table is used: https://github.com/rxi/lite/blob/143f8867a13a35f5688ad7c97717dddf8bc58cd2/data/core/doc/init.lua#L230 https://github.com/rxi/lite/blob/143f8867a13a35f5688ad7c9771...
- aspaceman 6y ago
  And if you want to take that a step further down the rabbit hole, here's how Lua allocates the table in memory: https://stackoverflow.com/a/29930168 https://stackoverflow.com/a/29930168 It's two dynamic arrays, of hashes and values, whose sizes grow as powers of two.
- dtf 6y ago
  Looks like an array of lines, which is a completely reasonable structure to use. There's a good post on the Visual Studio Code blog about why and when they moved on from an array of lines to a new structure based on a piece table. https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2018/03/23/text-buffer-reimplementation https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2018/03/23/text-buffer-r...
moonchild 6y ago
Look at ropes - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rope_(data_structure) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rope_(data_structure)

MacSystem 6y ago

That's a very nice piece of work. I'm very interest to get to know more how text editor/IDE works. How hard would be add something like a GUI designer?

pknerd 6y ago

Looks interesting. Hope plugins make it more wonderful to make it useful for many languages like Python, Go etc. Right now I am stuck with VSCode and PyCharm.

urlwolf 6y ago

See also howl, written in lua/moonscript and damn fast. Both of these seem to have a bit more of a community than textadept (and no dependency on scite). I used textadept for a while, bought the book to support the author. It didn't work out for me.

mega-tux 6y ago
I also think Howl is pretty nice unknown gem.

Semaphor 6y ago

It seems a lot faster than most. But what it still doesn’t replace is my favorite editor EmEditor [0] (Windows only). Like every alternative I’ve checked out, Lite blocks for a long time when opening a multi-gb file. They aren’t FOSS and probably more expensive than any other text editor, but I’d love to know what they do to have such superior large file performance (the free version is fast, the paid version even supports streaming-loading of parts of the file). [0]: https://www.emeditor.com/ https://www.emeditor.com/

einpoklum 6y ago
That's only because it doesn't do what editors have to do. Try writing some right-to-left text in lite and see what happens.
ryenus 6y ago
Wow, thank you for mentioning EmEditor, I used to keep it as a must-have app when used Windows, preferred it over UltraEdit, EditPlus etc, good memories. Nowadays it's all vscode though.

urlwolf 6y ago

Typing latency as measured by typometer is quite high on kwin (no compositing). Both kate and Howl do much better. And pycharm. Great start, but it's not defeating vscode in the one aspect I care about: typing latency. Kate is a surprisingly good/fast editor nowadays.

zem 6y ago
kate has always been a really good piece of software. I would have used it a lot back in the late 90s if it had only had good vim emulation, everything else was excellent.
jonahbenton 6y ago
Long time Kate user, though I dropped KDE years back in favor of Fedora XFCE. If one isn't in KDE world, Kate's paint latency when alt-tabbing back to a Kate window is incredibly, painfully slow.
ilrwbwrkhv 6y ago
do you mean vs code has low latency?

ludsan 6y ago

Beautiful. Would love to see this front a headless nvim.

devy 6y ago

Checking the Github repo, it says 92.3% C[1], 2.6% Lua[2], why does the author claim it's a "text editor written in Lua" instead? [1]: https://github.com/rxi/lite/search?l=c https://github.com/rxi/lite/search?l=c [2]: https://github.com/rxi/lite/search?l=lua https://github.com/rxi/lite/search?l=lua

ccmcarey 6y ago
It seems to include the entirety of Lua - https://github.com/rxi/lite/tree/master/src/lib/lua52 https://github.com/rxi/lite/tree/master/src/lib/lua52 Which is written in C.
- moonchild 6y ago
  Odd that they chose lua 5.2. The most popular luas nowadays are 5.1 (the version that luajit implements), and 5.3 (which was for a long time the 'latest and greatest', though it's been superseded by 5.4).
  - aeosynth 6y ago
    5.4 hasn't officially released (it's in the RC stage) so 5.3 is still the latest stable/supported version.
codemac 6y ago
They have all of the lua implementation checked in, which they didn't write. Most of the implementation is oddly in the "data" folder.
hawski 6y ago
If you check the C sources you'll find that it's Lua itself and libSDL.
pentlander 6y ago
Probably because that C code is the embedded Lua interpreter. See the lua.h file, there's the copyright notice at the bottom.

GordonS 6y ago

Firstly, let me say that I'm in no way hating on Lite, these are just some fact-based observations. Thought I'd give this a quick try on my Windows machines, where my liteweight editor of choice is Notepad3. A fresh start of Lite uses 10MB of memory, vs 3MB for Notepad3. After opening a 27.5MB text file in each, Lite used 156MB of memory, vs 68 for Notepad3. The functionality available in Notepad3 is also vastly superior. Lite is pretty spartan - it doesn't even appear to have a file/directory selection dialog to open files/folders with. I really like the default colour scheme/theme Lite ships with though.

userbinator 6y ago
Lite has a slightly smaller binary, however; but as someone whose regular text editor on Windows is notepad (the stock one, which is <100KB), I still find the fact that a text editor's binary is >1MB rather disappointing. I do realise that both Lite and Notepad3 are significantly more featureful, but I'm not sure if the increase in resource consumption is proportional. (For comparison, regular notepad uses <1MB of memory when holding nothing, and I don't have a 27.5MB text file to test with, but a 6.5MB one takes 17MB when loaded. In other words, the expansion factor is close to Notepad3.)
- sp332 6y ago
  Notepad is basically a wrapper around a text box provided by the Windows native UI libraries. The binary is so small because the heavy lifting (such as there is any to be done in Notepad) is handled by the platform.
  - barrkel 6y ago
    Precisely. And for the same reason, Windows 95 could only edit 64kb of text in Notepad because that was the most text that could be put in an EDIT control.
compressedgas 6y ago
The memory usage can be explained by what structure it uses for its buffer. It is a Lua table of lines. It is this splitting of the file into lines that causes the larger memory usage due to internal fragmentation.

fergie 6y ago

Whats the advantage of Lite over Vi or Emacs?

snazz 6y ago
I like Vim (and I've tried Emacs), but there's certainly still room for a small, hackable text editor that can be used with the same intuition that applies to the rest of a modern computer. Vim and Emacs keybindings require a time investment (that some people find worth it) to learn and get comfortable with.

fareesh 6y ago

I would really like something as simple as windows notepad which syncs to my devices, where the app is equally simple. A no frills fulltext search feature would be nice too. I currently use Google Keep, which is incredibly slow

nonesuchluck 6y ago
I love the mobile and web versions of Simplenote from Automattic--decent searching, basic markdown, perfect sync. But I do wish the Windows/Linux clients weren't Electron. There's a good native Mac client at least.
einpoklum 6y ago
Lite has far less functionality than notepad.
c-smile 6y ago
Try my Sciter Notes ( https://notes.sciter.com https://notes.sciter.com ). It uses database for storing stuff but you can map books to folders on hard drive. And those folders can be under control of DropBox, GoogleDrive etc. So you can read shared stuff on any device using browser there.
pradeepchhetri 6y ago
Have you tried Notion(https://www.notion.so/ https://www.notion.so/)?
- fareesh 6y ago
  - No linux client - Too many frills - Too slow

greendude29 6y ago

Very cool. Any plans of getting this into the arch repo?

satvikpendem 6y ago

Something similar is Revery, written in ReasonML (OCaml) [0]. I saw some comments here about a WASM renderer-based editor, I think there is something in Flutter that is similar, where Flutter uses Skia to render its components. [0] https://github.com/revery-ui/revery https://github.com/revery-ui/revery

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

donquichotte 6y ago

Lite is written by rxi, who has made some excellent game jams with very impressive youtube videos showing him doing programming, artwork and sound effects, all at record time [1]. His other github repos are also excellent, for example fe, a minimal Lisp, is definitely worth checking out. [1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1eJk1sWcUYvBwnn7v5RLaQ/videos https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1eJk1sWcUYvBwnn7v5RLaQ/vid...

m1sta_ 6y ago

Any chance on a windows arm64 build?

revnode 6y ago
Yay! Someone else on a Windows ARM machine! I have a Samsung Galaxy Book S.

ivanfon 6y ago

Is there language server support/is it planned?

unixhero 6y ago

What is the most feature-full modern text editor for the console, with syntax highlighting?

ZoomZoomZoom 6y ago
GNU Emacs (If by modern you mean actively developed)

winrid 6y ago

Man, I love Webstorm. I'd love something like this with Intellisense for JS/Node.

einpoklum 6y ago

Sorry, but this editor is effective unusable. It doesn't respect your keyboard layout (on Linux, probably on Windows too) and won't accept non-Latin characters. It's not "lite", it just lacks the basic functionality of an editor. PS - It is either impossible or difficult to write a new file. An irrelevant endeavor, don't waste your time on it. PS 2 - It is difficult or impossible to write a new file rather than open one. And I could go on.

pxi 6y ago

ooh - didn't know it was possible to set an SDL window icon like that in a linux build, my project... updated :)

jiggawatts 6y ago

One thing that has mystified me is all these people talking about text editor responsiveness, whether it feels "snappy" or not. What are they talking about!? I mean that as someone who has grown up with 3D shooters and is obsessive about tuning networks to the lowest possible ping times to improve latency for competitive gaming. I always turn triple buffering off because I can definitely feel the difference over double buffering. Practically every editor I use updates with the maximum 60Hz refresh of my monitor, and that literally can't be improved upon any further through software alone. The exception is Microsoft Word, which does about 30Hz and I hate this, but it's a shitty WYSIWYG editor, not a simple fixed-width text editor. I mean, seriously: I'm playing Doom Eternal at 4K with a constant 60fps, no dips. That game is processing a decent chunk of a terabyte per second of data at that rate. What is this mysterious difficulty people have with editing ~100KB text files!? Either this forum is full of people editing insane multi-gigabyte files (By hand? Why!?) or they're doing it on their 486SX PCs for nostalgia reasons. I seriously don't get it.

crazygringo 6y ago
I dunno why you haven't encountered it, but it's a real thing. I remember using one editor perhaps 8 years ago, and if I tried multi-cursor mode with more than ~40 insertion points (totally reasonable to edit 40 similar lines at a time), it took a couple of seconds to register each keypress. Similarly, other editors wind up choking on syntax highlighting, or large files, or find & replace, or documentation lookup, or whatever. The "mysterious difficulty" you mention is often literally several seconds of latency with, say, a 30,000-line file, whether it's with opening, scrolling, editing, or the other more advanced features already mentioned. I'm honestly pretty baffled this isn't something you've encountered before. This isn't about hertz, it's literally about entire seconds or large fractions thereof.
- jiggawatts 6y ago
  I regularly use Notepad, Notepad++, TextPad, VS Code, Visual Studio, and the PowerShell ISE. I haven't had any issues with any of them, even when block-selecting or multi-cursor editing. Notably, they're all Windows native apps written in C++, with the exception of VS Code, which is partially JavaScript. I've noticed that some of them struggle with huge (1 GB) files, but editing such as large file is a somewhat strange thing to do.

alexeiz 6y ago

For those who are already proficient with Vim/Emacs, is there any reason to consider this editor?

chrisMyzel 6y ago
Also does it come with.vim keybindings :D

ZeroClickOk 6y ago

I just think about use VSCode as text editor, but I cannot change from Notepad++ yet... and VSCode as code editor only.

T3RMINATED 6y ago

sublime text rip off... go invent something original scrub.

WalterBright 6y ago

Another one is Microemacs (I use it nearly exclusively): C version: https://github.com/DigitalMars/me https://github.com/DigitalMars/me D version: https://github.com/DigitalMars/med https://github.com/DigitalMars/med The source is so simple, the "extension language" is just editing the code.

matthewhartmans 6y ago

Nice one OP! looks great!

bootcat 6y ago

He says its coded in lua but it seems to be completely coded in C ?

h-cobordism 6y ago
See this thread. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23127741 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23127741

mythz 6y ago

Was a bit skeptical, but this is surprisingly fast & lite & supports multi-tab + tree view + syntax highlighting in a 1mb download. I've not seen any of the reported issues with the font which looks clean & crisp (on Win 10). I'm not expecting it to have any of the features I'm used to with VS Code or JetBrains products, but it's definitely going to replace notepad.exe for a fast look at any text file. Supports `lite <path>` to open any file/folder, e.g. `lite .` opens up the current folder in a tree view with beautiful dark mode by default, single click on each file loads it instantly. Seeing beautiful, matte-style syntax highlighting for all popular formats I've tried: .html, .css, .js, .md. Perfect minimal distraction-free editor for writing docs.

fouric 6y ago

A previous comment (I can't seem to find it) said that it didn't respect keyboard layout on Linux. Is this true?

amasad 6y ago

Very cool! I ran it on repl.it via x11 but not sure it does the perf justice because of the network lag: https://repl.it/@amasad/lite https://repl.it/@amasad/lite

nerdponx 6y ago

Does it support LSP?

extro 6y ago

Works on Haiku: http://0x0.st/i_3I.png http://0x0.st/i_3I.png

extro 6y ago
In src/main.c at line 33 i had to add an ;.

mrtweetyhack 6y ago

not https://appleple.github.io/lite-editor/ https://appleple.github.io/lite-editor/