6 ms·

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 s

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.
      - IAmEveryone 6y ago
        A survey doesn’t eliminate subjectiveness, it merely averages over it.
        crazygringo 6y ago
        You're missing the point. When it comes to products, people's average evaluation is the objective answer. Because people's evaluations are what lead to usage, purchase, subscriptions, etc. There is no other "objective" answer. There's nothing subjective about it. What users think about your product is your product in the marketplace. That's the entire meaning of "the customer is always right". Satisfying user demand for a capability isn't a mathematics problem where there's some independently objectively right answer.
        the_hoser 6y ago
        "The customer is always right." was a marketing slogan used by retailers in the late 19th century to convince people to shop in their stores. It doesn't mean anything.
        crazygringo 6y ago
        That's its origin, but it's certainly been repurposed today in product design to mean a very real thing, which is that the customer will buy what the customer wants, regardless of whether you think they should or not. In other words, there's no objective product goodness/badness. Only what the customer wants. In that sense, the customer (market) is always right. Inexperienced restauranteurs often experience the same shock. You don't cook the food you want to make, or that you think people ought to eat -- you cook the food people want to eat. Otherwise you'll go out of business.
        the_hoser 6y ago
        It's created an inappropriate sense of entitlement for many consumers. You're absolutely right that a product will fail if people don't want it, but it's also true that people often don't get the products that they want because there's no way to deliver that product to them and turn a profit. In these cases, the customer is most certainly not always right. It's a bad slogan that only portrays half of the reality of the situation.
  - akho 6y ago
    Usability is only objective if you use the word in a dictionary sense: "it is possible to use this editor". It is very much subjective in its usual use: how easily it can be used by a certain user to do certain things. Say, to me a text editor without Vim key bindings is not usable. To someone else, Ctrl-C / Ctrl-V bindings may be preferable. 'Usable code editor' and 'usable screenplay editor' are completely different categories, even though both are text editors. Different approaches to extensibility can exist, all of them good in certain areas. Both Emacs and VS Code are extensible; which approach is better? You'll find different opinions. You'll need, as a minimum, to specify a language to move "integration with favorite programming language" towards objectivity.
- stOneskull 6y ago
  Personally, I'm thinking of its comparison to Geany. A wonderful editor but I have a feeling the first difference is it's going to seem real bloated. Time to see.
  - alcover 6y ago
    Geany is lean and fast but has some warts. I.e. side-panel is too large, find+replace menu is modal and confusing.
  - zoom6628 6y ago
    Second that about Geany. Wonderful editor that i have been using for years - anytime find a new system or need to have 1 editor that will handle any type of file in a civilised manner, then my first install is Geany. That said looking at the author's main.c this looks really nice as a shell for anyone looking to create a tool with lua scripting. Im going to download and study this one!
vijaybritto 6y ago
The resident memory was 10MB in my windows machine when I ran this. A strong reason for me to use this would be in a low powered device. I want to write markdown in a tiny editor like this. I want to run multiple projects side by side and this is good for that. If I'm a beginner trying do dev on a machine lower than 4G of RAM. So many more examples come to my mind. I'm pretty sure there are more Also the immediate UI library from the same author is very good and the examples are amazing. 1. https://github.com/rxi/microui https://github.com/rxi/microui 2. https://floooh.github.io/sokol-html5/index.html https://floooh.github.io/sokol-html5/index.html
- stephen82 6y ago
  On my GNU / Debian testing 64-bit, with 10 tabs opened it consumed 31 MiB of RAM and my CPU pushed itself to reach 0.75% at its busiest processing during typing. To me this is simply mind-blowing.
  - alcover 6y ago
    Not as mind-blowing as SublimeText leaking 3 solid GB of RAM after a few days on my Debian..
    - vijaybritto 6y ago
      Its always the extensions. Not sublime itself. That has been my experience so far
  - barrkel 6y ago
    We used to be able to open 10 files at a time on 4MB systems back in the 90s. (They weren't big files, of course, but still. Standards have slipped.)
    - stephen82 6y ago
      Yes, those were the days...every once in a while, I visit https://kolibrios.org/en/screen https://kolibrios.org/en/screen to get nostalgic. Indeed standards have slipped or better say have been sacrificed at the altar of "quantity over quality". For a simple "Hello, World!" string message, nowadays you need how many MBs of RAM. Madness, complete madness!
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

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.
    - IAmEveryone 6y ago
      A survey doesn’t eliminate subjectiveness, it merely averages over it.
      - crazygringo 6y ago
        You're missing the point. When it comes to products, people's average evaluation is the objective answer. Because people's evaluations are what lead to usage, purchase, subscriptions, etc. There is no other "objective" answer. There's nothing subjective about it. What users think about your product is your product in the marketplace. That's the entire meaning of "the customer is always right". Satisfying user demand for a capability isn't a mathematics problem where there's some independently objectively right answer.
        the_hoser 6y ago
        "The customer is always right." was a marketing slogan used by retailers in the late 19th century to convince people to shop in their stores. It doesn't mean anything.
        crazygringo 6y ago
        That's its origin, but it's certainly been repurposed today in product design to mean a very real thing, which is that the customer will buy what the customer wants, regardless of whether you think they should or not. In other words, there's no objective product goodness/badness. Only what the customer wants. In that sense, the customer (market) is always right. Inexperienced restauranteurs often experience the same shock. You don't cook the food you want to make, or that you think people ought to eat -- you cook the food people want to eat. Otherwise you'll go out of business.
        the_hoser 6y ago
        It's created an inappropriate sense of entitlement for many consumers. You're absolutely right that a product will fail if people don't want it, but it's also true that people often don't get the products that they want because there's no way to deliver that product to them and turn a profit. In these cases, the customer is most certainly not always right. It's a bad slogan that only portrays half of the reality of the situation.
- akho 6y ago
  Usability is only objective if you use the word in a dictionary sense: "it is possible to use this editor". It is very much subjective in its usual use: how easily it can be used by a certain user to do certain things. Say, to me a text editor without Vim key bindings is not usable. To someone else, Ctrl-C / Ctrl-V bindings may be preferable. 'Usable code editor' and 'usable screenplay editor' are completely different categories, even though both are text editors. Different approaches to extensibility can exist, all of them good in certain areas. Both Emacs and VS Code are extensible; which approach is better? You'll find different opinions. You'll need, as a minimum, to specify a language to move "integration with favorite programming language" towards objectivity.
stOneskull 6y ago
Personally, I'm thinking of its comparison to Geany. A wonderful editor but I have a feeling the first difference is it's going to seem real bloated. Time to see.
- alcover 6y ago
  Geany is lean and fast but has some warts. I.e. side-panel is too large, find+replace menu is modal and confusing.
- zoom6628 6y ago
  Second that about Geany. Wonderful editor that i have been using for years - anytime find a new system or need to have 1 editor that will handle any type of file in a civilised manner, then my first install is Geany. That said looking at the author's main.c this looks really nice as a shell for anyone looking to create a tool with lua scripting. Im going to download and study this one!

vijaybritto 6y ago

The resident memory was 10MB in my windows machine when I ran this. A strong reason for me to use this would be in a low powered device. I want to write markdown in a tiny editor like this. I want to run multiple projects side by side and this is good for that. If I'm a beginner trying do dev on a machine lower than 4G of RAM. So many more examples come to my mind. I'm pretty sure there are more Also the immediate UI library from the same author is very good and the examples are amazing. 1. https://github.com/rxi/microui https://github.com/rxi/microui 2. https://floooh.github.io/sokol-html5/index.html https://floooh.github.io/sokol-html5/index.html

stephen82 6y ago
On my GNU / Debian testing 64-bit, with 10 tabs opened it consumed 31 MiB of RAM and my CPU pushed itself to reach 0.75% at its busiest processing during typing. To me this is simply mind-blowing.
- alcover 6y ago
  Not as mind-blowing as SublimeText leaking 3 solid GB of RAM after a few days on my Debian..
  - vijaybritto 6y ago
    Its always the extensions. Not sublime itself. That has been my experience so far
- barrkel 6y ago
  We used to be able to open 10 files at a time on 4MB systems back in the 90s. (They weren't big files, of course, but still. Standards have slipped.)
  - stephen82 6y ago
    Yes, those were the days...every once in a while, I visit https://kolibrios.org/en/screen https://kolibrios.org/en/screen to get nostalgic. Indeed standards have slipped or better say have been sacrificed at the altar of "quantity over quality". For a simple "Hello, World!" string message, nowadays you need how many MBs of RAM. Madness, complete madness!

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]