6 ms·

I wonder how do people come to a decision that it's a good idea to start their own text editor when vim and emacs exist. For this one my guess is the author is

by 098799 4y ago

I wonder how do people come to a decision that it's a good idea to start their own text editor when vim and emacs exist. For this one my guess is the author is a c/c++ developer and wanted to have their editor cusomizable in their desired language. Would that be enough? It's also not a common thing for projects like that not to start as FOSS.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
vinyl7 4y ago
Yea, being able to customize with C++ is peferable for some people compared to vimscript/lisp/etc. Then you have the issue where emacs and vim can choke under reasonable file sizes. The other part is vim/emacs aren't as performant as they could be
Koshkin 4y ago
Though good and powerful editors, there are reasons why emacs and vim have a very small user share. (Everyone I know prefer VSCode when not using an IDE.) Even JEdit and Sublime each have a dedicated but a comparatively small userbase.
- usr1106 4y ago
  Proably of the people you know also only a small share is active on HN. At least that's the case for me. I'd guess amongst HN users the share of emacs and vim users might be higher than for developers in general.
cnity 4y ago
There's a sizeable cohort of people (that overlaps largely with the "handmade network") who are tired of hearing "don't reinvent the wheel" and see virtue in rebuilding software. I think it's a good attitude personally, since it's _how we get better things_.
pantulis 4y ago
> I wonder how do people come to a decision that it's a good idea to start their own text editor when vim and emacs exist. It's really a smaller decision compared with the point of view that text files as source code are "holding back our tools - https://dion.systems/dion_format.html https://dion.systems/dion_format.html So these guys are really thinking big.
- rtz121 4y ago
  If text files are holding you back. Smalltalk exists...
  - sevnin 4y ago
    What do you mean by that?
    - rtz121 4y ago
      In Smalltalk there is no such thing as source files. Your program is an image which can be freely modified and dumped. Look at Pharo[1] which is a modern Smalltalk environment. You start it up and create classes in the IDE, but never do you create "source files". [1] https://pharo.org/ https://pharo.org/
      - igouy 4y ago
        "6.18 Saving code in a file" Pharo 9 by Example, page 75 https://books.google.com/books?id=hfpwEAAAQBAJ&lpg=PA75&ots=2J8SRES11C&dq=pharo%20saving%20code%20in%20a%20file&pg=PA75#v=onepage&q=pharo%20saving%20code%20in%20a%20file https://books.google.com/books?id=hfpwEAAAQBAJ&lpg=PA75&ots=... > In Smalltalk there is no such thing as source files... $ cat fact.st Stdio stdout nextPutAll: 100 factorial printString; nextPut: Character lf.! SmalltalkImage current snapshot: false andQuit: true! $ bin/pharo --headless Pharo10-SNAPSHOT-64bit-502addc.image fact.st 93326215443944152681699238856266700490715968264381621468592963895217599993229915608941463976156518286253697920827223758251185210916864000000000000000000000000
paskozdilar 4y ago
> I wonder how do people come to a decision that it's a good idea to start their own text editor when vim and emacs exist. Vim/Emacs have a huge community and ecosystem, but they aren't exactly perfect. I don't see anything weird about people writing their own editor. I'd personally love to have a Python-programmable editor a la Emacs, and if I ever write a text editor, it's gonna be like that.
tuckerpo 4y ago
Eh, it's part of the handmade effort. Sometimes building your own tool is just fun. + You don't need to learn a bespoke language to customize 4coder (vim_script in vim's case)
typon 4y ago
Both are dead in the water architecturally if you want to use a text editor that can render fonts and other graphics at 60 fps on a normal desktop.
- rtz121 4y ago
  You don't need to render anything at 60fps. Emacs is not a game, it only renders when needed and that it does pretty fast.
alpaca128 4y ago
- Fun - Learning new things - No decades old quirks & constraints through backwards compatibility - Same concept with fresh ideas & multithreading A lot of good reasons imho, which is why I'm also tinkering with my own little editor. In the worst case I'll have learned a ton and have a small collection of useful libraries. Some innovation in modal editing after 30 years might be nice.

by 098799 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

vinyl7 4y ago

Yea, being able to customize with C++ is peferable for some people compared to vimscript/lisp/etc. Then you have the issue where emacs and vim can choke under reasonable file sizes. The other part is vim/emacs aren't as performant as they could be

Koshkin 4y ago

Though good and powerful editors, there are reasons why emacs and vim have a very small user share. (Everyone I know prefer VSCode when not using an IDE.) Even JEdit and Sublime each have a dedicated but a comparatively small userbase.

usr1106 4y ago
Proably of the people you know also only a small share is active on HN. At least that's the case for me. I'd guess amongst HN users the share of emacs and vim users might be higher than for developers in general.

cnity 4y ago

There's a sizeable cohort of people (that overlaps largely with the "handmade network") who are tired of hearing "don't reinvent the wheel" and see virtue in rebuilding software. I think it's a good attitude personally, since it's _how we get better things_.

pantulis 4y ago

> I wonder how do people come to a decision that it's a good idea to start their own text editor when vim and emacs exist. It's really a smaller decision compared with the point of view that text files as source code are "holding back our tools - https://dion.systems/dion_format.html https://dion.systems/dion_format.html So these guys are really thinking big.

rtz121 4y ago
If text files are holding you back. Smalltalk exists...
- sevnin 4y ago
  What do you mean by that?
  - rtz121 4y ago
    In Smalltalk there is no such thing as source files. Your program is an image which can be freely modified and dumped. Look at Pharo[1] which is a modern Smalltalk environment. You start it up and create classes in the IDE, but never do you create "source files". [1] https://pharo.org/ https://pharo.org/
    - igouy 4y ago
      "6.18 Saving code in a file" Pharo 9 by Example, page 75 https://books.google.com/books?id=hfpwEAAAQBAJ&lpg=PA75&ots=2J8SRES11C&dq=pharo%20saving%20code%20in%20a%20file&pg=PA75#v=onepage&q=pharo%20saving%20code%20in%20a%20file https://books.google.com/books?id=hfpwEAAAQBAJ&lpg=PA75&ots=... > In Smalltalk there is no such thing as source files... $ cat fact.st Stdio stdout nextPutAll: 100 factorial printString; nextPut: Character lf.! SmalltalkImage current snapshot: false andQuit: true! $ bin/pharo --headless Pharo10-SNAPSHOT-64bit-502addc.image fact.st 93326215443944152681699238856266700490715968264381621468592963895217599993229915608941463976156518286253697920827223758251185210916864000000000000000000000000

paskozdilar 4y ago

> I wonder how do people come to a decision that it's a good idea to start their own text editor when vim and emacs exist. Vim/Emacs have a huge community and ecosystem, but they aren't exactly perfect. I don't see anything weird about people writing their own editor. I'd personally love to have a Python-programmable editor a la Emacs, and if I ever write a text editor, it's gonna be like that.

tuckerpo 4y ago

Eh, it's part of the handmade effort. Sometimes building your own tool is just fun. + You don't need to learn a bespoke language to customize 4coder (vim_script in vim's case)

typon 4y ago

Both are dead in the water architecturally if you want to use a text editor that can render fonts and other graphics at 60 fps on a normal desktop.

rtz121 4y ago
You don't need to render anything at 60fps. Emacs is not a game, it only renders when needed and that it does pretty fast.

alpaca128 4y ago

- Fun - Learning new things - No decades old quirks & constraints through backwards compatibility - Same concept with fresh ideas & multithreading A lot of good reasons imho, which is why I'm also tinkering with my own little editor. In the worst case I'll have learned a ton and have a small collection of useful libraries. Some innovation in modal editing after 30 years might be nice.