8 ms·

Lapce Editor 0.3

222 points by philonoist 3y ago

Alifatisk 3y ago
I could definitely give this a shot, looks clean as hell. Does it support Ruby?
- jitl 3y ago
  There’s a language server for Ruby maintained by Shopify so I expect it should support Ruby okay if you have that installed.
czechdeveloper 3y ago
Looks better than last time I checked. I like the idea and it's getting there.
attende_domine 3y ago
Promising project, but keyboard internationalization is a mess. It's unusable for those using non-English keyboard layouts. https://github.com/lapce/lapce/issues/2244 https://github.com/lapce/lapce/issues/2244 https://github.com/lapce/lapce/issues/1094 https://github.com/lapce/lapce/issues/1094 https://github.com/lapce/lapce/issues/1689 https://github.com/lapce/lapce/issues/1689 https://github.com/lapce/lapce/issues/2731 https://github.com/lapce/lapce/issues/2731
- petepete 3y ago
  It's at 0.3, cut them some slack.
  - Iridescent_ 3y ago
    This is kind of a problem in that it reduces the number of potential early users, testers and ultimately contributors. Sure it is still early in its development process, but it is important work to do in order to gain traction.
    - _a_a_a_ 3y ago
      [flagged]
    - golergka 3y ago
      As a non-native English speaker who speaks 4 languages, I have almost never found myself using any other language than English in a code editor or IDE. And I never seen anyone who did, except for very occasional editing of localisation data files.
      - tmtvl 3y ago
        I have seen used (mainly in comments): Japanese, French, German, Dutch, Chinese (don't know if it was TC or SC; if those are even different unicode ranges or whether they are differentiated by font), and, if I remember correctly, Afrikaans. It's also kinda funny and a little off-putting to see English keywords side-by-side with, like, Dutch variable names.
  - tom_ 3y ago
    An alternative way of looking at this: a text editor's main job is to turn keys pressed into characters to be inserted in the document and commands to be executed.
    - eyelidlessness 3y ago
      So what? It isn’t claiming to be ready, for its main job or otherwise.
      - ReleaseCandidat 3y ago
        I do not see any indication of its "not-readiness" anywhere in the README https://github.com/lapce/lapce https://github.com/lapce/lapce or their website: https://lapce.dev/ https://lapce.dev/ So while it isn't claiming to be ready, their content does not tell otherwise. Yes, the version is 0.3, but Neovim is at 0.9.
        nwienert 3y ago
        Says pre alpha right at the very top of the website.
        ReleaseCandidat 3y ago
        Oh, you're right, it's there right above the title "Lightning-fast and Powerful Code Editor". I swear they added that after my post ;)
        yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
        > Yes, the version is 0.3, but Neovim is at 0.9. I would argue that that's a fault on neovim's side; I'm sure there's a reason, but I would call it 1.x software.
        ReleaseCandidat 3y ago
        Oh, that's to be version-comparable to Emacs, which is at version 29. Vim being at 9 is just way too optimistic! duck and run
  - artisin 3y ago
    Indeed, navigating keyboard internationalization is a rabbit hole within a time-sink. Luckily, in most cases, you can just plop in a library, and it works, but it's probably not that simple here. All the wtf edge cases, plus the quirks of different operating systems and hardware manufacturers—it's the stuff of nightmares.
  - HelloNurse 3y ago
    Keyboard handling is so fundamental that a text editor must deal with it, perfectly, from the beginning. The cited issues aren't merely a severe and high impact bug cluster, but also an inexcusable design defect that disqualifies the whole project; I suppose someone decided to use Rust despite the lack of sufficiently mature input handling libraries.
    - Strom 3y ago
      > Keyboard handling is so fundamental that a text editor must deal with it, perfectly, from the beginning. That would be nice but in reality it's such a tricky and subtle problem that nobody does it perfectly. All the operating systems and browsers are buggy in different ways, nevermind anything with smaller budgets. The deeper you get into proper text handling, the more you will realize that nobody has solved it.
      - HelloNurse 3y ago
        Perfection is unlikely, but serious developers should aim to be less buggy than the competition and/or limited by operating system and hardware shortcomings.
      - ihateolives 3y ago
        Handling dead keys and displaying national characters is solved problem and has been since MS-DOS times. It's really not that "tricky and subtle problem" in 2023. Unless one is inventing keyboard handling from scratch again.
        Strom 3y ago
        Dead keys are a drop in the ocean of what goes into international keyboard handling, and even that functions differently in every browser and OS. Which browser or OS do you think has it solved, or do you think that all of them are solved despite giving different results for the same sequence of presses? Displaying text is an even deeper issue and also broken, the further you go from latin alphabets. Referencing MS-DOS really takes the cake though. The Unicode standard wasn't even released until late 1991. They're still updating it even today, because it's a lot of work to handle international languages.
  - poulpy123 3y ago
    I'm not going to criticize them but being able to type with my keyboard is pretty high in my list of requirements for a text editor :D
- bfrog 3y ago
  I'm sure contributions are welcome to solve the problem
  - oneshtein 3y ago
    Please, contribute to discussion at least.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
AndreasBackx 3y ago
I wonder whether it's achievable to have a plugin system similar to how web extensions work where you could write a plugin and have it work across different editors. I see how getting people to move to this editor might depend on people moving over once a sufficient amount of their current editor's features are supported, some of which might be contributed by extensions.
- elteto 3y ago
  So an interface like LSP but for plugins… very interesting idea! Text manipulation operations are fairly simple to define and can probably be abstracted away into some generic API. Then writing generic text manipulation plugins should be very doable. The complexity comes with project management, multiple files, build actions, etc. But you could define language specific sub-interfaces and the plugins would implement them. So a C++ plugin would understand CMake files for example.
  - PurpleRamen 3y ago
    The complexity comes with interaction in general. Writing plugins on their own is simple. And defining a good API for most common use cases is also not hard today, as we have enough experience now. But the hard part will be defining an independent Interface which will work everywhere on a satisfying level. I mean that's basically the biggest selling-point of plugin-systems today. Not that you can write your own functions to do something, but how well you can integrate it into the interface and deliver your own interface to enhance the app. And another part would be safe interaction with other plugins, and necessary package-managment.
  - akoboldfrying 3y ago
    >So a C++ plugin would understand CMake files for example. No one understands CMake files
- PurpleRamen 3y ago
  There seems to be some trend, to outsource plugins into their separate processes, so you can write them in your preferred language. So APIs are already being established here and there. All we probably need is someone carving out a standard from them, with room for editor-specific enhancement, and then convince the projects to support this. Maybe the neovim-people could get together with other projects, start some group, project, whatever to discuss this further? Of maybe something like this already exists?
TwentyPosts 3y ago
Still not sure what the "killer feature" here is. Is there even one? Or is it just "something like vs code but in Rust and faster and slicker"? I'd give it a try, but I am very happy using Helix, which is pretty novel in its own right.
- nicoburns 3y ago
  I'd say it's either "VS Code, but with better performance / resource usage" or "Sublime Text, but open source"
- agluszak 3y ago
  Not everything has to have a killer feature. It's an oper-source project, not a for-profit startup
- eviks 3y ago
  this is the one > You can write a plugin for Lapce with any programing language that compiles to WASI though faster and slicker than Electron would also be nice. A helix-like as opposed to vim-like mode as well
  - zozbot234 3y ago
    > A helix-like as opposed to vim-like mode as well Discussed here: https://github.com/lapce/lapce/issues/281 https://github.com/lapce/lapce/issues/281
- afefers 3y ago
  The killer feature for me is not being an Electron app.
  - snvzz 3y ago
    Neither is kate. Nor vim nor emacs for that matter.
    - afefers 3y ago
zozbot234 3y ago
Would it be feasible to implement a TUI/ncurses mode over the same editor backend and feature set? Think something like the FreePascal TUI IDE, or the Oberon TUI that made HN a couple days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38240333 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38240333
sneed_chucker 3y ago
Awesome, this looks like an editor I've wanted to have for a while. I'll definitely be trying it out. Basically it seems to take the good parts from a few other editors and combines them: It's like VSCode, but without the bloat of electron or Microsoft's telemetry. It's like sublime text, but it's open source and has first class LSP support. It's like Neovim, but it doesn't require downloading and configuring a bunch of mystery meat plugins just to get what have been table stakes editor features for decades.
- PurpleRamen 3y ago
  > It's like VSCode, but without the bloat of electron or Microsoft's telemetry. But isn't the bloat of electron which enables the greatest benefit of VS Code? By which I mean the plugins with their wide range of abilities and UI-integrations. > It's like sublime text, but it's open source and has first class LSP support. Sublime has LSP since a while now.
  - sneed_chucker 3y ago
    > But isn't the bloat of electron which enables the greatest benefit of VS Code? By which I mean the plugins with their wide range of abilities and UI-integrations. Maybe for some users. I'm sparing with extensions because I find them hard to vet; I checked and I'm only using clangd and prettier right now. But I don't think Electron is required in order to have rich extensions - just see Vim/Neovim, Emacs, or any IDE. > Sublime has LSP since a while now. My bad then. I thought sublime's LSP support came from a third party package.
    - PurpleRamen 3y ago
      > But I don't think Electron is required in order to have rich extensions - just see Vim/Neovim, Emacs, or any IDE. I don't know about IDEs, but I wouldn't put vim & Emacs on the same level as VS Code in terms of interfaces. They go much further than your average text-editor and also grow over time, but at the end they are still text-based interfaces with some fluff. Though, It of course depends strongly on your requirements. For most developers, text with fluff is more than enough.
alexbezhan 3y ago
Code folding is still not supported. It's a dealbreaker for me https://github.com/lapce/lapce/issues/749 https://github.com/lapce/lapce/issues/749
oneshtein 3y ago
I want an "I'm adult" switch, which will stop bombing me with popups until I press Tab (for completion) or F1 (for help). It's unusable, because it distracts on almost every keypress with popups, type hints, and additional characters inserted. Sometimes, these popups even block the CODE I working on. It similar to browsing without an ad-blocker. I want a helpful and predictable editor, not a kaleidoscope. I don't want to think "hey, what happened?" after a key press.
- _a_a_a_ 3y ago
  I can't speak for this particular editor, but Visual Studio once shipped with a mode for C# I think it was, that was like a neon light show. It was unbearable. Also SSMS it has full-on intellisense or nothing at all, and having it on; it just gets in the way. It's like MS only know "my way or the highway". I realise this is tangential to the subject but I think it bears repeating: respect the user.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- billforsternz 3y ago
  Does it try to help you type "if" once you press 'i' ? I find it really weird that (some) code editors do that. Also adding )}] after I type ({ or [, and even worse a second " or ' after I type one " or '. I realise there are ways of turning this sort of thing off (usually), but I miss the days when such things never ever happened. Edit: I just looked at the project's main website and the auto help provided half way through typing "self" which they are obviously very proud of looks like my worst nightmare. A few weekends back I did some "unplugged" C programming just with Notepad++ rather than Visual Studio and honestly I felt it was a key step to overcoming the migraine issues I've been having lately.
  - tmtvl 3y ago
    I like autopairs (as those are called) but I really hate it when I type the terminator and the editor inserts another terminator. That's why I gave up on VS Codium after giving it a second try.
littlestymaar 3y ago
> #2190: Rewrite with Floem UI Oh, does it means that it's moving back to wgpu after its earlier switch to OpenGL? Does it means that the problems that were encountered earlier with wgpu has been resolved?
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
  https://github.com/lapce/lapce https://github.com/lapce/lapce says, > Lapce (IPA: /læps/) is written in pure Rust with a UI in Floem. It is designed with Rope Science from the Xi-Editor which makes for lightning-fast computation, and leverages Wgpu for rendering. So I think it's reasonable to conclude that they did move back.
juliangmp 3y ago
Definetly a project I'm keeping my eyes on. The "killer feature" will be the plugin/extension support. Vscode got where its now mostly because of how extendable it is imo.
- ReleaseCandidat 3y ago
  > Vscode got where its now mostly because of how extendable it is imo. Every IDE or "code" editor has had some sort of extensions since decades. _Not_ being extensible is a reason to not being successful. What made VS Code was the LSP and that you can use JS (that "everybody" already knows) to write extensions. The need of Lapce to use a language with manual memory management (to compile to (non GC) WASM) is a problem for general adoption.
zamalek 3y ago
> Rewrote in FloemUI Just had a look at this. It's one of the few that doesn't use jsx-like macros, an major anti-feature in my opinion. The jsx stuff looks fancy, but it completely breaks Rust Analyzer. You might not care about code completion, but good luck resolving the complex type+lifetime issues (that UIs in Rust often have) without hover type. Kudos for showing scope discipline, that's one I will be keeping an eye on.
- emi2k01 3y ago
  > The jsx stuff looks fancy, but it completely breaks Rust Analyzer That's not inherent of macros, but how the parser of the macro body is written. Ideally, the jsx code would be transformed to correct Rust code even on broken input, then Rust Analyzer would map the tokens from the expansion to the tokens from the source code to have context for IDE features (rename, autocompletion, go to definition, etc). I wrote some stuff [1]. It's a bit all over the place since I'm very bad at writing. Here's also a thread with Rust Analyzer's developers [2] [1]: https://blog.emi0x7d1.dev/improving-autocompletion-in-your-rust-macros/ https://blog.emi0x7d1.dev/improving-autocompletion-in-your-r... [2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/16x2kzi/improving_autocompletion_in_rust_macros/k34frim/?context=3 https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/16x2kzi/improving_aut...
  - zamalek 3y ago
    The problem is that you also sometimes need to inspect output tokens that occur between (or that don't logically map to tokens between) the input tokens. I ran into this with Leptos. It's just a bad idea. Floem shows that you can have something that looks awfully similar to HTML, without the unnecessary complexity (and compile times) of JSX macros.
wvh 3y ago
I've been using this the last year for navigating larger code bases where my usual terminal editor falls a bit short because this looks clean and minimal but has all the IDE navigation features like file system trees and LSP functionality. It's a cool project, and it might be getting to the point where it can be used as the main code editor for a project.
microflash 3y ago
It's great but unfortunately the lack of line wrapping[1] has actively prevented me using it. [1]: https://github.com/lapce/lapce/issues/945 https://github.com/lapce/lapce/issues/945
- smohare 3y ago
  The ticket seems to be describing virtual wrapping. Interesting that this is a strict requirement for you. I’ve personally never used this feature in any editor. I disable it when I can. Personally, I just find such “long” lines too difficult to navigate.
  - microflash 3y ago
    For personal projects, where I'm in control of column size, this works nicely. Not so much for "work" projects. > Personally, I just find such “long” lines too difficult to navigate. This is where line wrapping helps me. It wraps the lines to my preferred column size preventing the horizontal scroll.
  - yencabulator 3y ago
    The troff style of writing is sentence per line. It makes diffs of prose a lot nicer, but pretty much requires "folding" lines.
- vouaobrasil 3y ago
  That is absolutely right. I downloaded it to try it but luckily I saw this comment and I deleted the install file. I think if someone makes a text editor, they should have the courtesy to say "note: there is no line wrapping in this editor". It's actually a basic expectation that most people have with regard to editors. Technically, like the person said in the thread "What prevents you from doing it yourself?" I feel like not having line wrapping is like not having a save function. Yeah technically it's open source but it's a little irritating not to have "NO WRAPPING" in big letters.
  - Aerbil313 3y ago
vsskanth 3y ago
weird font rendering on non-retina windows makes this unusable for me.
ckdot2 3y ago
Syntax highlighting? Aaaaaand... it's gone!
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- tomtheelder 3y ago
  Does this mean you are rejecting it because it has syntax highlighting? It has theme support so you can absolutely turn that off if you’d like.
  - ckdot2 3y ago
    No, that would be crazy. Ofc I want syntax highlighting. There's a bug in the newest version which removes syntax highlighting. I thought it's more common, so I understand that probably most are not understanding my comment. https://github.com/lapce/lapce/issues/2747 https://github.com/lapce/lapce/issues/2747
chambored 3y ago
I’ve really liked Lapce for the past 3/4 months I’ve used it, but there’s been a persistent issue that keeps me going back to Lite XL. Pasting huge blocks of text, think 80,000 characters long, breaks it to the point of not being able to open the same file again in the editor. Lite XL doesn’t care and it’s wicked fast with edge cases like that. If Lapce could manage that better, it would be my go to.
norman784 3y ago
It feels extremely fast if you compare with vscode, also it looks like it is already usable for some projects, need more time to see if there's some deal breaker for an early adoption.
bobajeff 3y ago
I've been keeping an eye on this one. This holds the most promise of replacing vscode for me. Right now, Kate is more mature and stable at the moment. But I think once it gets further along it'll definitely kick the pants off of the other options. I've tried Lite XL and CudeText and they are both hard to set up and fall far short of Kate and Lapce in terms of UI.
- bogwog 3y ago
  I'm curious, why not Sublime Text? It is better, faster, and more mature than Lapce, LiteXL, Kate, CudaText, and VSCode (although VSCode might have more extensions). Is it just because it's not free? I bought it, and it has been my most used piece of software by far.
  - bobajeff 3y ago
    I've heard about Sublime Text but never considered getting it. The first code editor I ever got any real use out of was vscode. Which until recently was perfect (some feature regressions and issues with crashing.) At this point the last thing I want to do is depend on a proprietary editor.
Aerbil313 3y ago
I first thought “Another editor, we don’t need that…” but this one actually gets everything even more right than neovim! Plugins on WASM, written entirely in Rust, renders via wgpu, built in Remote Development. Only thing missing is an official built-in package manager, to avoid the mistake neovim did. A non-barebones VSCode like out-of-the-box configuration would be the cherry on top.
dang 3y ago
Related. Others? Lapce Editor, Release v0.2.0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32714191 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32714191 - Sept 2022 (40 comments) Lapce – Fast open-source code editor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30708505 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30708505 - March 2022 (224 comments) Show HN: Lapce – open-source code editor inspired by Xi-editor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30526693 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30526693 - March 2022 (2 comments) Lapce – Fast and Powerful Code Editor written in Rust - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29549173 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29549173 - Dec 2021 (145 comments)
deckar01 3y ago
The preview image shows intellisense covering up 80% of the code with irrelevant suggestions and a compiler error verbosely complaining about code in progress. That much distraction should have a very small visual indicator at the point of focus, just enough to hint the action required to expand if it is actually relevant.
i_am_a_peasant 3y ago
Tried it. Not bad actually, can't see the type annotations from the Rust lsp though. I see one warning so I imagine annotations are at least partially supported. Also I can't jump to my jumped-from point when pressing "go to definition" via Ctrl+T when using vim bindings.
jeroen79 3y ago
Looks promising, but not usable for me atm, formatting doesn't seem to work and i also don't find any support for eslint.

Lapce Editor 0.3

222 points by philonoist 3y ago

Alifatisk 3y ago

I could definitely give this a shot, looks clean as hell. Does it support Ruby?

jitl 3y ago
There’s a language server for Ruby maintained by Shopify so I expect it should support Ruby okay if you have that installed.

czechdeveloper 3y ago

Looks better than last time I checked. I like the idea and it's getting there.

attende_domine 3y ago

Promising project, but keyboard internationalization is a mess. It's unusable for those using non-English keyboard layouts. https://github.com/lapce/lapce/issues/2244 https://github.com/lapce/lapce/issues/2244 https://github.com/lapce/lapce/issues/1094 https://github.com/lapce/lapce/issues/1094 https://github.com/lapce/lapce/issues/1689 https://github.com/lapce/lapce/issues/1689 https://github.com/lapce/lapce/issues/2731 https://github.com/lapce/lapce/issues/2731

petepete 3y ago
It's at 0.3, cut them some slack.
- Iridescent_ 3y ago
  This is kind of a problem in that it reduces the number of potential early users, testers and ultimately contributors. Sure it is still early in its development process, but it is important work to do in order to gain traction.
  - _a_a_a_ 3y ago
    [flagged]
  - golergka 3y ago
    As a non-native English speaker who speaks 4 languages, I have almost never found myself using any other language than English in a code editor or IDE. And I never seen anyone who did, except for very occasional editing of localisation data files.
    - tmtvl 3y ago
      I have seen used (mainly in comments): Japanese, French, German, Dutch, Chinese (don't know if it was TC or SC; if those are even different unicode ranges or whether they are differentiated by font), and, if I remember correctly, Afrikaans. It's also kinda funny and a little off-putting to see English keywords side-by-side with, like, Dutch variable names.
- tom_ 3y ago
  An alternative way of looking at this: a text editor's main job is to turn keys pressed into characters to be inserted in the document and commands to be executed.
  - eyelidlessness 3y ago
    So what? It isn’t claiming to be ready, for its main job or otherwise.
    - ReleaseCandidat 3y ago
      I do not see any indication of its "not-readiness" anywhere in the README https://github.com/lapce/lapce https://github.com/lapce/lapce or their website: https://lapce.dev/ https://lapce.dev/ So while it isn't claiming to be ready, their content does not tell otherwise. Yes, the version is 0.3, but Neovim is at 0.9.
      - nwienert 3y ago
        Says pre alpha right at the very top of the website.
        ReleaseCandidat 3y ago
        Oh, you're right, it's there right above the title "Lightning-fast and Powerful Code Editor". I swear they added that after my post ;)
      - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
        > Yes, the version is 0.3, but Neovim is at 0.9. I would argue that that's a fault on neovim's side; I'm sure there's a reason, but I would call it 1.x software.
        ReleaseCandidat 3y ago
        Oh, that's to be version-comparable to Emacs, which is at version 29. Vim being at 9 is just way too optimistic! duck and run
- artisin 3y ago
  Indeed, navigating keyboard internationalization is a rabbit hole within a time-sink. Luckily, in most cases, you can just plop in a library, and it works, but it's probably not that simple here. All the wtf edge cases, plus the quirks of different operating systems and hardware manufacturers—it's the stuff of nightmares.
- HelloNurse 3y ago
  Keyboard handling is so fundamental that a text editor must deal with it, perfectly, from the beginning. The cited issues aren't merely a severe and high impact bug cluster, but also an inexcusable design defect that disqualifies the whole project; I suppose someone decided to use Rust despite the lack of sufficiently mature input handling libraries.
  - Strom 3y ago
    > Keyboard handling is so fundamental that a text editor must deal with it, perfectly, from the beginning. That would be nice but in reality it's such a tricky and subtle problem that nobody does it perfectly. All the operating systems and browsers are buggy in different ways, nevermind anything with smaller budgets. The deeper you get into proper text handling, the more you will realize that nobody has solved it.
    - HelloNurse 3y ago
      Perfection is unlikely, but serious developers should aim to be less buggy than the competition and/or limited by operating system and hardware shortcomings.
    - ihateolives 3y ago
      Handling dead keys and displaying national characters is solved problem and has been since MS-DOS times. It's really not that "tricky and subtle problem" in 2023. Unless one is inventing keyboard handling from scratch again.
      - Strom 3y ago
        Dead keys are a drop in the ocean of what goes into international keyboard handling, and even that functions differently in every browser and OS. Which browser or OS do you think has it solved, or do you think that all of them are solved despite giving different results for the same sequence of presses? Displaying text is an even deeper issue and also broken, the further you go from latin alphabets. Referencing MS-DOS really takes the cake though. The Unicode standard wasn't even released until late 1991. They're still updating it even today, because it's a lot of work to handle international languages.
- poulpy123 3y ago
  I'm not going to criticize them but being able to type with my keyboard is pretty high in my list of requirements for a text editor :D
bfrog 3y ago
I'm sure contributions are welcome to solve the problem
- oneshtein 3y ago
  Please, contribute to discussion at least.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

AndreasBackx 3y ago

I wonder whether it's achievable to have a plugin system similar to how web extensions work where you could write a plugin and have it work across different editors. I see how getting people to move to this editor might depend on people moving over once a sufficient amount of their current editor's features are supported, some of which might be contributed by extensions.

elteto 3y ago
So an interface like LSP but for plugins… very interesting idea! Text manipulation operations are fairly simple to define and can probably be abstracted away into some generic API. Then writing generic text manipulation plugins should be very doable. The complexity comes with project management, multiple files, build actions, etc. But you could define language specific sub-interfaces and the plugins would implement them. So a C++ plugin would understand CMake files for example.
- PurpleRamen 3y ago
  The complexity comes with interaction in general. Writing plugins on their own is simple. And defining a good API for most common use cases is also not hard today, as we have enough experience now. But the hard part will be defining an independent Interface which will work everywhere on a satisfying level. I mean that's basically the biggest selling-point of plugin-systems today. Not that you can write your own functions to do something, but how well you can integrate it into the interface and deliver your own interface to enhance the app. And another part would be safe interaction with other plugins, and necessary package-managment.
- akoboldfrying 3y ago
  >So a C++ plugin would understand CMake files for example. No one understands CMake files
PurpleRamen 3y ago
There seems to be some trend, to outsource plugins into their separate processes, so you can write them in your preferred language. So APIs are already being established here and there. All we probably need is someone carving out a standard from them, with room for editor-specific enhancement, and then convince the projects to support this. Maybe the neovim-people could get together with other projects, start some group, project, whatever to discuss this further? Of maybe something like this already exists?

TwentyPosts 3y ago

Still not sure what the "killer feature" here is. Is there even one? Or is it just "something like vs code but in Rust and faster and slicker"? I'd give it a try, but I am very happy using Helix, which is pretty novel in its own right.

nicoburns 3y ago
I'd say it's either "VS Code, but with better performance / resource usage" or "Sublime Text, but open source"
agluszak 3y ago
Not everything has to have a killer feature. It's an oper-source project, not a for-profit startup
eviks 3y ago
this is the one > You can write a plugin for Lapce with any programing language that compiles to WASI though faster and slicker than Electron would also be nice. A helix-like as opposed to vim-like mode as well
- zozbot234 3y ago
  > A helix-like as opposed to vim-like mode as well Discussed here: https://github.com/lapce/lapce/issues/281 https://github.com/lapce/lapce/issues/281
afefers 3y ago
The killer feature for me is not being an Electron app.
- snvzz 3y ago
  Neither is kate. Nor vim nor emacs for that matter.
  - afefers 3y ago

zozbot234 3y ago

Would it be feasible to implement a TUI/ncurses mode over the same editor backend and feature set? Think something like the FreePascal TUI IDE, or the Oberon TUI that made HN a couple days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38240333 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38240333

sneed_chucker 3y ago

Awesome, this looks like an editor I've wanted to have for a while. I'll definitely be trying it out. Basically it seems to take the good parts from a few other editors and combines them: It's like VSCode, but without the bloat of electron or Microsoft's telemetry. It's like sublime text, but it's open source and has first class LSP support. It's like Neovim, but it doesn't require downloading and configuring a bunch of mystery meat plugins just to get what have been table stakes editor features for decades.

PurpleRamen 3y ago
> It's like VSCode, but without the bloat of electron or Microsoft's telemetry. But isn't the bloat of electron which enables the greatest benefit of VS Code? By which I mean the plugins with their wide range of abilities and UI-integrations. > It's like sublime text, but it's open source and has first class LSP support. Sublime has LSP since a while now.
- sneed_chucker 3y ago
  > But isn't the bloat of electron which enables the greatest benefit of VS Code? By which I mean the plugins with their wide range of abilities and UI-integrations. Maybe for some users. I'm sparing with extensions because I find them hard to vet; I checked and I'm only using clangd and prettier right now. But I don't think Electron is required in order to have rich extensions - just see Vim/Neovim, Emacs, or any IDE. > Sublime has LSP since a while now. My bad then. I thought sublime's LSP support came from a third party package.
  - PurpleRamen 3y ago
    > But I don't think Electron is required in order to have rich extensions - just see Vim/Neovim, Emacs, or any IDE. I don't know about IDEs, but I wouldn't put vim & Emacs on the same level as VS Code in terms of interfaces. They go much further than your average text-editor and also grow over time, but at the end they are still text-based interfaces with some fluff. Though, It of course depends strongly on your requirements. For most developers, text with fluff is more than enough.

alexbezhan 3y ago

Code folding is still not supported. It's a dealbreaker for me https://github.com/lapce/lapce/issues/749 https://github.com/lapce/lapce/issues/749

oneshtein 3y ago

I want an "I'm adult" switch, which will stop bombing me with popups until I press Tab (for completion) or F1 (for help). It's unusable, because it distracts on almost every keypress with popups, type hints, and additional characters inserted. Sometimes, these popups even block the CODE I working on. It similar to browsing without an ad-blocker. I want a helpful and predictable editor, not a kaleidoscope. I don't want to think "hey, what happened?" after a key press.

_a_a_a_ 3y ago
I can't speak for this particular editor, but Visual Studio once shipped with a mode for C# I think it was, that was like a neon light show. It was unbearable. Also SSMS it has full-on intellisense or nothing at all, and having it on; it just gets in the way. It's like MS only know "my way or the highway". I realise this is tangential to the subject but I think it bears repeating: respect the user.
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billforsternz 3y ago
Does it try to help you type "if" once you press 'i' ? I find it really weird that (some) code editors do that. Also adding )}] after I type ({ or [, and even worse a second " or ' after I type one " or '. I realise there are ways of turning this sort of thing off (usually), but I miss the days when such things never ever happened. Edit: I just looked at the project's main website and the auto help provided half way through typing "self" which they are obviously very proud of looks like my worst nightmare. A few weekends back I did some "unplugged" C programming just with Notepad++ rather than Visual Studio and honestly I felt it was a key step to overcoming the migraine issues I've been having lately.
- tmtvl 3y ago
  I like autopairs (as those are called) but I really hate it when I type the terminator and the editor inserts another terminator. That's why I gave up on VS Codium after giving it a second try.

littlestymaar 3y ago

> #2190: Rewrite with Floem UI Oh, does it means that it's moving back to wgpu after its earlier switch to OpenGL? Does it means that the problems that were encountered earlier with wgpu has been resolved?

yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
https://github.com/lapce/lapce https://github.com/lapce/lapce says, > Lapce (IPA: /læps/) is written in pure Rust with a UI in Floem. It is designed with Rope Science from the Xi-Editor which makes for lightning-fast computation, and leverages Wgpu for rendering. So I think it's reasonable to conclude that they did move back.

juliangmp 3y ago

Definetly a project I'm keeping my eyes on. The "killer feature" will be the plugin/extension support. Vscode got where its now mostly because of how extendable it is imo.

ReleaseCandidat 3y ago
> Vscode got where its now mostly because of how extendable it is imo. Every IDE or "code" editor has had some sort of extensions since decades. _Not_ being extensible is a reason to not being successful. What made VS Code was the LSP and that you can use JS (that "everybody" already knows) to write extensions. The need of Lapce to use a language with manual memory management (to compile to (non GC) WASM) is a problem for general adoption.

zamalek 3y ago

> Rewrote in FloemUI Just had a look at this. It's one of the few that doesn't use jsx-like macros, an major anti-feature in my opinion. The jsx stuff looks fancy, but it completely breaks Rust Analyzer. You might not care about code completion, but good luck resolving the complex type+lifetime issues (that UIs in Rust often have) without hover type. Kudos for showing scope discipline, that's one I will be keeping an eye on.

emi2k01 3y ago
> The jsx stuff looks fancy, but it completely breaks Rust Analyzer That's not inherent of macros, but how the parser of the macro body is written. Ideally, the jsx code would be transformed to correct Rust code even on broken input, then Rust Analyzer would map the tokens from the expansion to the tokens from the source code to have context for IDE features (rename, autocompletion, go to definition, etc). I wrote some stuff [1]. It's a bit all over the place since I'm very bad at writing. Here's also a thread with Rust Analyzer's developers [2] [1]: https://blog.emi0x7d1.dev/improving-autocompletion-in-your-rust-macros/ https://blog.emi0x7d1.dev/improving-autocompletion-in-your-r... [2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/16x2kzi/improving_autocompletion_in_rust_macros/k34frim/?context=3 https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/16x2kzi/improving_aut...
- zamalek 3y ago
  The problem is that you also sometimes need to inspect output tokens that occur between (or that don't logically map to tokens between) the input tokens. I ran into this with Leptos. It's just a bad idea. Floem shows that you can have something that looks awfully similar to HTML, without the unnecessary complexity (and compile times) of JSX macros.

wvh 3y ago

I've been using this the last year for navigating larger code bases where my usual terminal editor falls a bit short because this looks clean and minimal but has all the IDE navigation features like file system trees and LSP functionality. It's a cool project, and it might be getting to the point where it can be used as the main code editor for a project.

microflash 3y ago

It's great but unfortunately the lack of line wrapping[1] has actively prevented me using it. [1]: https://github.com/lapce/lapce/issues/945 https://github.com/lapce/lapce/issues/945

smohare 3y ago
The ticket seems to be describing virtual wrapping. Interesting that this is a strict requirement for you. I’ve personally never used this feature in any editor. I disable it when I can. Personally, I just find such “long” lines too difficult to navigate.
- microflash 3y ago
  For personal projects, where I'm in control of column size, this works nicely. Not so much for "work" projects. > Personally, I just find such “long” lines too difficult to navigate. This is where line wrapping helps me. It wraps the lines to my preferred column size preventing the horizontal scroll.
- yencabulator 3y ago
  The troff style of writing is sentence per line. It makes diffs of prose a lot nicer, but pretty much requires "folding" lines.
vouaobrasil 3y ago
That is absolutely right. I downloaded it to try it but luckily I saw this comment and I deleted the install file. I think if someone makes a text editor, they should have the courtesy to say "note: there is no line wrapping in this editor". It's actually a basic expectation that most people have with regard to editors. Technically, like the person said in the thread "What prevents you from doing it yourself?" I feel like not having line wrapping is like not having a save function. Yeah technically it's open source but it's a little irritating not to have "NO WRAPPING" in big letters.
- Aerbil313 3y ago

vsskanth 3y ago

weird font rendering on non-retina windows makes this unusable for me.

ckdot2 3y ago

Syntax highlighting? Aaaaaand... it's gone!

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tomtheelder 3y ago
Does this mean you are rejecting it because it has syntax highlighting? It has theme support so you can absolutely turn that off if you’d like.
- ckdot2 3y ago
  No, that would be crazy. Ofc I want syntax highlighting. There's a bug in the newest version which removes syntax highlighting. I thought it's more common, so I understand that probably most are not understanding my comment. https://github.com/lapce/lapce/issues/2747 https://github.com/lapce/lapce/issues/2747

chambored 3y ago

I’ve really liked Lapce for the past 3/4 months I’ve used it, but there’s been a persistent issue that keeps me going back to Lite XL. Pasting huge blocks of text, think 80,000 characters long, breaks it to the point of not being able to open the same file again in the editor. Lite XL doesn’t care and it’s wicked fast with edge cases like that. If Lapce could manage that better, it would be my go to.

norman784 3y ago

It feels extremely fast if you compare with vscode, also it looks like it is already usable for some projects, need more time to see if there's some deal breaker for an early adoption.

bobajeff 3y ago

I've been keeping an eye on this one. This holds the most promise of replacing vscode for me. Right now, Kate is more mature and stable at the moment. But I think once it gets further along it'll definitely kick the pants off of the other options. I've tried Lite XL and CudeText and they are both hard to set up and fall far short of Kate and Lapce in terms of UI.

bogwog 3y ago
I'm curious, why not Sublime Text? It is better, faster, and more mature than Lapce, LiteXL, Kate, CudaText, and VSCode (although VSCode might have more extensions). Is it just because it's not free? I bought it, and it has been my most used piece of software by far.
- bobajeff 3y ago
  I've heard about Sublime Text but never considered getting it. The first code editor I ever got any real use out of was vscode. Which until recently was perfect (some feature regressions and issues with crashing.) At this point the last thing I want to do is depend on a proprietary editor.

Aerbil313 3y ago

I first thought “Another editor, we don’t need that…” but this one actually gets everything even more right than neovim! Plugins on WASM, written entirely in Rust, renders via wgpu, built in Remote Development. Only thing missing is an official built-in package manager, to avoid the mistake neovim did. A non-barebones VSCode like out-of-the-box configuration would be the cherry on top.

dang 3y ago

Related. Others? Lapce Editor, Release v0.2.0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32714191 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32714191 - Sept 2022 (40 comments) Lapce – Fast open-source code editor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30708505 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30708505 - March 2022 (224 comments) Show HN: Lapce – open-source code editor inspired by Xi-editor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30526693 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30526693 - March 2022 (2 comments) Lapce – Fast and Powerful Code Editor written in Rust - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29549173 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29549173 - Dec 2021 (145 comments)

deckar01 3y ago

The preview image shows intellisense covering up 80% of the code with irrelevant suggestions and a compiler error verbosely complaining about code in progress. That much distraction should have a very small visual indicator at the point of focus, just enough to hint the action required to expand if it is actually relevant.

i_am_a_peasant 3y ago

Tried it. Not bad actually, can't see the type annotations from the Rust lsp though. I see one warning so I imagine annotations are at least partially supported. Also I can't jump to my jumped-from point when pressing "go to definition" via Ctrl+T when using vim bindings.

jeroen79 3y ago

Looks promising, but not usable for me atm, formatting doesn't seem to work and i also don't find any support for eslint.