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Honestly, I'd love a terminal based editor/IDE that is essentially a shameless clone of VSCode. nvim showed me that it's possible, with mouse events, right-cli

Honestly, I'd love a terminal based editor/IDE that is essentially a shameless clone of VSCode. nvim showed me that it's possible, with mouse events, right-click context menus, and a rich editing experience. I did genuinely try to transition to nvim but I use my mouse a lot; resizing panels, using the file tree, copy/cut/pasting files in the file browser, tabs, etc. That's not to say nvim is bad, but after hours of configuration, I personally found myself less productive with it when compared to VSCode - however VSCode is bloated, slow, uses a lot of RAM, and SSH functionality is unreliable. I actually started writing this as a side project - using Rust, ratatui and a plugin system based on wasm (and dynamic C libs), but you know how side projects go

tiltowait 2y ago
I had a similar experience. I liked nvim for simple editing, but not for anything multi-file. And then I found Helix, and I never looked back. I only hop into vscode if I want a Jupyter notebook.
- apatheticonion 2y ago
  Thanks for the recommendation. Just looked it up, I'll give it a try! EDIT: https://helix-editor.com/ https://helix-editor.com/ I love that the homepage has a video showing usage. Such a great way to demonstrate it.
pshc 2y ago
Have you tried Zed?
- apatheticonion 2y ago
  Yes I have. Last time I tried it, it didn't have SSH support (I'm on a MBP so my life involves around remote development tooling). I'll take a look again
  - sunshowers 2y ago
    I use Zed with SSH support daily, most often to SSH into a distrobox dev container running on localhost. It's a little jank but it works great for the most part. Note that Zed has the aforementioned concern around downloading a remote binary as well. In my case this isn't an issue, since the distrobox container is not a security boundary of any kind.
CGamesPlay 2y ago
I do my full-time development work using Neovide (a GUI frontend to nvim) over SSH. As a long-time vim user, this is great for me, but I will freely admit that it is nowhere near as easy to set up as VSCode, and it is also fundamentally a dumb client over SSH, so it suffers from lag spikes. There has been some discussion about what a smart client version of nvim would look like, but it's probably years out: https://github.com/neovim/neovim/issues/24690 https://github.com/neovim/neovim/issues/24690
asveikau 2y ago
I remember many years ago looking into mouse events over terminal and in that time you could only handle clicks, you couldn't track cursor position so dragging would be impossible. So I was curious to hear about someone actually making a usable mouse UI in a terminal. As I do some googling it seems like there is now better support for that.
krobelus 2y ago
Kakoune has network-transparency - you can run the editor server on a remote system and run editor clients locally, communicating only via Unix socket.

tiltowait 2y ago

I had a similar experience. I liked nvim for simple editing, but not for anything multi-file. And then I found Helix, and I never looked back. I only hop into vscode if I want a Jupyter notebook.

apatheticonion 2y ago
Thanks for the recommendation. Just looked it up, I'll give it a try! EDIT: https://helix-editor.com/ https://helix-editor.com/ I love that the homepage has a video showing usage. Such a great way to demonstrate it.

pshc 2y ago

Have you tried Zed?

apatheticonion 2y ago
Yes I have. Last time I tried it, it didn't have SSH support (I'm on a MBP so my life involves around remote development tooling). I'll take a look again
- sunshowers 2y ago
  I use Zed with SSH support daily, most often to SSH into a distrobox dev container running on localhost. It's a little jank but it works great for the most part. Note that Zed has the aforementioned concern around downloading a remote binary as well. In my case this isn't an issue, since the distrobox container is not a security boundary of any kind.

CGamesPlay 2y ago

I do my full-time development work using Neovide (a GUI frontend to nvim) over SSH. As a long-time vim user, this is great for me, but I will freely admit that it is nowhere near as easy to set up as VSCode, and it is also fundamentally a dumb client over SSH, so it suffers from lag spikes. There has been some discussion about what a smart client version of nvim would look like, but it's probably years out: https://github.com/neovim/neovim/issues/24690 https://github.com/neovim/neovim/issues/24690

asveikau 2y ago

I remember many years ago looking into mouse events over terminal and in that time you could only handle clicks, you couldn't track cursor position so dragging would be impossible. So I was curious to hear about someone actually making a usable mouse UI in a terminal. As I do some googling it seems like there is now better support for that.

krobelus 2y ago

Kakoune has network-transparency - you can run the editor server on a remote system and run editor clients locally, communicating only via Unix socket.