10 ms·
HappyEdit: A Vim-inspired, modern, open source text editor
- sudonim 14y agoLooks great. Is it releasable at the moment? It looks like the indiegogo campaign may not succeed - sorry :(. http://www.indiegogo.com/happyedit http://www.indiegogo.com/happyedit (3 days left, $805 / $10,000 raised). Have you considered alternate ways of funding your development? Like subscriptions? (it's a web app right?). Maybe figure out a price... let's say $10 a month or $100 a year and get people to pay for a yearly subscription up front. It may not allow you to focus on it full time at first, but could give you the incentive to continue improving the product and eventually work on it full time.
- marekmroz 14y agoI think that the author will get all the funds regardless of reaching the goal. It is the first time I see indiegogo and it would be quite different from kickstarter, but that's what their page seems to indicate: >Flexible Funding campaign >This campaign will receive all of the funds contributed by Wed Oct 31 at 11:59PM PT.
- johncoltrane 14y agoYou can install it but it's a barely working joke at this point.
- zapt02 14y agothis doesn't look thought out. you need way more than "1-2 months" to develop a good IDE. there's no mention of supported languages and popular features like code indexing and live compilation will never happen on a web platform.
- jcheng 14y agoOur web based IDE does code indexing: http://www.rstudio.com/ide/docs/using/navigation http://www.rstudio.com/ide/docs/using/navigation Never say never... I agree though that 1-2 months would only be scratching the surface, surely.
- dysoco 14y agoLooks really interesting, but you seriously need $10,000 ? Can I run this from a Terminal ? Without the UI but using some features from HappyEdit ?
- ibotty 14y agoform a terminal? you might like to try vim.
- qu4z-2 14y agoWhich is the point really.
- sergiotapia 14y agoThe entire point of this project is to modernize it, and give it a user friendly UI. If you want Terminal usage, just use Vim.
- duck 14y agoWhy does modernize mean not supporting a terminal interface?
- dfbrown 14y agoI would imagine because there are many UI features that cannot be easily reproduced in the terminal and maintaining two different interfaces with very different capabilities is more trouble than it's worth.
- jlgreco 14y agoIdeally any new system should be made UI agnostic, provided a simple default UI with few features readily accessible (perhaps accessible only though a command line of sorts), and allow users of your editor to craft their own frontends, be they TTY or web-based, or anything they may dream up in the future. Just building the web-based editor that you want this year may be fine for this year, but I am not convinced we should be putting much effort into designing systems that don't learn from their predecessors. The classic editors can feel rickety today because they were made with the TTY, and arguably only the TTY, in mind. A system designed today should keep that in mind, and I think make future-proofing it's first and for-most concern. I think it is also really hard to justify supporting fewer features than classical editors do today. Removing the ability to implement technical features so that you can add support for UI features seems like a step backward to me. I don't think there is much (or anything) that you couldn't add to Vim or Emacs, the question is just more along the lines of "can you make it look how you want it too". An editor designed with UI agnosticy (is that a word?) as a first class feature should not have this problem.
- barbs 14y agoAwesome. I'm always on the lookout for a text editor with all the cool things from Vim, but without having to fiddle with the stupid plugin and config system. The closest thing I've found so far is Vico (http://www.vicoapp.com/ http://www.vicoapp.com/)
- buf 14y agoCheck out vundle http://lepture.com/work/vundle-vs-pathogen/ http://lepture.com/work/vundle-vs-pathogen/ https://github.com/gmarik/vundle https://github.com/gmarik/vundle
- johncoltrane 14y agoWell. You'll get less fiddling but also a lot less power.
- jlgreco 14y agoI am wondering in what way a "modern vim" isn't "vim". GVim exists, and plugin management is a problem frankly solved years ago. I also wonder how he is going to support modern features that Vim currently has with a web-based editor. Can I script this in my choice of modern languages? Python? Ruby? If I were going to change any single thing about Vim, it would be to make MzScheme scripting support a first class citizen, and slowly re-engineer the backend to be more Emacs styled. Core C (or whatever, but C out of momentum) functions with the rest of the system build up in Scheme. I think it would be foolish to call such an improvement "modernizing" though, since it is hardly a new idea. ;)
- ecspike 14y agoChrome Packaged Apps are essentially a Chrome extension with some extra features that can run outside a browser instance. As such, scripting would be limited to languages that can run in JS. So if he allows plugins, it would be JS, CoffeeScript, or possibly Emscripten.
- jlgreco 14y agoThat is what I suspected. Kind of makes the idea of using that sort of system to create generic modern developer tools DOA I think. Definitely so if it means I lose Vim's ! command; I couldn't live without that.
- ecspike 14y agoI agree. You can make unitaskers like sprite packer/unpackers image quick editors/resizers and the like but anything comprehensive is going to be hard.
- jrajav 14y agoWay to be subtle with that last paragraph. :P I'd actually approach the issue from the other end (that is, frontend) - There is a slight pain point in the strong binding between vim and terminals in that, as this video points out, the UI is limited by a character grid. This makes many features uglier and less usable, such as autocomplete, file viewers, the command line, the gutter, etc. It also limits your choices for fonts. If I were to design a "modern" vim from the ground up, I'd probably arrive at something a lot like Sublime Text 2 with vim at the core.
- ecspike 14y agoUsing Chrome packaged apps makes compilation problematic if not impossible as well as running command-line functions. The file model for Chrome packaged apps is similar to the Mac App Store in that you can access files but you have to get explicit permission for each one you open. There's also an internal file system to the app that you can create. I write HTML5 apps but also do quite a bit of Java moving between different projects during the course of the day and running some command-line functions too. Happy Edit as it appears today wouldn't give me parity to how I use vim. If I were on a Chromebook, I would probably just use tmux/screen and a ssh session.
- dantiberian 14y agoIt wasn't obvious on the linked page but this is available to try on Github here https://github.com/pthulin/HappyEdit https://github.com/pthulin/HappyEdit
- venatiodecorus 14y agoSublime Text 2 has Vintage mode which supports Vim-like commands, is a native app, and is elegant. However, HappyEdit has one significant advantage over ST2, in that it is open source. While I love ST2, I feel like for it to really be embraced as a great editor, it needs to be open source.
- krakensden 14y agoVintage mode is in a pretty ugly point in the uncanny valley.
- djacobs 14y agoI've tried using Sublime with Vintage mode, and about 30% of the time I'm editing, I try a Vim combo and nothing happens. This isn't just for advanced Vim features -- it's for basic things like g_.
- lloeki 14y agoThere's a VintageEx bundle that extends Vintage mode with more vim-ness. It still lacks vim-surround which is a no-go for me, and there are a few differences in behavior (off-by-one mostly) that constantly throw me off.
- doesnt_know 14y agoI love Sublime and have been using it since the beginning of this year but I'm really worried about getting too "invested" in it because it isn't released under a Free Software license. My old emacs.d still sits in my home folder because I have this fear that Sublime will just stop being supported tomorrow and I would have no choice but to go back to emacs. I really just wish emacs had an amazing mixed mode, it's the only thing that even made me try out Sublime. All the php mixed modes I tried were really bad and I do a lot of work in PHP/HTML mixed view files.
- calinet6 14y agoThe name is horrible. Change it and it might see success.
- wyclif 14y agoI came here to say just this. I'm a vim user, and I have my doubts about this project, but overall I encourage people to experiment and do new things in the editor space-- so I don't begrudge this. But the name is terrible. Don't project an emotion onto your users.
- Evbn 14y agoAre you jokimg? http://m.dictionary.com/d/?q=vim http://m.dictionary.com/d/?q=vim
- wyclif 14y agoI'm as serious as a heart attack. Actually, it's really not the same thing at all, and I'm an English major-- I know that "vim" is a noun. But "happy" is an adjective. That's part of the reason why it's a bad name.
- songgao 14y agoLooks interesting. Is it possible to support real-time collaboration? By real-time collaboration I mean multiple people working on the same file and being able to see other people changing the file in real time, like Google Wave or Google Docs.
- klibertp 14y agoOr maybe like Vim in tmux?
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- songgao 14y agoBut that's still only one person modifying the code and the other watching. There couldn't be two cursors/editing points at the same time.
- klibertp 14y agoMy bad, you're right, it's not exactly the same. I just didn't think about two people working on one document in two different places at once.
- alexkus 14y agoOr $EDITOR inside a shared VNC session.
- ef4 14y agoI can almost guarantee that it would be easier to fix whatever it is you don't like about vim than to start from scratch. Too many developers have this conceit that it's easier to start from scratch. Sometimes that's true, but usually not. Usually there's an exaggerated fear of extending other people's code. Of course the world is big enough for another project, and you might make the next great editor. But be realistic about how much effort went into something like vim, and don't think you're going to single-handedly replace it in a month.
- kkowalczyk 14y agoYou should have checked out the project before ranting. 1. The major difficulty in writing an editor is in writing the editor core. He didn't write it from scratch but used existing ACE editor. 2. VIM is a huge mass of C code. Working on a huge mass of C code is ridiculously slow. He's writing in JavaScript and using html for the UI - this is orders of magnitude faster.
- smosher 14y agoHe's writing in JavaScript and using html for the UI - this is orders of magnitude faster. In what sense is that true?
- dbattaglia 14y agoFaster for them to code with compared to C I would imagine.
- jrockway 14y agoActually, the editor core is relatively easy. The hard part is adding all those 100s of little extra features you use every day. (Emacs ships with almost a million lines of extension code.)
- scottjad 14y agoIncluded in that million lines of code are two maybe three email clients, two IRC clients, org-mode (~100KLOC itself), tetris, and who knows what else. I agree with your point, just not that the Emacs code base is a good reference of what's required to implement the numerous little text editing features people use every day.
- hayksaakian 14y agoThis is a great example of what you can do with chrome packaged apps. Many of the APIs associated with packaged apps are not supported in the current official release of chrome, unfortunately.
- gnuvince 14y agoWhy another web-based editor? What's wrong with a native editor?
- BasDirks 14y agoFrom http://www.indiegogo.com/happyedit http://www.indiegogo.com/happyedit "What will you do with the money? The money buys time for me to work on this project. With the $10,000 that I am asking for, I expect to get 1-2 months of development. This should be enough time to finish what's on the roadmap." Why would he need an average yearly income to be coding ± 45 days?
- danieldk 14y agoWhere in the Western world is $10,000 an average yearly income?
- tsahyt 14y agoIn Portugal, the average wage is 777€/month, paid 14 times a year, resulting in about 10800€ a year. Not exactly 10000$, but close.
- ibotty 14y agowell. the euro is way more worthy than the us $. that seems a little off. (10000$/2month still seems like a good salary... for something resembling vaporware for now.)
- Deestan 14y agoIn Sweden, that is pretty close to 2 months' salary for a software developer.
- Magenta 14y agoNo offence, but as far as I can see, this does nothing that can't be done in vim (or one of its forks) with pathogen/vundle and the extant plugin ecosystem. Also I doubt people will want to pay if there is no native editor/terminal support. ;(
- tsahyt 14y agoI've been watching the video and it doesn't look bad but... how is VIMs plugin system a mess? It always worked like a charm for me.
- navs 14y agoIf he's using HTML and JS to code this, can we expect it to run in a browser as well? I'd love that.
- johncoltrane 14y agoIt runs in Chrome as an extension.
- navs 14y agoThanks. I didn't really catch on to that until I looked at the github project.
- volaski 14y agoI like the product but I really dislike the way he's trying to fund it. You know, once upon a time people would just build and launch shit, instead of begging people for money even before building it. I understand this type of Kickstarter-like campaign is really helpful for building hardware products which require upfront budget, since building hardware costs real money. But building a software? Please... If I was so motivated, I would just build it and release it.
- jamesrcole 14y agoI don't see why it's that bad. You describe it pejoratively as "begging for money", but it does take time to develop anything, and you need money to live. What's wrong with someone wanting to be able to work full-time developing it? And what's wrong if some people want to provide monetary support so the person can do that?
- edanm 14y agoI'd love for someone to remake vim, in a modern way. With a modern GUI. And with a lot of thought put into how to make vim easier to use for new users. And with a better solution for plugins and customization. I'd love for this project to succeed, and I was ready to pay for it, but frankly, I'm skeptical, after looking at the product page. He's asking for money equal to 2 months of development. This is nowhere near, not even remotely close, to how much time it will take to get even a semi-descent version of an editor. I'm sorry, but that's just unrealistic. Also, I'd love to see other projects he's worked on, to see he knows how to build things, before I back a project.
- jamesrcole 14y agoFeedback for the author: The "Back This Project" button send this message: only click this button if you have already decided you want to pledge money. I think more people would click on it if it was named something like: "Find Out More" or "Visit Project Page".
- kintamanimatt 14y agoI didn't realize this until now, but I get a kind of satisfaction from using the old CLI Vim because it's harder and uglier than neccessary. I could be equally productive in gEdit.
- andybak 14y agoI'd like to know more but I'm in an environment where I can't watch a video. (plus I hate video...) Is it that hard to also write some old-fasioned text as well?
- mercurial 14y agoI must admit a marked lack of enthusiasm for projects like this. You already have a number of vim "clones" developed with various technologies (ysis in qt4 - dead, yi in haskell - though it has also an emacs mode, still actively developed, probably others I don't know about). They haven't managed to take off in a significant way, what is this one bringing to the table? The idea of taking on an editor with about 20 years of development behind it, even with the editor core already written, in a couple of months, is ludicrous. And to top it all, it doesn't even work in a terminal.
- fafner 14y agoThe problem is attracting a large enough group of users and contributors. If you have only a handful people working on it then it will quickly fade away. I've seen this with several open source projects. One maintainer finishes college, the other changes jobs, the one guy who thought he could make a living out of it realises he's broke, the biggest contributor becomes father and all of the sudden there are too few people left. And although everybody loves the new ideas behind the project it quickly turns into an unmaintained mess and because there are so many alternatives available they'll eventually move on. Let's face it the editor market is really really crowded. And there are tons of great editors out there. You really have to be innovative to get a foothold there. And can HappyEdit really provide that by simply being a vim-like in-browser editor with some sublime features? It is incompatible to all the existing vim plugins and has to reimplement everything vim does. The majority of vim users are probably not interested in fancy guis or even leaving the terminal ("it's not the UNIX way"(tm)). And the $10,000 he asks for will only get him 1-2 month of development. Oh and the indiegogo campaign has less than 3days left and currently only a bit more than $1,000 of the $10,000 he asks for. So yeah I doubt that this will be a huge success.
- mercurial 14y agoPrecisely. If you want to challenge a product with massive mindshare [1], then you need new, very compelling features, and preferably be compatible with the existing ecosystem. 1: Unless you can play "abusive monopolist".
- fisadev 14y agoHow is this editor "vim-inspired"? Has a vim-like editing language? (not just shortcuts, but combinable verbs, objects and modifiers) Has different modes? (normal or command, editing, ...) Is very extensible? I don't see any of those in the video, and they are vim's most important features (especially the first one).
- pkkm 14y agoFrom its IndieGoGo page (http://www.indiegogo.com/happyedit http://www.indiegogo.com/happyedit): "Already implemented: Vim like INSERT/COMMAND/NORMAL modes, keybindings and search."