4 ms·

Without any sarcasm, really, what is the value proposition in this one, that would make someone ditch Sublime Text for it?

by larodi 8mo ago

oneeyedpigeon 8mo ago
I haven't spent much time with it at all, but my very early impressions are: - (Fairly) low memory footprint - Nice approach to buffers which seems to borrow from vi - Apparent very high extensibility using lua
throwaway290 8mo ago
No sarcasm intended, but probably same reasons lots of people ditch sublime after trying it for a day;)
- larodi 8mo ago
  hm... whole industry embraced its approach to palette of tools, dunno what you mean really :D I still try to avoid it for more than 10 years now, but is on all my compatible boxes. of course, knowledge of VIM is essential to anyone when doing CLIs.
  - throwaway290 8mo ago
    I don't know anybody using Sublime:) what means "palette of tools"?
deltarholamda 8mo ago
Can't speak to ditching a preferred text editor for this one, as text editors are one of the most highly personal preferences in computing. But as a guy that teaches kids about computing and system administration, having another option to demonstrate is excellent. For many things something like nano is fine, but for something a bit more robust? And is available for many platforms? And is small and self-contained? It's a great option. The Lua extensibility is also a bonus. Teaching teenagers how to use vim or emacs is, not surprisingly, a bit of a chore.
Fwirt 8mo ago
For starters, Sublime Text is closed-source. A better parallel would be something like Neovim, which also is extensible with Lua. What draws me to Textadept over Neovim is that it's intentionally kept very small, which means it's very easy to understand and extend. Contrast with Vim and its massive manual. However, like Emacs, almost everything is fair game for customization. For example, I wanted minimap functionality, so I implemented it: https://github.com/Fwirt/textadept-minimap https://github.com/Fwirt/textadept-minimap Textadept's biggest strength is also its biggest weakness: Scintilla allows for a lot of features that are nigh-impossible in the likes of Vim and Emacs due to their reliance on terminal behavior. However, Scintilla is not terribly well optimized and does not support GPU rendering, meaning that while there is very little bloat, Textadept can still chug in some edge cases. The most notable instance right now is large files with no line breaks (e.g. minified js libraries). Other Scintilla-based editors also suffer from this to varying degrees, although Notepad++ has some performance optimizations that seem to mostly mitigate it. Notepad++ is also Windows only and not as easily extensible.

Without any sarcasm, really, what is the value proposition in this one, that would make someone ditch Sublime Text for it?

by larodi 8mo ago

Without any sarcasm, really, what is the value proposition in this one, that would make someone ditch Sublime Text for it?

oneeyedpigeon 8mo ago

I haven't spent much time with it at all, but my very early impressions are: - (Fairly) low memory footprint - Nice approach to buffers which seems to borrow from vi - Apparent very high extensibility using lua

throwaway290 8mo ago

No sarcasm intended, but probably same reasons lots of people ditch sublime after trying it for a day;)

larodi 8mo ago
hm... whole industry embraced its approach to palette of tools, dunno what you mean really :D I still try to avoid it for more than 10 years now, but is on all my compatible boxes. of course, knowledge of VIM is essential to anyone when doing CLIs.
- throwaway290 8mo ago
  I don't know anybody using Sublime:) what means "palette of tools"?

deltarholamda 8mo ago

Can't speak to ditching a preferred text editor for this one, as text editors are one of the most highly personal preferences in computing. But as a guy that teaches kids about computing and system administration, having another option to demonstrate is excellent. For many things something like nano is fine, but for something a bit more robust? And is available for many platforms? And is small and self-contained? It's a great option. The Lua extensibility is also a bonus. Teaching teenagers how to use vim or emacs is, not surprisingly, a bit of a chore.

Fwirt 8mo ago

For starters, Sublime Text is closed-source. A better parallel would be something like Neovim, which also is extensible with Lua. What draws me to Textadept over Neovim is that it's intentionally kept very small, which means it's very easy to understand and extend. Contrast with Vim and its massive manual. However, like Emacs, almost everything is fair game for customization. For example, I wanted minimap functionality, so I implemented it: https://github.com/Fwirt/textadept-minimap https://github.com/Fwirt/textadept-minimap Textadept's biggest strength is also its biggest weakness: Scintilla allows for a lot of features that are nigh-impossible in the likes of Vim and Emacs due to their reliance on terminal behavior. However, Scintilla is not terribly well optimized and does not support GPU rendering, meaning that while there is very little bloat, Textadept can still chug in some edge cases. The most notable instance right now is large files with no line breaks (e.g. minified js libraries). Other Scintilla-based editors also suffer from this to varying degrees, although Notepad++ has some performance optimizations that seem to mostly mitigate it. Notepad++ is also Windows only and not as easily extensible.