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Try textadept! It is structured in a way similar to Emacs: small core in C, most functionality written in Lua. In my opnion the only thing better about Elisp th

Try textadept! It is structured in a way similar to Emacs: small core in C, most functionality written in Lua. In my opnion the only thing better about Elisp than Lua is that it has macros, everything else, from scoping to speed and coroutines is probably better in Lua. And the icing on the cake? The parsers use LPEG grammars and not regex! Of course there is a downside: it has a tiny fraction of Emacs's functionality (even without considering non-default Emacs packages!), but it mostly has the fraction I use and is simpler enough than Emacs that I am more likely to extend it than Emacs. (If you already knew about textadept but don't consider it a "programmable text editor", please let me know why.)

sprash 13y ago
Could some Debian dev please step up and package Textadept. Thx!
artagnon 13y ago
Let's put aside the fact that it's a one-man project for one second. I tried building it from sources for an hour before giving up: it depends on lots of custom packages which it fetches and custom patches [1]. Okay, so it has a really tiny C core [2], upon which lua modules build up the rest of the editor. I'm impressed: yes, this certainly qualifies as a programmable editor. It has some interesting ideas worth exploring; thanks. As an open source project, it is a total failure. If a potential contributor can't clone and build the sources in under 10 minutes (or an hour!), it's no better than a research paper. It hasn't been packaged for any major distributions, and it has no users. p.s- I did manage to grab a fairly recent build from AUR. As far as out-of-the box functionality is concerned, it's absolute rubbish; opening files and navigating buffer is a chore, and I couldn't even get it to indent properly. [1]: https://gist.github.com/artagnon/6102996 https://gist.github.com/artagnon/6102996 [2]: https://gist.github.com/artagnon/6103013 https://gist.github.com/artagnon/6103013
- omaranto 13y ago
  I didn't try building it from source, so I didn't know about any difficulties in doing so. I agree that that is a serious issue. In particular I wonder if patching Scintilla and Lua is really necessary... About opening files and navigating buffers: I must have been a very naive Emacs user because I didn't really miss anything basic. I open files by typing the file name, with tab completion. I switch to buffers in two ways: if I have only 2 or 3 buffers, I advance between them; if I have more, I jump between them by typing portions of their their names. To navigate inside a buffer all I use are motions by character, word, line, paragraph, page; jumping to matching parenthesis, bracket or brace; incremental search; jumping to line numbers. All of this is present in Textadept, so I felt the basics were covered. (I am sure that more expert Emacs users will definitely find lots to miss in Textadept.) Indenting of course is much more primitive in Textadept, that's definitely true. I'm used to indenting manually (well, not totally manually: having each newline start with the indentation of the previous one and then adding or removing indentation using tab and S-tab), from using other non-Emacs editors and esoteric languages for which no Emacs mode had been written at the time, so I didn't mind that much. The first thing I really missed was eval-last-sexp, so I quickly wrote a basic substitute (since Lua doesn't have those easy to match parenthesis around everything, I evaluate either the selection or, if empty, the whole line; that works for me). I have the Lua code evaluated in an environment where the usual print function inserts text in the buffer instead of writing to stdout.

sprash 13y ago

Could some Debian dev please step up and package Textadept. Thx!

artagnon 13y ago

Let's put aside the fact that it's a one-man project for one second. I tried building it from sources for an hour before giving up: it depends on lots of custom packages which it fetches and custom patches [1]. Okay, so it has a really tiny C core [2], upon which lua modules build up the rest of the editor. I'm impressed: yes, this certainly qualifies as a programmable editor. It has some interesting ideas worth exploring; thanks. As an open source project, it is a total failure. If a potential contributor can't clone and build the sources in under 10 minutes (or an hour!), it's no better than a research paper. It hasn't been packaged for any major distributions, and it has no users. p.s- I did manage to grab a fairly recent build from AUR. As far as out-of-the box functionality is concerned, it's absolute rubbish; opening files and navigating buffer is a chore, and I couldn't even get it to indent properly. [1]: https://gist.github.com/artagnon/6102996 https://gist.github.com/artagnon/6102996 [2]: https://gist.github.com/artagnon/6103013 https://gist.github.com/artagnon/6103013

omaranto 13y ago
I didn't try building it from source, so I didn't know about any difficulties in doing so. I agree that that is a serious issue. In particular I wonder if patching Scintilla and Lua is really necessary... About opening files and navigating buffers: I must have been a very naive Emacs user because I didn't really miss anything basic. I open files by typing the file name, with tab completion. I switch to buffers in two ways: if I have only 2 or 3 buffers, I advance between them; if I have more, I jump between them by typing portions of their their names. To navigate inside a buffer all I use are motions by character, word, line, paragraph, page; jumping to matching parenthesis, bracket or brace; incremental search; jumping to line numbers. All of this is present in Textadept, so I felt the basics were covered. (I am sure that more expert Emacs users will definitely find lots to miss in Textadept.) Indenting of course is much more primitive in Textadept, that's definitely true. I'm used to indenting manually (well, not totally manually: having each newline start with the indentation of the previous one and then adding or removing indentation using tab and S-tab), from using other non-Emacs editors and esoteric languages for which no Emacs mode had been written at the time, so I didn't mind that much. The first thing I really missed was eval-last-sexp, so I quickly wrote a basic substitute (since Lua doesn't have those easy to match parenthesis around everything, I evaluate either the selection or, if empty, the whole line; that works for me). I have the Lua code evaluated in an environment where the usual print function inserts text in the buffer instead of writing to stdout.