7 ms·

Light Table 0.5.0

180 points by ibdknox 13y ago

jeffbr13 13y ago
Great work, and I can't wait for plugins to arrive! This should be the next great text-editor once it's open-sourced - I'm too young to bother with vim/emacs, and a bit too poor to buy Sublime Text, great though it is! The fact that it's written in Clojure(script) makes me want to dive into the source, and find out how a modern desktop application is built using a Lisp.
- RBerenguel 13y ago
  I wonder how young is too young for emacs/vim
  - baxter001 13y ago
    For Emacs your span has to be wide enough.
    - RBerenguel 13y ago
      Hmmm what?
      - bricestacey 13y ago
        He means size of hands. Children with smaller hands may have trouble with some key combinations.
        RBerenguel 13y ago
        Thanks. I would have never guessed. Even as a child I had big hands, so... :)
  - Paradigma11 13y ago
    Especially since you need to be young to have any chance to get a positive return of investment with emacs.
    - RBerenguel 13y ago
      I started using it (consistently, all day) with ~22 after learning vi and emacs during my degree (that's 8 years ago). I stuck with emacs for the PhD and now for work, but I'm using evil lately to get text objects. I don't think emacs or vim are that hard, you get used pretty quick to anything you do all day long (I'm now using Acme to write go, as an example of new things)
- Mikeb85 13y ago
  It's basically a desktop webkit application that happens to be written in Clojure-script (which gets compiled to Javascript). A modern IDE written entirely in Clojure would be Clooj (which IS open-source).
  - graue 13y ago
    Huh, hadn't heard of Clooj. Another Clojure IDE written in Clojure is Nightcode: http://nightcode.info/ http://nightcode.info/ It's open source under the Unlicense, but very young — even the early releases of Light Table may be more polished at this point. On the other hand, it has Paredit mode, which is still "coming soon" for Light Table :)
- canthonytucci 13y ago
  > I'm too young to bother with vim/emacs, What does this mean? The younger the better, there's quite a bit to learn about using both. If you mean they're too "Old-school" as in there are a lot of keyboard commands to learn to use them effectively...give them a try, you might find after a while that ctrl-n really is easier than moving all the way over to the down arrow key when you're in the zone and building something.
- kmf 13y ago
  Never too young! Most editors look flashy next to Vim, but switching to a terminal-based editor towards the beginning of my development learning helped my learning gains immensely. Give it a try, you'd be surprised!
tofflos 13y ago
Hi Chris! Thanks for the new release. Is it possible to reopen the open files from the previous session on startup? I find myself frustrated with having to look at the welcome screen instead of getting what I was working on in my previous session. It's also a bit annoying to reopen all the files at the beginning of each session. Am I missing something?
canthonytucci 13y ago
I love the little spinning glider in the lower left, I don't know what it represents or how I got it to appear but, COOL! I want to like this so badly, but so far I can't justify spending the time to learn to use it just yet. It might just be a problem with the docs, and maybe I'm just not understanding what light table is on a conceptual level but: * docs reference tabs that do not exist in my version of the interface ( a trip to the view menu produced no option to show or hide them, so I assume they're from an older version?) * they expect me to already have created files elsewhere? * cmd/ctrl-o dialog? what does this do? (seems like nothing, looks like file prompt, but no tab-completion....am I supposed to type out /home/uname/file/x/y/z?) * cmd-shift-o opens files....but not directories, how do I get a file tree like in the screenshots? * if the browser tab has focus, cmd-shift-o dialog will not show (as I'm asked to do in the docs) * control-tab doesn't switch between tabs * what is the relationship between this browser window and my js file? after this I gave up. I guess I am late to the party? Where can I find the real docs? I have high hopes for this to mature and someday become something that I can say goodbye to vim/sublime, but at this point, I'd need a better onboarding to really give it a go. Despite their perceived difficulty to use, both emacs and vim provide extensive awesome help without having to resort to a third party. Sublime may have help somewhere, but since it works just like every other desktop program I've never needed to refer to it. If this is going to be something that's so wildly different from the text editors I'm used to, I'm going to need more hand-holding to get excited about it.
- nikkisnow 13y ago
  I agree with many of the things @canthonytucci said. My biggest thing is that I need Vim keybindings to feel 'normal' inside my editor and, for the life of me, can't find out how to enable them in Light Table. The commands and views I use/see in my LT installation on Fedora 19 do not look like or act like the docs. It's extremely frustrating. I'm willing to muddle through learning a new text editor. I also really want to like this editor but I find it hard to do so when the docs aren't matching what I see. [edit]: cleaned up text for clarity.
  - ibdknox 13y ago
    Updated docs are coming soon, just didn't want to hold the release any longer. In your user behaviors add this: :editor [:lt.plugins.vim/activate-vim] and then save.
bkurtz13 13y ago
I couldn't find any way of getting out of Fullscreen mode without killing LT through the task manager.
- susi22 13y ago
  CTRL+Space "ful" <enter> ("Toogle full screen") Admittedly, that's not too user friendly
- mjgoeke 13y ago
  Alt+W (Windows) brings up the window menu, from there just deselect fullscreen
nefasti 13y ago
Love python, but on my day to day I'm using GO and Ruby. I know GO would not fit into the LightTable philosophy but ruby support would be awesome.
- jared314 13y ago
  Those would make for good plugins when the plugin api is released.
_halgari 13y ago
Any chance of getting paredit soon? Still the reason why I never use LT for more than 10 minutes with each release.
- ibdknox 13y ago
  We have someone working with us on basic paredit support :) So.. soon!
fingerprinter 13y ago
This looks great. Can't find this in the documentation, so wondering two things: 1. Is there a way to get a python console? 2. I have a Flask app. Can I run it directly from LT?
- frio 13y ago
  1. in 0.4.x, no -- but you can have a buffer (say, scratchpad.py) and evaluate the whole buffer. This is a workflow I find more useful than an ipython session (although it's a little lame not having tab-completion and whatnot for inspecting unknown modules). I've not tried 0.5.x yet :). 2. Yes!
  - fingerprinter 13y ago
    #2 - Really? Nice. Any pointers on how? I'm mucking around with it right now and can't seem to get it to work :/
MaysonL 13y ago
So far, started it three times, had it silently exit without being asked three times. No Style tab available, no findable way to change that ugly white on black. Such promising, currently unusable. OS X 10.8.4.
- ibdknox 13y ago
  Can you tell me what you were doing when it silently exited? Can you put up a gist of whatevers in your logs/ dir? To change the skin/theme you can put the following in your user behaviors: :app [(:lt.objs.style/set-skin "light")] :editor [(:lt.objs.style/set-theme "codemirror")]
  - MaysonL 13y ago
    contents of window0.log bootstrap.js[16107]: nil screen-dark.css[43]: Invalid CSS selector: #content ol li::marker
  - nyc640 13y ago
    Why take out the existing UI for changing these settings? Also, what happened to the settings for changing fonts and font sizes?
- coldtea 13y ago
  It's for hackers. It just dying is not what happens to most of us -- but even if it happened to you, you should be able to short it out. Have you checked the console output for example? Have you installed another version of Java? etc..
ponyous 13y ago
Are we who pledged supposed to be in private beta?
- DigitalJack 13y ago
  There was a specific level that included the private beta privilege. Is the kickstarter page not there anymore?
  - bmj 13y ago
    http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ibdknox/light-table http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ibdknox/light-table Found via http://www.chris-granger.com/lighttable/ http://www.chris-granger.com/lighttable/.
tsumnia 13y ago
I'm a backer, but this is the first time I'm picking up the alpha. As someone primarily using Sublime Text, what can I expect to be different? I get its still in Alpha, but just what difference.
tmslnz 13y ago
Why is it not packaged within the Lighttable.app anymore? Unzipping it's a folder with a .app inside and all the NW resources next to it instead of inside. Confused…
dfischer 13y ago
Is Ruby support planed?
nikatwork 13y ago
The "watches" feature video actually made me say "wow" out loud in the office. Such a simple idea but I can instantly see how amazingly useful it will be.
- seanmcdirmid 13y ago
  You might be interested in this paper then: http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=189802 http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=1898... (not lighttable, but more research on the topic)
sjm 13y ago
In the change logs there's notes about an added Emacs mode; has anyone worked out how to enable this? Can't see anything in the command list and nothing in a brief glance through the .behaviours files.
- wging 13y ago
  As Chris mentioned elsewhere: In user.behaviors (ctrl+space, user behaviors), adding an element to my current editor vector activates vim mode: :editor [:lt.objs.editor/no-wrap (:lt.objs.style/set-theme "default") :lt.plugins.vim/activate-vim] Instead of this, you can write :lt.plugins.emacs/activate-emacs to activate emacs mode. Note that this page has nice completion-matching--for example, if you delete the interior of the string "default" you can see fuzzy completions, and putting the cursor within a keyword will explain what setting it's bound to.
michaelsbradley 13y ago
This is the first release of LightTable I've experimented with, and I find it to be really promising! One thing: I fired up the built-in browser and pointed it at a local static server which sits in front of some apps I'm building with Google Polymer[1]. The apps don't work at all in that browser environment -- the console reports lots of errors related to invalid html and css. I was able to connect LightTable (per the docs) to an external browser, but that seems to lessen the LT experience somewhat. Would it be possible for the LT team to look into why the Polymer polyfills don't work properly with the built-in browser? [1] http://www.polymer-project.org/ http://www.polymer-project.org/
pekru 13y ago
anyone else tried the linux tarball? The binary named ltbin seems to be missing.
- untothebreach 13y ago
  i had to `tar -xzf` twice, the first time the ltbin executable was missing for me as well. not sure why?
josephwegner 13y ago
So, I'm a bit confused about how these watches work. I expected them to give me a live view of how a variable changes (like data-binding), but that doesn't seem to be the case. It seems that it puts a hook into whenever the page evaluates that code, it updates the watch. For instance, I put a watch on this javascript: window.scrollY; I expected it to update every time I scrolled. In reality, I had to put an event hook onto the window's scroll event with window.scrollY inside of it. This is a bit confusing. Also, Chris, anyone you can put an update somewhere when you get the docs finished? This is the first release that is stable enough for me to actually use, so I don't really know how to do anything. Seems like the docs are way out of date (ie: How the heck do I search for files in my workspace?). Great release though! I'm pumped that LightTable is finally stable enough for me to attempt to replace sublime!
- josephwegner 13y ago
  For the record, I now see someone else commented with the Cmd+o hint.. I guess that's how you search for files. Either way, I'd love to know when the docs are updated so I can really dig in!

180 points by ibdknox 13y ago

Great work, and I can't wait for plugins to arrive! This should be the next great text-editor once it's open-sourced - I'm too young to bother with vim/emacs, and a bit too poor to buy Sublime Text, great though it is! The fact that it's written in Clojure(script) makes me want to dive into the source, and find out how a modern desktop application is built using a Lisp.

RBerenguel 13y ago
I wonder how young is too young for emacs/vim
- baxter001 13y ago
  For Emacs your span has to be wide enough.
  - RBerenguel 13y ago
    Hmmm what?
    - bricestacey 13y ago
      He means size of hands. Children with smaller hands may have trouble with some key combinations.
      - RBerenguel 13y ago
        Thanks. I would have never guessed. Even as a child I had big hands, so... :)
- Paradigma11 13y ago
  Especially since you need to be young to have any chance to get a positive return of investment with emacs.
  - RBerenguel 13y ago
    I started using it (consistently, all day) with ~22 after learning vi and emacs during my degree (that's 8 years ago). I stuck with emacs for the PhD and now for work, but I'm using evil lately to get text objects. I don't think emacs or vim are that hard, you get used pretty quick to anything you do all day long (I'm now using Acme to write go, as an example of new things)
Mikeb85 13y ago
It's basically a desktop webkit application that happens to be written in Clojure-script (which gets compiled to Javascript). A modern IDE written entirely in Clojure would be Clooj (which IS open-source).
- graue 13y ago
  Huh, hadn't heard of Clooj. Another Clojure IDE written in Clojure is Nightcode: http://nightcode.info/ http://nightcode.info/ It's open source under the Unlicense, but very young — even the early releases of Light Table may be more polished at this point. On the other hand, it has Paredit mode, which is still "coming soon" for Light Table :)
canthonytucci 13y ago
> I'm too young to bother with vim/emacs, What does this mean? The younger the better, there's quite a bit to learn about using both. If you mean they're too "Old-school" as in there are a lot of keyboard commands to learn to use them effectively...give them a try, you might find after a while that ctrl-n really is easier than moving all the way over to the down arrow key when you're in the zone and building something.
kmf 13y ago
Never too young! Most editors look flashy next to Vim, but switching to a terminal-based editor towards the beginning of my development learning helped my learning gains immensely. Give it a try, you'd be surprised!

tofflos 13y ago

Hi Chris! Thanks for the new release. Is it possible to reopen the open files from the previous session on startup? I find myself frustrated with having to look at the welcome screen instead of getting what I was working on in my previous session. It's also a bit annoying to reopen all the files at the beginning of each session. Am I missing something?

canthonytucci 13y ago

I love the little spinning glider in the lower left, I don't know what it represents or how I got it to appear but, COOL! I want to like this so badly, but so far I can't justify spending the time to learn to use it just yet. It might just be a problem with the docs, and maybe I'm just not understanding what light table is on a conceptual level but: * docs reference tabs that do not exist in my version of the interface ( a trip to the view menu produced no option to show or hide them, so I assume they're from an older version?) * they expect me to already have created files elsewhere? * cmd/ctrl-o dialog? what does this do? (seems like nothing, looks like file prompt, but no tab-completion....am I supposed to type out /home/uname/file/x/y/z?) * cmd-shift-o opens files....but not directories, how do I get a file tree like in the screenshots? * if the browser tab has focus, cmd-shift-o dialog will not show (as I'm asked to do in the docs) * control-tab doesn't switch between tabs * what is the relationship between this browser window and my js file? after this I gave up. I guess I am late to the party? Where can I find the real docs? I have high hopes for this to mature and someday become something that I can say goodbye to vim/sublime, but at this point, I'd need a better onboarding to really give it a go. Despite their perceived difficulty to use, both emacs and vim provide extensive awesome help without having to resort to a third party. Sublime may have help somewhere, but since it works just like every other desktop program I've never needed to refer to it. If this is going to be something that's so wildly different from the text editors I'm used to, I'm going to need more hand-holding to get excited about it.

nikkisnow 13y ago
I agree with many of the things @canthonytucci said. My biggest thing is that I need Vim keybindings to feel 'normal' inside my editor and, for the life of me, can't find out how to enable them in Light Table. The commands and views I use/see in my LT installation on Fedora 19 do not look like or act like the docs. It's extremely frustrating. I'm willing to muddle through learning a new text editor. I also really want to like this editor but I find it hard to do so when the docs aren't matching what I see. [edit]: cleaned up text for clarity.
- ibdknox 13y ago
  Updated docs are coming soon, just didn't want to hold the release any longer. In your user behaviors add this: :editor [:lt.plugins.vim/activate-vim] and then save.

bkurtz13 13y ago

I couldn't find any way of getting out of Fullscreen mode without killing LT through the task manager.

susi22 13y ago
CTRL+Space "ful" <enter> ("Toogle full screen") Admittedly, that's not too user friendly
mjgoeke 13y ago
Alt+W (Windows) brings up the window menu, from there just deselect fullscreen

nefasti 13y ago

Love python, but on my day to day I'm using GO and Ruby. I know GO would not fit into the LightTable philosophy but ruby support would be awesome.

jared314 13y ago
Those would make for good plugins when the plugin api is released.

_halgari 13y ago

Any chance of getting paredit soon? Still the reason why I never use LT for more than 10 minutes with each release.

ibdknox 13y ago
We have someone working with us on basic paredit support :) So.. soon!

fingerprinter 13y ago

This looks great. Can't find this in the documentation, so wondering two things: 1. Is there a way to get a python console? 2. I have a Flask app. Can I run it directly from LT?

frio 13y ago
1. in 0.4.x, no -- but you can have a buffer (say, scratchpad.py) and evaluate the whole buffer. This is a workflow I find more useful than an ipython session (although it's a little lame not having tab-completion and whatnot for inspecting unknown modules). I've not tried 0.5.x yet :). 2. Yes!
- fingerprinter 13y ago
  #2 - Really? Nice. Any pointers on how? I'm mucking around with it right now and can't seem to get it to work :/

MaysonL 13y ago

So far, started it three times, had it silently exit without being asked three times. No Style tab available, no findable way to change that ugly white on black. Such promising, currently unusable. OS X 10.8.4.

ibdknox 13y ago
Can you tell me what you were doing when it silently exited? Can you put up a gist of whatevers in your logs/ dir? To change the skin/theme you can put the following in your user behaviors: :app [(:lt.objs.style/set-skin "light")] :editor [(:lt.objs.style/set-theme "codemirror")]
- MaysonL 13y ago
  contents of window0.log bootstrap.js[16107]: nil screen-dark.css[43]: Invalid CSS selector: #content ol li::marker
- nyc640 13y ago
  Why take out the existing UI for changing these settings? Also, what happened to the settings for changing fonts and font sizes?
coldtea 13y ago
It's for hackers. It just dying is not what happens to most of us -- but even if it happened to you, you should be able to short it out. Have you checked the console output for example? Have you installed another version of Java? etc..

ponyous 13y ago

Are we who pledged supposed to be in private beta?

DigitalJack 13y ago
There was a specific level that included the private beta privilege. Is the kickstarter page not there anymore?
- bmj 13y ago
  http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ibdknox/light-table http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ibdknox/light-table Found via http://www.chris-granger.com/lighttable/ http://www.chris-granger.com/lighttable/.

tsumnia 13y ago

I'm a backer, but this is the first time I'm picking up the alpha. As someone primarily using Sublime Text, what can I expect to be different? I get its still in Alpha, but just what difference.

tmslnz 13y ago

Why is it not packaged within the Lighttable.app anymore? Unzipping it's a folder with a .app inside and all the NW resources next to it instead of inside. Confused…

dfischer 13y ago

Is Ruby support planed?

nikatwork 13y ago

The "watches" feature video actually made me say "wow" out loud in the office. Such a simple idea but I can instantly see how amazingly useful it will be.

seanmcdirmid 13y ago
You might be interested in this paper then: http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=189802 http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=1898... (not lighttable, but more research on the topic)

sjm 13y ago

In the change logs there's notes about an added Emacs mode; has anyone worked out how to enable this? Can't see anything in the command list and nothing in a brief glance through the .behaviours files.

wging 13y ago
As Chris mentioned elsewhere: In user.behaviors (ctrl+space, user behaviors), adding an element to my current editor vector activates vim mode: :editor [:lt.objs.editor/no-wrap (:lt.objs.style/set-theme "default") :lt.plugins.vim/activate-vim] Instead of this, you can write :lt.plugins.emacs/activate-emacs to activate emacs mode. Note that this page has nice completion-matching--for example, if you delete the interior of the string "default" you can see fuzzy completions, and putting the cursor within a keyword will explain what setting it's bound to.

michaelsbradley 13y ago

This is the first release of LightTable I've experimented with, and I find it to be really promising! One thing: I fired up the built-in browser and pointed it at a local static server which sits in front of some apps I'm building with Google Polymer[1]. The apps don't work at all in that browser environment -- the console reports lots of errors related to invalid html and css. I was able to connect LightTable (per the docs) to an external browser, but that seems to lessen the LT experience somewhat. Would it be possible for the LT team to look into why the Polymer polyfills don't work properly with the built-in browser? [1] http://www.polymer-project.org/ http://www.polymer-project.org/

pekru 13y ago

anyone else tried the linux tarball? The binary named ltbin seems to be missing.

untothebreach 13y ago
i had to `tar -xzf` twice, the first time the ltbin executable was missing for me as well. not sure why?

josephwegner 13y ago

So, I'm a bit confused about how these watches work. I expected them to give me a live view of how a variable changes (like data-binding), but that doesn't seem to be the case. It seems that it puts a hook into whenever the page evaluates that code, it updates the watch. For instance, I put a watch on this javascript: window.scrollY; I expected it to update every time I scrolled. In reality, I had to put an event hook onto the window's scroll event with window.scrollY inside of it. This is a bit confusing. Also, Chris, anyone you can put an update somewhere when you get the docs finished? This is the first release that is stable enough for me to actually use, so I don't really know how to do anything. Seems like the docs are way out of date (ie: How the heck do I search for files in my workspace?). Great release though! I'm pumped that LightTable is finally stable enough for me to attempt to replace sublime!

josephwegner 13y ago
For the record, I now see someone else commented with the Cmd+o hint.. I guess that's how you search for files. Either way, I'd love to know when the docs are updated so I can really dig in!