18 ms·

Lime – Experimental Sublime Text clone

547 points by seer 13y ago

saejox 13y ago
Nice work. That's quite a bit of code. If you are serious about this you should setup a website, list features, show screenshots and offer binaries. As it stand it not likely that many people will build a thing they never even seen a screenshot.
- foxhill 13y ago
  i think this is quite early work, we're a little bit off having stable binary issues - i think quarnster is only after feedback from people comfortable with coding :)
- deevus 13y ago
  My thoughts exactly. I'm always happy to try a new text editor, but if I can't at least see a screenshot of how it looks... no thanks.
- miloshadzic 13y ago
  Why not build it yourself and submit a pull requests with a screenshot? You have the source and he wrote that he's accepting PRs.
  - recursive 13y ago
    Because I can't find the build instructions for my OS.
  - blueblob 13y ago
    On ArchLinux Go is pretty massive ~294 MB (compared to the jdk7-openjdk at ~19MB) installed. I, personally, have avoided installing some small programs because they had Go as a dependency, obviously you can compile a binary to resolve this for the editor itself. It seems like quite a bit of work just to generate a screenshot though.
    - axelf 13y ago
      I've heard this argument from people refusing to install packages that depend on haskell too. I don't get it, 294mb is a trivial amount of space nowadays.
      - Killswitch 13y ago
        It's more the fact that honestly, I don't want to take the time... It's easier for me to shell out $70 to Sublime Text knowing that I can see it before I buy it than take the time to download and install all dependencies, build it, then be like "I don't even like this at all..."
      - blueblob 13y ago
        Depends on how old your computer is and what you do with it I guess. EDIT:Also if this is the only program using go I now have a 300 MB text editor.
        barrkel 13y ago
        Go creates statically linked executables. You don't need to have Go installed to run your text editor.
        drbawb 13y ago
        True, though it does look like this is using `cgo` though (for the Qt support?) Do those dependencies end up statically linked as well? Otherwise you'll need Qt installed. I don't happen to have it on my system, but I'd imagine Qt is quite large compared to the Go development tools.
        jeorgun 13y ago
        Not really; all of Qt5 (most of which presumably wouldn't be needed to run this) amounts to ~133Mb.
        blueblob 13y ago
beaumartinez 13y ago
> Why can't I open up an issue? > Because I'm just a single person and I don't want to offer up my spare time doing support or dealing with feature requests that I don't care about myself [...] Sort of defeats the point of open source, no? Sublime Text's author could argue a similar case about keeping it closed source himself.
- theboywho 13y ago
  I think the author makes a point here, he is making it Open Source so that anyone who wants to tinker with it can. Fixing people "Issues" is not part of the Open Source culture and more of the closed source model, since the whole point of Open Source is so that you can "fix" things yourself without waiting for the vendor. That's why there's "Use at your own risk" everywhere
- foxhill 13y ago
  but its open source nature means we can add features/fix bugs ourselves. if they gain enough traction, i'm sure they'll end up in the mainline branch.
- srik 13y ago
  Keeping issues open does have some serendipitous benefits. Someone who has the skillset/knowledge and has the same issue, might offer to fix it.
- golergka 13y ago
  I think that the point of open source is that I'm able to fork it anytime, and to accept all kind of issues with blackjack and hookers on my fork.
- mjs7231 13y ago
  That line right there killed any chance of me downloading or trying this. His first three paragraphs cover how he dislikes Sublime Text for some decently noble reasons. Then the first FAQ is about how he is no different. In fact, probably even worse. The idea that he will only work on things 'only he cares about' says this: Unless I'm you, I wont care about your project either.
stenehall 13y ago
Would it be possible to get a couple of screenshots?
talloaktrees 13y ago
On Ubuntu + my AMD card, sublime text just chugs no matter what settings I use or what driver I switch to, so I'm really open to checking out alternatives. I'm even working up the courage to dive into vim.
- blueblob 13y ago
  Do it, but steal somebody else's .vimrc that maps leader and some basic switching between buffers/tabs.
- davidw 13y ago
  > I'm even working up the courage to dive into vim. If you're going to be using something 10 hours a day for who knows how many years, definitely take the time to get to know the best tools, which to me are still Emacs and ... I'll grudgingly admit, Vim.
  - nbouscal 13y ago
    Interesting how the editor wars seem to have ceased due to the prevalence of other editors. It used to be emacs vs. vim, now it seems to be emacs and vim vs. everyone else. (I completely agree, from the vim side).
    - lemonberry 13y ago
      I've noticed this too over the past few years that I've been dipping my toes in these waters. I just started learning emacs after working in vim for the past couple of years. Not an attempt to switch so much as to have another tool on my tool belt. Plus I don't want to be handicapped if a pairing opportunity arises.
- foxhill 13y ago
  do you know what GPU driver you're using? many times, i have come across people still using the framebuffer driver..
  - 13y ago
foxhill 13y ago
i wish quarnster didn't decide to retire his excellent sublimeclang plugin. it's by far the most useful plugin i've come across for sublime (in fact, i've almost come to rely on it), and i fear that his replacement isn't going to be able to do quite as much as clang can. incidentally, the lack of ST updates have meant that i've not ran into any issues with the plugin randomly breaking..! that said, i'm looking forward to giving this a go, as an open source sublime text would be perfect.
- tuananh 13y ago
  It's discontinued https://github.com/quarnster/SublimeClang https://github.com/quarnster/SublimeClang
- quarnster 13y ago
  One of the reasons it was retired is the same reason people can't open up issues on lime. Too much demand to fix everything that's broken, and not enough people actually fixing it combined with me not touching much C/C++ code personally. I do still accept pull requests for it, and if anyone wants to step up as a maintainer I'd happily add them as collaborators after they've submitted a few pull requests.
  - foxhill 13y ago
    actually, aside from a few UI issues, i don't really have any complaints with sublimeclang, however, if the time comes that it no longer works with a build of ST3, i'll be more than happy to try and make a fix.
  - CJefferson 13y ago
    My plan is to dive into the plugin if/when it breaks. If I can't get it working, I'll probably take that as a single to leave Sublime Text (unless development and interaction with the community has picked up again). At the moment, SublimeClang working so well is the only thing which is stopping me looking around at other editors (I've tried the grand old vim and emacs before, and never got on well with either of them).
  - 13y ago
twodayslate 13y ago
Looks interesting. Hopefully it become popular so this guy gets some help.
- eliben 13y ago
  Isn't the 2013 way to get help is run a Kickstarter project for it?
  - jlgreco 13y ago
    Franklin and I are bros and all, so I don't mean to dis him, but he's a shite programmer.
kayoone 13y ago
Nice effort, not sure if thats the right approach though. SublimeText is awesome and alot of work went into it. Before creating your own version of it disregarding everything the original author put into it, one should maybe try to collaborate with him on an unsupported open-source lite version or something.
- kh_hk 13y ago
  https://github.com/quarnster/lime#what-is-lime https://github.com/quarnster/lime#what-is-lime
  - andyhmltn 13y ago
    He means of Sublime text from the original codebase instead of a totally new program
hajderr 13y ago
Go is an interesting choice. I wonder if this will inspire or scare developers away.
- talloaktrees 13y ago
  probably a good share of both
- hkdobrev 13y ago
  You know the rule for a new language. There are few developers, but those are one of the best.
  - RivieraKid 13y ago
    That's not a rule, but an unproven assumption repeated mostly by devs that use new languages.
    - outworlder 13y ago
      Yeah, new languages will probably attract their fair share of hipsters and "rock stars". They might not be the best, but you can be sure they are able to code. They would get exposed pretty quickly in small communities, if not.
      - hackula1 13y ago
        IMHO, new languages are dominated by people that are not the best, but are on their way, as they will spend an inordinate amount of time learning from the best in older languages out of necessity. The arrogant go devs of today are likely to be the jaded experts of tomorrow, as they will be forced to learn in ways that devs on an established platform rarely must.
- malka 13y ago
  Personally, i take it as a good occasion to finally learn Go.
- 13y ago
broodbucket 13y ago
Looks like this is as close to Sublime Text for ARM I'm gonna get! (haven't tried to compile it yet, but I can't see why I couldn't). Best of luck with the project.
- talloaktrees 13y ago
  if you do check it out, you can save some time and get Dave Cheney's unofficial go arm binaries http://dave.cheney.net/unofficial-arm-tarballs http://dave.cheney.net/unofficial-arm-tarballs
  - broodbucket 13y ago
    Yeah I've already got Go running. His binaries are awesome
talloaktrees 13y ago
Alright, I had some real problems building this on Ubuntu. 1. I couldn't compile completion. There is no build.go in the build directory 2. I tried compiling lime anyways, by it required go-qt5 even though the repo page says that's optional. I really wanted to check this out but I'm not really willing to spend more than the 15 minutes I already did trying to build it.
- burtakulous 13y ago
  Same issue on OS X. Spent a few minutes to check this out but the build instructions aren't clear enough.
- derekchiang 13y ago
  Same issue here. No build.go in completion. Please update the instructions because I REALLY REALLY want to give it a try. Thanks!
- drbawb 13y ago
  Please check out my comment in another thread with my experience: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6601763 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6601763 As a self-proclaimed gopher: this build has taken me far more than 15 minutes, and I'm still struggling with my Python installation. The main issue here is that very few of these packages follow the proper conventions to work with the `go get` tool. The author has attempted to version control his third-party deps (something `go get` lacks) in addition to using cgo (to build a C extension for Python). Plus there's a frontend with a dependency on QT5 (another complicated C-interop library which probably has its own crazy dependency maze). This is a fairly complex build, but the lack of `go gettable` packages and poor factoring of some packages is definitely making it more complex than it needs to be.
yuvipanda 13y ago
From the go-qt5 page: > This is a fork of visualfc's qt4 bindings, and several critical bugs are inherited along the way. Until these bugs are fixed, this package is not recommended for any real use. I don't have any time to actively work on this project, but I'll keep reviewing and merging pull requests. I guess GUI programming in Go isn't really up to anyplace you can consider 'stable'
- casperc 13y ago
  Which is a shame. Cross platform GUI development is really a pain point that could use some attention.
- georgemcbay 13y ago
  I recommend checking out go-qml. https://github.com/niemeyer/qml https://github.com/niemeyer/qml It is a different approach to using Qt GUI programming in Go where you use qml to define your UIs and keep the interface surface between Qt and Go fairly small instead of trying to expose the whole of Qt (which is very difficult to do in a maintainable manner because of the C++ API). The license is LGPLv3 instead of the usual MIT-style Go license but it includes a linking exception that makes it viable for just about any use.
nXqd 13y ago
any screenshot ?
frou_dh 13y ago
If Sublime Text development does go off the rails like TextMate 1 did then that'll be my "fool me twice" moment and I'll concede to FOSS tooling advocates.
- jbverschoor 13y ago
  Well.. already got hit hard by coronasdk before. I refuse to use any non-opensource software / kits.
- eknkc 13y ago
  I love ST. Bought both ST2 and ST3 licenses and never thought it was not worth the money. However, it's getting silent and the maintainer does not really care about taking care of the community. I was hoping that it would not be like TextMate. But I guess I should not be "hoping" for anything when it's about my text editor.
  - TylerE 13y ago
    Pretty sure that's called "mature software".
    - jaredmcateer 13y ago
      Vim is mature software and has 20 years history of not going silent. 7.3 has had about 1300 updates published. and they already have 50 updates since 7.4 was released in August. Mature software doesn't mean done.
    - pantalaimon 13y ago
      Then why is ST3 still labeled beta?
  - byroot 13y ago
    > I was hoping that it would not be like TextMate Ironically I just received a mail from Allan Odgaard warning me that the Maverick update may break some bundles because of the ruby update.
- 13y ago
silasb 13y ago
If anyone gets some Mac binaries up I would love to give it a try.
ulisesrmzroche 13y ago
Is sublime dying out or something? That sucks I just bought a license this year.
- jbrooksuk 13y ago
  No, but the author (Jon) has been taking a long time to reply to comments on the forum — which isn't unusual — and there has been a lack of recent updates. The last one was released a couple of days ago and didn't really bring anything new, even after months of waiting. When I emailed Jon directly about his disappearance (just before the last release) he did say he's aware of his lack of communication and will address it shortly.
  - artlogic 13y ago
    This sort of thing is exactly why I didn't install Sublime Text on my new laptop. After using v2 for nearly a year and buying a license, I became more and more uncomfortable that if there was a problem with the product, I couldn't fix it myself. Having already been burned by TextMate, I decided enough was enough and only installed Emacs. That was last December, and I'd say I'm much happier - but I also spend a bit more time tweaking my editor than I probably should. This is not to say I have anything against Sublime Text. It's a beautiful piece of work. It's simply not open source, and that's a deal breaker for a tool as integral to my day to day as a text editor.
- swah 13y ago
  No, he just launched a update with the long wanted BLOCK CURSOR :)
gprasanth 13y ago
How about making a campaign to raise money to buy SublimeText just to make it opensource? (Assuming, it is up for sale, not at an impractical rate.)
grimborg 13y ago
There's something wrong on the install instructions: completion can't be installed $ go get code.google.com/p/log4go github.com/quarnster/parser github.com/quarnster/completion github.com/howeyc/fsnotify package github.com/quarnster/completion imports github.com/quarnster/completion imports github.com/quarnster/completion: no Go source files in /home/oscar/go/src/github.com/quarnster/completion $ go version go version go1.1.2 linux/amd64 How did you guys install lime?
- drbawb 13y ago
  I'm still in the process of building it. (Need to get my C deps straightened out for the python integration.) The main problem here is that several of these packages (`lime` included) are not "go gettable." --- Completion: If you `go get github.com/quarnster/completion` it will error out but `$GOPATH/src/github.com/quarnster/completion` should contain the downloaded source files. If you go into `$GOPATH/src/github.com/quarnster/completion/build` there's a Makefile you can run (with `make`) that should install the package. ---- Parser: The `github.com/quarnster/parser` package is also not properly go gettable. You need to cd into `$GOPATH/src/github.com/quarnster/parser/pegparser` and run `go install` which will put it in `$GOPATH/bin` (I didn't try, but `go get github.com/quarnster/parser/pegparser` might actually work.) This package is just poorly factored in my opinion. The root package contains the library code, and the binary is in a sub-package. It really should be the other way around: the root package should build the binary, which would import the library from a sub-package. That or they really should be two completely separate packages in distinct namespaces. --- QT5: The `github.com/salviati/go-qt5` library is _also_ not go gettable. However `go get` will download the source to your `$GOPATH` which should be enough for the Makefile to find it. --- This is a rather frustrating build because so many of these packages don't follow the proper conventions for Go's package management.
  - kolev 13y ago
    I gave up! It fails to build miserably. What's the point of open-sourcing something when you're not open to the community. I mean, do this when it's ready for prime time, provide binaries, and they open-source it so that people can have some confidence in what they're running on their machines.
jagtesh 13y ago
+1 just for taking the effort man. I'm going to review it and post my feedback here.
znowi 13y ago
A text editor project without screenshots is just... wrong :)
- lectrick 13y ago
  Agreed. Someone else in the forum just posted this https://github-camo.global.ssl.fastly.net/b0f3292d2c26070a186cd41ca0e312e8a6504688/687474703a2f2f692e696d6775722e636f6d2f5649706d6a61752e706e67 https://github-camo.global.ssl.fastly.net/b0f3292d2c26070a18...
endijs 13y ago
Looks like there is a screenshot now. Just head to Github page. Or look here: https://github-camo.global.ssl.fastly.net/b0f3292d2c26070a186cd41ca0e312e8a6504688/687474703a2f2f692e696d6775722e636f6d2f5649706d6a61752e706e67 https://github-camo.global.ssl.fastly.net/b0f3292d2c26070a18...
quarnster 13y ago
Aha, so that's why there are 100's of new people starring it... ;) Hello, thanks for the interest. I hope some of you will take the time to contribute in the form of pull requests. I just updated README.md with a screenshot, here's a direct link: http://i.imgur.com/VIpmjau.png http://i.imgur.com/VIpmjau.png
- jpgvm 13y ago
  Could you clarify the build steps please. Especially the bit down the bottom requesting that Python 3 be built with special configure flags.
- derekchiang 13y ago
  Thanks a lot for doing this project! I have been hoping for an open-source alternative for ST for a while. As a side note, could you clarify the build section where it says we need to modify cgo.go? I'm not exactly sure what to do there. I'm using Ubuntu 13.10.
  - drbawb 13y ago
    Haven't gotten this to run yet because my copy of Python does not meet the criteria he listed in the Readme (`Python 3 must be compiled without sigaltstack enabled.`) However I got it to build on Arch Linux. First of all: modifying `cgo.go` didn't work for me. Not sure why: but it's included to late in the build process, `abstract.go` bombs out on the compilation. These flags worked for me just fine on Arch Linux: `// #cgo pkg-config: libffi python-3.3` That's assuming you have `.pc` files for libffi and python on your system. (Which might not be the case if you're building it from scratch.)
- flippyhead 13y ago
  Yay, I'm excited to see where this goes!
- csbrooks 13y ago
  Has anyone looked at getting it building for Windows? What would the major obstacles be?
adrianlmm 13y ago
No screenshots, no installers, no binaries, no features request. No thanks.
- kolev 13y ago
  True, unfortunately.
- bronson 13y ago
  Source code? Yes please.
gosukiwi 13y ago
Why did you choose go as the base programming language?
DFx 13y ago
I have to wonder if this is solving a problem that doesn't really exist. So Sublime Text is closed source and production has slowed down... one could argue the latter happens when any big project blows-up to mainstream. We have TextMate, we have SublimeText we have an endless supply of code editors and IDEs...do we need another just because of "open source"? I can't help this feels like a wasted effort. Also, after going through the checklist, the app is supposed to support SublimeText and Textmate snippets, colors, bundles, bindings and more. Seems like the dev might have been better off contributing to these projects rather than trying to push yet another code-editor into an already crowded market. </2Cents>
- quarnster 13y ago
  I don't care about what you need or don't need, maybe I enjoy writing code for the sake of writing code. Implementing the rope structure for example was fun, as was figuring out how to go about with the various ST3 compatibility tasks. What I choose to do on my own spare time is none of your business no matter how much of a waste of time you think it is.
  - DFx 13y ago
    It wasn't my intent to raise a defensive argument from you as I was simply stating my opinion. I know this is your pet project, and you're defensive... but people will have differing opinions and you should get used to dealing with them. My point (which was perhaps missed?) was that I personally just don't see the value in bringing another text editor into the world especially when you're focused on imitating and supporting others rather than innovating with your own way. If you had created an editor with a new way of doing things, or pushed past existing concepts I wouldn't have thought twice about its value, but all the feature checklist is pretty much "Make this TextMate and Sublime in one" without any real game-changing plans being mentioned. As to your point about learning new things through projects and enjoying code I don't disagree. My point was simply that you chose to invest your time in an already crowded market and simply reinvented functionality that already existed. I can respect the work, effort and learning that went into the project, I was just musing that it may have been better invested in a project that is a bit more unique and doesn't just reiterate what has already been achieved. That's also why I ended it with </2cents> it was an opinion...
notduncansmith 13y ago
My main question is... what doesn't Sublime already do? I get that you want a project that's constantly getting new bugfixes and features, but there's not a whole lot that Sublime doesn't do for you as it stands. It's a mature project, most of the kinks have been ironed out. And, whatever functionality doesn't exist for it, YOU CAN BUILD. There's only one feature that I feel could benfit ST3 right now, and that's the ability to move files from the sidebar. But even then, I can't hate on the creator because that seems a bit outside the purview of a text editor in the first place (IMO that moves into IDE territory). I'd love it, and Sublime pretty much is my IDE already (what with build commands, project files, source control integration plugins, etc), but ultimately I'm fine with it not being there because I have a perfectly capable file manager open in a window right beside it. I don't mean to rag on OP, I absolutely support the mentality that if you feel like something is broken you should fix it: however, in this instance I just feel like it ain't broke.
- mumphster 13y ago
  Sublime isn't open source and free.
  - notduncansmith 13y ago
    It's pretty much free, if you don't mind the nag dialogs. And it's well worth the money - finally, who cares if it's open source? You can build anything you need on top of it. Maybe it doesn't satisfy some lofty "open-source" philosophy, but for practical purposes, who cares?
    - mayhew 13y ago
      Learning an editor is an investment in a developers time. Software has to be updated and maintained to work on newer operating systems. With popular open source editors, you're pretty much guaranteed that the software will continue to evolve. Can't say the same about proprietary editors. I think a lot of developers could use an open source editor for their entire career, something highly unlikely to happen if they were using a proprietary one.
    - 13y ago
squozzer 13y ago
too bad the word "slime" is already used by a text editor.
oconnor0 13y ago
quarnster, would you explain the what the backend/frontend split is for?
- lobster_johnson 13y ago
  Splitting into a generic back end that deals with data means you can adapt different UIs to it. For example, you could provide a native app such as Cocoa without having to rewrite the entire app for that GUI framework.
codex 13y ago
Here again we see the pain of trying to sell software to open source enthusiasts: the temptation to destroy the author's livelihood by copying their work is too great. By releasing a clone as open source, the copier gets to bask in the reflected glory of the original work. It's like trying to sell original oil paintings to master forgers. BitKeeper is the canonical example, but there are countless others.
- rattray 13y ago
  That's why you open-source your software if you're selling to open source enthusiasts. I'd be just as happy to pay for an upgrade to a commercial version as I would be to upgrade from the "free trial" version.
  - codex 13y ago
    That may be the only way, I agree. But because open source pricing fails to capture the value of the software, you'll make 100x more writing closed source software for a more respectful industry.
    - rattray 13y ago
      Open source can mean your customers contribute to product development. Thus, "the value of the software" that people pay for does become diminished: it's just having the commercial license on hand, and not having to build from source yourself. But we're not just a demanding (less respectful, in your terms) industry, we also are one that's willing to support itself - developers do pay to support each other.
- chipotle_coyote 13y ago
  This may be the pain of trying to sell software to developers. There are a lot of "open source enthusiasts" who don't do any more programming than simple shell scripts, and while they appreciate the philosophy of "if the project doesn't have the feature you want you can just add it," in practice they can't just add it. (Unless it can be added through a simple script, which -- ironically in this case -- you can do pretty well with a lot of closed source editors.) The flip side, of course, is that only a limited number of developers can afford the time to write a full-featured programmers' editor with no expectation of recompense. That's not trivial stuff. There are an awful lot of free editors out there, but most of them end up being relatively feature-limited and, at best, "cult hits." Even getting to that point takes years. (And, while I hope this won't seem too cynical, the pain points Lime's developer describes as his motivation don't strike me as coming from Sublime Text's status as closed source. They strike me as coming from its status as a one-person project. A one-person open source project is theoretically better than a one-person closed source project, but...)
jalan 13y ago
Check out the demo: http://quarnster.github.io/lime/ http://quarnster.github.io/lime/ Looks Interesting!
- alphakappa 13y ago
  Interesting indeed. How is the application running in the browser though?
- lobster_johnson 13y ago
  That's not the editor. That looks like an experiment that sets up an ACE editor with TextMate syntax highlighting. The Lime editor is written mainly in Go.
  - quarnster 13y ago
    At one point it was written in javascript. Then in python. Then Go. I still think a html frontend would be cool, and it's certainly my intent to keep as much of the code in the backend as possible to be able to swap one frontend with another.
macco 13y ago
Finally, what we needed, another text editor. I think coders are to obsessed with text editors. Try to solve new problems, don't copy the solution to existing problems.
- crucialfelix 13y ago
  first level of procrastination: programmer writes own to do list software second level of procrastination: programmer writes own IDE
- syzo 13y ago
  Personally, I've been hoping for an open Sublime Text, so this is pretty interesting to me.
khalstvedt 13y ago
Seems like the dominant sentiment is that the maintainer is being defensive... I'd rather like to think he's being up-front and clear about his intentions for the project.
pbreit 13y ago
I had high hopes for Kod [1] but the developer joined Facebook and stopped developing it. If Lime is intended for Mac, could do worse than starting with the Kod code base. 1: https://github.com/rsms/kod/ https://github.com/rsms/kod/
- SmileyKeith 13y ago
  Kod had some great potential for sure. I was definitely disappointed when it stopped being actively developed.
mortdeus 13y ago
How about instead of writing just an opensource sublime text clone. We sit down as a community and discuss how we can create an even better editor than Sublime Text. There are some awesome text editors out there that have features I wish were in sublime text but sadly arent. For example, Rob Pike's acme editor has some really awesome ideas like mouse chording, (contextual right click. middle click command executions, etc), 9p vfs interfaces that allow plugins to be written in any language. And then there are little experimental editor ideas like Conception with great ideas that are worth checking into. https://github.com/shurcooL/Conception https://github.com/shurcooL/Conception Sublime Text gets alot of things right, but during my experience using it and using acme. I often find myself wishing there was a way to take both editors and mash them together because using one often makes me miss using the other.
- mortdeus 13y ago
  Oh and in case people want to see a demo of Acme. Here is Russ Cox giving a tour of acme. http://research.swtch.com/acme http://research.swtch.com/acme
- pessimizer 13y ago
  Most people think that they have already found an even better editor than Sublime Text. Sublime Text is used by a small minority of programmers.
  - ascendantlogic 13y ago
    Do you have numbers to back that up? Or is this purely anecdotal?
    - rplnt 13y ago
      I think it's more of an assumption than anecdotal. Sublimetext is a very expensive piece of software. You have the forever trial thing, but people don't usually want to get hooked up. And now piece of anecdotal - I don't know a single person around me that uses it.
ericstob 13y ago
can you please make it so people can post issues? It is a big part of community. even if you do not personally fix any issues it will allow contributors to collaborate about them.
riquito 13y ago
More than 1600 people starred the project. There is a clear interest in an open source Sublime Text.
swah 13y ago
I keep expecting some editor that will reuse a browser engine to make a modern Emacs.
bathsalted 13y ago
>Python 3 No.
- PeterisP 13y ago
  Why? I mean, Python 3 is already up for years, and using Python 2x for me personally feels like shooting myself in the foot due to the horrible unicode handling, for example. Why can't we finaly draw the line and abandon Python 2 forever?
DigitalSea 13y ago
Wow, surprised to see everyone bickering as opposed to giving praise. Just because the author doesn't want you to log issues doesn't mean the project is any less open source... The code is there, if you have a problem fork and submit a pull request. The author is merely stating the fact he can't fix issues by himself and if you find an issue and can help, you should submit a fix. Calm down people and learn to say thank you every once and a while. This is seriously cool, it's written in Go (which HN has a raging hard on for), what's not to love about this? I'm grateful someone took the time to get this far, now lets take it further.
- jagtesh 13y ago
  It takes a lot of effort to get something like this out. Just think of all the things the author could've done with time invested in this. And to make it open source and donate it to the world is just crazy. Props to the author. The naysayers ought to suck it up unless they've poured their free time in an open source project like this.
  - DigitalSea 13y ago
    That's exactly it. It's like being invited to an expensive restaurant and getting a five course dinner for free including drinks and then complaining that the dinner wasn't good enough. It was a free dinner!
- bobx11 13y ago
  Most people don't care to give back to open source, they just want to have something to fix their problem... I am disabling issues from my projects starting today. I think this is a brilliant way to make people realize that work has to get done and if they don't want to do it, they have to as someone personally to do it and it's really a favor! I love it.
  - joeyespo 13y ago
    Most people don't care to fix Wikipedia articles either. But I really appreciate the people who do. Turning off the discussions behind those pages would be a terrible disservice to the people who do contribute. Likewise, turning off issues makes it much more difficult for us contributors. You can't search issues to see who's working on what, get advice or guidance from the community for nontrivial fixes, and otherwise have high-level conversations before even touching the code. For those who just open issues, it's not always about laziness. Sometimes, you just don't have that much invested in a particular project. Personally, I still open issues to projects I use infrequently. I can't justify diving deep into a new codebase, reading their style guide, debugging, fixing the broken code, double-checking my fix, adding the proper tests, and documenting it in every case, but I'd be happy to spend the 5 min to search the issues and post a new one if necessary. Please don't do this.
unfamiliar 13y ago
While I agree that quarnster is under no obligation to fix issues people have with the code, I think a simple statement to the effect that they will not be fixed would suffice. Not allowing issues and suggesting that people fork the code and set up their own issues neglects the fact that this will probably remain the main repo for the project, and it would be good to have issues in one place even for contributors to discuss.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
elliottlan 13y ago
Speaking of open source potential - has anybody tried out brackets (http://www.brackets.io/ http://www.brackets.io/) It seems like it could be another worthy alternative to sublime text if it moves in the right direction. Disclaimer: I'm not looking for an alternative to sublime right now - it's stable enough for me to use as it is.
x0054 13y ago
Just today, I was thinking to my self, my life isn't long enough to get fully comfortable with emacs or vi (and I am sure I am going to get hate mail for even saying that :)) So, it makes me happy to see a new, from the looks of it, powerful, text editor for the terminal! I don't get why people are so pissed that this guy is refusing to fix bugs in his code or add features. I get it that Open Source is often massy because of this kind of attitude, but then again, you get MORE than you pay for it, don't you. If this proves to be a popular project, I am sure a community can organize around it. Not to mention that this kind of editor would primarily be used by programmers and coders, it's only fair that at least some of the people who use the software for free would get to contribute to it as well.
- Trufa 13y ago
  Vim is not as hard as it seems, the learning curve is kind of steep but nothing too crazy to get the basic things going, it's just a different approach to text editing. Don't get me wrong I would never use it (me, myself!) as a IDE, but as text editor, it's pretty great. I don't want to start a flamewar about this, I don't find them interesting, I just want to point out that knowing Vim is extremely useful if you're going to be shh'ing into remote machines as it is basically ubiquitous.
  - x0054 13y ago
    I agree, Vim is nice to know. But to each his own, I like the Sublime Text style editors, and having something like it but in terminal sounds really cool to me. Wonder how it will support multiple cursors, have yet to try it.
  - tehwalrus 13y ago
    I agree that flamewars about editors are not interesting, so I won't say too much, other than: For SSH'ing, another editor which is (nearly) always there, and which I find convenient, is nano - and it displays its common shortcuts at the bottom, so you don't have to learn anything. I still use nano, even on my mac locally, to edit the odd file quickly in the terminal.

547 points by seer 13y ago

Nice work. That's quite a bit of code. If you are serious about this you should setup a website, list features, show screenshots and offer binaries. As it stand it not likely that many people will build a thing they never even seen a screenshot.

foxhill 13y ago
i think this is quite early work, we're a little bit off having stable binary issues - i think quarnster is only after feedback from people comfortable with coding :)
deevus 13y ago
My thoughts exactly. I'm always happy to try a new text editor, but if I can't at least see a screenshot of how it looks... no thanks.
miloshadzic 13y ago
Why not build it yourself and submit a pull requests with a screenshot? You have the source and he wrote that he's accepting PRs.
- recursive 13y ago
  Because I can't find the build instructions for my OS.
- blueblob 13y ago
  On ArchLinux Go is pretty massive ~294 MB (compared to the jdk7-openjdk at ~19MB) installed. I, personally, have avoided installing some small programs because they had Go as a dependency, obviously you can compile a binary to resolve this for the editor itself. It seems like quite a bit of work just to generate a screenshot though.
  - axelf 13y ago
    I've heard this argument from people refusing to install packages that depend on haskell too. I don't get it, 294mb is a trivial amount of space nowadays.
    - Killswitch 13y ago
      It's more the fact that honestly, I don't want to take the time... It's easier for me to shell out $70 to Sublime Text knowing that I can see it before I buy it than take the time to download and install all dependencies, build it, then be like "I don't even like this at all..."
    - blueblob 13y ago
      Depends on how old your computer is and what you do with it I guess. EDIT:Also if this is the only program using go I now have a 300 MB text editor.
      - barrkel 13y ago
        Go creates statically linked executables. You don't need to have Go installed to run your text editor.
        drbawb 13y ago
        True, though it does look like this is using `cgo` though (for the Qt support?) Do those dependencies end up statically linked as well? Otherwise you'll need Qt installed. I don't happen to have it on my system, but I'd imagine Qt is quite large compared to the Go development tools.
        jeorgun 13y ago
        Not really; all of Qt5 (most of which presumably wouldn't be needed to run this) amounts to ~133Mb.
        blueblob 13y ago

beaumartinez 13y ago

> Why can't I open up an issue? > Because I'm just a single person and I don't want to offer up my spare time doing support or dealing with feature requests that I don't care about myself [...] Sort of defeats the point of open source, no? Sublime Text's author could argue a similar case about keeping it closed source himself.

theboywho 13y ago
I think the author makes a point here, he is making it Open Source so that anyone who wants to tinker with it can. Fixing people "Issues" is not part of the Open Source culture and more of the closed source model, since the whole point of Open Source is so that you can "fix" things yourself without waiting for the vendor. That's why there's "Use at your own risk" everywhere
foxhill 13y ago
but its open source nature means we can add features/fix bugs ourselves. if they gain enough traction, i'm sure they'll end up in the mainline branch.
srik 13y ago
Keeping issues open does have some serendipitous benefits. Someone who has the skillset/knowledge and has the same issue, might offer to fix it.
golergka 13y ago
I think that the point of open source is that I'm able to fork it anytime, and to accept all kind of issues with blackjack and hookers on my fork.
mjs7231 13y ago
That line right there killed any chance of me downloading or trying this. His first three paragraphs cover how he dislikes Sublime Text for some decently noble reasons. Then the first FAQ is about how he is no different. In fact, probably even worse. The idea that he will only work on things 'only he cares about' says this: Unless I'm you, I wont care about your project either.

stenehall 13y ago

Would it be possible to get a couple of screenshots?

talloaktrees 13y ago

On Ubuntu + my AMD card, sublime text just chugs no matter what settings I use or what driver I switch to, so I'm really open to checking out alternatives. I'm even working up the courage to dive into vim.

blueblob 13y ago
Do it, but steal somebody else's .vimrc that maps leader and some basic switching between buffers/tabs.
davidw 13y ago
> I'm even working up the courage to dive into vim. If you're going to be using something 10 hours a day for who knows how many years, definitely take the time to get to know the best tools, which to me are still Emacs and ... I'll grudgingly admit, Vim.
- nbouscal 13y ago
  Interesting how the editor wars seem to have ceased due to the prevalence of other editors. It used to be emacs vs. vim, now it seems to be emacs and vim vs. everyone else. (I completely agree, from the vim side).
  - lemonberry 13y ago
    I've noticed this too over the past few years that I've been dipping my toes in these waters. I just started learning emacs after working in vim for the past couple of years. Not an attempt to switch so much as to have another tool on my tool belt. Plus I don't want to be handicapped if a pairing opportunity arises.
foxhill 13y ago
do you know what GPU driver you're using? many times, i have come across people still using the framebuffer driver..
- 13y ago

foxhill 13y ago

i wish quarnster didn't decide to retire his excellent sublimeclang plugin. it's by far the most useful plugin i've come across for sublime (in fact, i've almost come to rely on it), and i fear that his replacement isn't going to be able to do quite as much as clang can. incidentally, the lack of ST updates have meant that i've not ran into any issues with the plugin randomly breaking..! that said, i'm looking forward to giving this a go, as an open source sublime text would be perfect.

tuananh 13y ago
It's discontinued https://github.com/quarnster/SublimeClang https://github.com/quarnster/SublimeClang
quarnster 13y ago
One of the reasons it was retired is the same reason people can't open up issues on lime. Too much demand to fix everything that's broken, and not enough people actually fixing it combined with me not touching much C/C++ code personally. I do still accept pull requests for it, and if anyone wants to step up as a maintainer I'd happily add them as collaborators after they've submitted a few pull requests.
- foxhill 13y ago
  actually, aside from a few UI issues, i don't really have any complaints with sublimeclang, however, if the time comes that it no longer works with a build of ST3, i'll be more than happy to try and make a fix.
- CJefferson 13y ago
  My plan is to dive into the plugin if/when it breaks. If I can't get it working, I'll probably take that as a single to leave Sublime Text (unless development and interaction with the community has picked up again). At the moment, SublimeClang working so well is the only thing which is stopping me looking around at other editors (I've tried the grand old vim and emacs before, and never got on well with either of them).
- 13y ago

twodayslate 13y ago

Looks interesting. Hopefully it become popular so this guy gets some help.

eliben 13y ago
Isn't the 2013 way to get help is run a Kickstarter project for it?
- jlgreco 13y ago
  Franklin and I are bros and all, so I don't mean to dis him, but he's a shite programmer.

kayoone 13y ago

Nice effort, not sure if thats the right approach though. SublimeText is awesome and alot of work went into it. Before creating your own version of it disregarding everything the original author put into it, one should maybe try to collaborate with him on an unsupported open-source lite version or something.

kh_hk 13y ago
https://github.com/quarnster/lime#what-is-lime https://github.com/quarnster/lime#what-is-lime
- andyhmltn 13y ago
  He means of Sublime text from the original codebase instead of a totally new program

hajderr 13y ago

Go is an interesting choice. I wonder if this will inspire or scare developers away.

talloaktrees 13y ago
probably a good share of both
hkdobrev 13y ago
You know the rule for a new language. There are few developers, but those are one of the best.
- RivieraKid 13y ago
  That's not a rule, but an unproven assumption repeated mostly by devs that use new languages.
  - outworlder 13y ago
    Yeah, new languages will probably attract their fair share of hipsters and "rock stars". They might not be the best, but you can be sure they are able to code. They would get exposed pretty quickly in small communities, if not.
    - hackula1 13y ago
      IMHO, new languages are dominated by people that are not the best, but are on their way, as they will spend an inordinate amount of time learning from the best in older languages out of necessity. The arrogant go devs of today are likely to be the jaded experts of tomorrow, as they will be forced to learn in ways that devs on an established platform rarely must.
malka 13y ago
Personally, i take it as a good occasion to finally learn Go.
13y ago

broodbucket 13y ago

Looks like this is as close to Sublime Text for ARM I'm gonna get! (haven't tried to compile it yet, but I can't see why I couldn't). Best of luck with the project.

talloaktrees 13y ago
if you do check it out, you can save some time and get Dave Cheney's unofficial go arm binaries http://dave.cheney.net/unofficial-arm-tarballs http://dave.cheney.net/unofficial-arm-tarballs
- broodbucket 13y ago
  Yeah I've already got Go running. His binaries are awesome

talloaktrees 13y ago

Alright, I had some real problems building this on Ubuntu. 1. I couldn't compile completion. There is no build.go in the build directory 2. I tried compiling lime anyways, by it required go-qt5 even though the repo page says that's optional. I really wanted to check this out but I'm not really willing to spend more than the 15 minutes I already did trying to build it.

burtakulous 13y ago
Same issue on OS X. Spent a few minutes to check this out but the build instructions aren't clear enough.
derekchiang 13y ago
Same issue here. No build.go in completion. Please update the instructions because I REALLY REALLY want to give it a try. Thanks!
drbawb 13y ago
Please check out my comment in another thread with my experience: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6601763 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6601763 As a self-proclaimed gopher: this build has taken me far more than 15 minutes, and I'm still struggling with my Python installation. The main issue here is that very few of these packages follow the proper conventions to work with the `go get` tool. The author has attempted to version control his third-party deps (something `go get` lacks) in addition to using cgo (to build a C extension for Python). Plus there's a frontend with a dependency on QT5 (another complicated C-interop library which probably has its own crazy dependency maze). This is a fairly complex build, but the lack of `go gettable` packages and poor factoring of some packages is definitely making it more complex than it needs to be.

yuvipanda 13y ago

From the go-qt5 page: > This is a fork of visualfc's qt4 bindings, and several critical bugs are inherited along the way. Until these bugs are fixed, this package is not recommended for any real use. I don't have any time to actively work on this project, but I'll keep reviewing and merging pull requests. I guess GUI programming in Go isn't really up to anyplace you can consider 'stable'

casperc 13y ago
Which is a shame. Cross platform GUI development is really a pain point that could use some attention.
georgemcbay 13y ago
I recommend checking out go-qml. https://github.com/niemeyer/qml https://github.com/niemeyer/qml It is a different approach to using Qt GUI programming in Go where you use qml to define your UIs and keep the interface surface between Qt and Go fairly small instead of trying to expose the whole of Qt (which is very difficult to do in a maintainable manner because of the C++ API). The license is LGPLv3 instead of the usual MIT-style Go license but it includes a linking exception that makes it viable for just about any use.

nXqd 13y ago

any screenshot ?

frou_dh 13y ago

If Sublime Text development does go off the rails like TextMate 1 did then that'll be my "fool me twice" moment and I'll concede to FOSS tooling advocates.

jbverschoor 13y ago
Well.. already got hit hard by coronasdk before. I refuse to use any non-opensource software / kits.
eknkc 13y ago
I love ST. Bought both ST2 and ST3 licenses and never thought it was not worth the money. However, it's getting silent and the maintainer does not really care about taking care of the community. I was hoping that it would not be like TextMate. But I guess I should not be "hoping" for anything when it's about my text editor.
- TylerE 13y ago
  Pretty sure that's called "mature software".
  - jaredmcateer 13y ago
    Vim is mature software and has 20 years history of not going silent. 7.3 has had about 1300 updates published. and they already have 50 updates since 7.4 was released in August. Mature software doesn't mean done.
  - pantalaimon 13y ago
    Then why is ST3 still labeled beta?
- byroot 13y ago
  > I was hoping that it would not be like TextMate Ironically I just received a mail from Allan Odgaard warning me that the Maverick update may break some bundles because of the ruby update.
13y ago

silasb 13y ago

If anyone gets some Mac binaries up I would love to give it a try.

ulisesrmzroche 13y ago

Is sublime dying out or something? That sucks I just bought a license this year.

jbrooksuk 13y ago
No, but the author (Jon) has been taking a long time to reply to comments on the forum — which isn't unusual — and there has been a lack of recent updates. The last one was released a couple of days ago and didn't really bring anything new, even after months of waiting. When I emailed Jon directly about his disappearance (just before the last release) he did say he's aware of his lack of communication and will address it shortly.
- artlogic 13y ago
  This sort of thing is exactly why I didn't install Sublime Text on my new laptop. After using v2 for nearly a year and buying a license, I became more and more uncomfortable that if there was a problem with the product, I couldn't fix it myself. Having already been burned by TextMate, I decided enough was enough and only installed Emacs. That was last December, and I'd say I'm much happier - but I also spend a bit more time tweaking my editor than I probably should. This is not to say I have anything against Sublime Text. It's a beautiful piece of work. It's simply not open source, and that's a deal breaker for a tool as integral to my day to day as a text editor.
swah 13y ago
No, he just launched a update with the long wanted BLOCK CURSOR :)

gprasanth 13y ago

How about making a campaign to raise money to buy SublimeText just to make it opensource? (Assuming, it is up for sale, not at an impractical rate.)

grimborg 13y ago

There's something wrong on the install instructions: completion can't be installed $ go get code.google.com/p/log4go github.com/quarnster/parser github.com/quarnster/completion github.com/howeyc/fsnotify package github.com/quarnster/completion imports github.com/quarnster/completion imports github.com/quarnster/completion: no Go source files in /home/oscar/go/src/github.com/quarnster/completion $ go version go version go1.1.2 linux/amd64 How did you guys install lime?

drbawb 13y ago
I'm still in the process of building it. (Need to get my C deps straightened out for the python integration.) The main problem here is that several of these packages (`lime` included) are not "go gettable." --- Completion: If you `go get github.com/quarnster/completion` it will error out but `$GOPATH/src/github.com/quarnster/completion` should contain the downloaded source files. If you go into `$GOPATH/src/github.com/quarnster/completion/build` there's a Makefile you can run (with `make`) that should install the package. ---- Parser: The `github.com/quarnster/parser` package is also not properly go gettable. You need to cd into `$GOPATH/src/github.com/quarnster/parser/pegparser` and run `go install` which will put it in `$GOPATH/bin` (I didn't try, but `go get github.com/quarnster/parser/pegparser` might actually work.) This package is just poorly factored in my opinion. The root package contains the library code, and the binary is in a sub-package. It really should be the other way around: the root package should build the binary, which would import the library from a sub-package. That or they really should be two completely separate packages in distinct namespaces. --- QT5: The `github.com/salviati/go-qt5` library is _also_ not go gettable. However `go get` will download the source to your `$GOPATH` which should be enough for the Makefile to find it. --- This is a rather frustrating build because so many of these packages don't follow the proper conventions for Go's package management.
- kolev 13y ago
  I gave up! It fails to build miserably. What's the point of open-sourcing something when you're not open to the community. I mean, do this when it's ready for prime time, provide binaries, and they open-source it so that people can have some confidence in what they're running on their machines.

jagtesh 13y ago

+1 just for taking the effort man. I'm going to review it and post my feedback here.

znowi 13y ago

A text editor project without screenshots is just... wrong :)

lectrick 13y ago
Agreed. Someone else in the forum just posted this https://github-camo.global.ssl.fastly.net/b0f3292d2c26070a186cd41ca0e312e8a6504688/687474703a2f2f692e696d6775722e636f6d2f5649706d6a61752e706e67 https://github-camo.global.ssl.fastly.net/b0f3292d2c26070a18...

endijs 13y ago

Looks like there is a screenshot now. Just head to Github page. Or look here: https://github-camo.global.ssl.fastly.net/b0f3292d2c26070a186cd41ca0e312e8a6504688/687474703a2f2f692e696d6775722e636f6d2f5649706d6a61752e706e67 https://github-camo.global.ssl.fastly.net/b0f3292d2c26070a18...

quarnster 13y ago

Aha, so that's why there are 100's of new people starring it... ;) Hello, thanks for the interest. I hope some of you will take the time to contribute in the form of pull requests. I just updated README.md with a screenshot, here's a direct link: http://i.imgur.com/VIpmjau.png http://i.imgur.com/VIpmjau.png

jpgvm 13y ago
Could you clarify the build steps please. Especially the bit down the bottom requesting that Python 3 be built with special configure flags.
derekchiang 13y ago
Thanks a lot for doing this project! I have been hoping for an open-source alternative for ST for a while. As a side note, could you clarify the build section where it says we need to modify cgo.go? I'm not exactly sure what to do there. I'm using Ubuntu 13.10.
- drbawb 13y ago
  Haven't gotten this to run yet because my copy of Python does not meet the criteria he listed in the Readme (`Python 3 must be compiled without sigaltstack enabled.`) However I got it to build on Arch Linux. First of all: modifying `cgo.go` didn't work for me. Not sure why: but it's included to late in the build process, `abstract.go` bombs out on the compilation. These flags worked for me just fine on Arch Linux: `// #cgo pkg-config: libffi python-3.3` That's assuming you have `.pc` files for libffi and python on your system. (Which might not be the case if you're building it from scratch.)
flippyhead 13y ago
Yay, I'm excited to see where this goes!
csbrooks 13y ago
Has anyone looked at getting it building for Windows? What would the major obstacles be?

adrianlmm 13y ago

No screenshots, no installers, no binaries, no features request. No thanks.

kolev 13y ago
True, unfortunately.
bronson 13y ago
Source code? Yes please.

gosukiwi 13y ago

Why did you choose go as the base programming language?

DFx 13y ago

I have to wonder if this is solving a problem that doesn't really exist. So Sublime Text is closed source and production has slowed down... one could argue the latter happens when any big project blows-up to mainstream. We have TextMate, we have SublimeText we have an endless supply of code editors and IDEs...do we need another just because of "open source"? I can't help this feels like a wasted effort. Also, after going through the checklist, the app is supposed to support SublimeText and Textmate snippets, colors, bundles, bindings and more. Seems like the dev might have been better off contributing to these projects rather than trying to push yet another code-editor into an already crowded market. </2Cents>

quarnster 13y ago
I don't care about what you need or don't need, maybe I enjoy writing code for the sake of writing code. Implementing the rope structure for example was fun, as was figuring out how to go about with the various ST3 compatibility tasks. What I choose to do on my own spare time is none of your business no matter how much of a waste of time you think it is.
- DFx 13y ago
  It wasn't my intent to raise a defensive argument from you as I was simply stating my opinion. I know this is your pet project, and you're defensive... but people will have differing opinions and you should get used to dealing with them. My point (which was perhaps missed?) was that I personally just don't see the value in bringing another text editor into the world especially when you're focused on imitating and supporting others rather than innovating with your own way. If you had created an editor with a new way of doing things, or pushed past existing concepts I wouldn't have thought twice about its value, but all the feature checklist is pretty much "Make this TextMate and Sublime in one" without any real game-changing plans being mentioned. As to your point about learning new things through projects and enjoying code I don't disagree. My point was simply that you chose to invest your time in an already crowded market and simply reinvented functionality that already existed. I can respect the work, effort and learning that went into the project, I was just musing that it may have been better invested in a project that is a bit more unique and doesn't just reiterate what has already been achieved. That's also why I ended it with </2cents> it was an opinion...

notduncansmith 13y ago

My main question is... what doesn't Sublime already do? I get that you want a project that's constantly getting new bugfixes and features, but there's not a whole lot that Sublime doesn't do for you as it stands. It's a mature project, most of the kinks have been ironed out. And, whatever functionality doesn't exist for it, YOU CAN BUILD. There's only one feature that I feel could benfit ST3 right now, and that's the ability to move files from the sidebar. But even then, I can't hate on the creator because that seems a bit outside the purview of a text editor in the first place (IMO that moves into IDE territory). I'd love it, and Sublime pretty much is my IDE already (what with build commands, project files, source control integration plugins, etc), but ultimately I'm fine with it not being there because I have a perfectly capable file manager open in a window right beside it. I don't mean to rag on OP, I absolutely support the mentality that if you feel like something is broken you should fix it: however, in this instance I just feel like it ain't broke.

mumphster 13y ago
Sublime isn't open source and free.
- notduncansmith 13y ago
  It's pretty much free, if you don't mind the nag dialogs. And it's well worth the money - finally, who cares if it's open source? You can build anything you need on top of it. Maybe it doesn't satisfy some lofty "open-source" philosophy, but for practical purposes, who cares?
  - mayhew 13y ago
    Learning an editor is an investment in a developers time. Software has to be updated and maintained to work on newer operating systems. With popular open source editors, you're pretty much guaranteed that the software will continue to evolve. Can't say the same about proprietary editors. I think a lot of developers could use an open source editor for their entire career, something highly unlikely to happen if they were using a proprietary one.
  - 13y ago

squozzer 13y ago

too bad the word "slime" is already used by a text editor.

oconnor0 13y ago

quarnster, would you explain the what the backend/frontend split is for?

lobster_johnson 13y ago
Splitting into a generic back end that deals with data means you can adapt different UIs to it. For example, you could provide a native app such as Cocoa without having to rewrite the entire app for that GUI framework.

codex 13y ago

Here again we see the pain of trying to sell software to open source enthusiasts: the temptation to destroy the author's livelihood by copying their work is too great. By releasing a clone as open source, the copier gets to bask in the reflected glory of the original work. It's like trying to sell original oil paintings to master forgers. BitKeeper is the canonical example, but there are countless others.

rattray 13y ago
That's why you open-source your software if you're selling to open source enthusiasts. I'd be just as happy to pay for an upgrade to a commercial version as I would be to upgrade from the "free trial" version.
- codex 13y ago
  That may be the only way, I agree. But because open source pricing fails to capture the value of the software, you'll make 100x more writing closed source software for a more respectful industry.
  - rattray 13y ago
    Open source can mean your customers contribute to product development. Thus, "the value of the software" that people pay for does become diminished: it's just having the commercial license on hand, and not having to build from source yourself. But we're not just a demanding (less respectful, in your terms) industry, we also are one that's willing to support itself - developers do pay to support each other.
chipotle_coyote 13y ago
This may be the pain of trying to sell software to developers. There are a lot of "open source enthusiasts" who don't do any more programming than simple shell scripts, and while they appreciate the philosophy of "if the project doesn't have the feature you want you can just add it," in practice they can't just add it. (Unless it can be added through a simple script, which -- ironically in this case -- you can do pretty well with a lot of closed source editors.) The flip side, of course, is that only a limited number of developers can afford the time to write a full-featured programmers' editor with no expectation of recompense. That's not trivial stuff. There are an awful lot of free editors out there, but most of them end up being relatively feature-limited and, at best, "cult hits." Even getting to that point takes years. (And, while I hope this won't seem too cynical, the pain points Lime's developer describes as his motivation don't strike me as coming from Sublime Text's status as closed source. They strike me as coming from its status as a one-person project. A one-person open source project is theoretically better than a one-person closed source project, but...)

jalan 13y ago

Check out the demo: http://quarnster.github.io/lime/ http://quarnster.github.io/lime/ Looks Interesting!

alphakappa 13y ago
Interesting indeed. How is the application running in the browser though?
lobster_johnson 13y ago
That's not the editor. That looks like an experiment that sets up an ACE editor with TextMate syntax highlighting. The Lime editor is written mainly in Go.
- quarnster 13y ago
  At one point it was written in javascript. Then in python. Then Go. I still think a html frontend would be cool, and it's certainly my intent to keep as much of the code in the backend as possible to be able to swap one frontend with another.

macco 13y ago

Finally, what we needed, another text editor. I think coders are to obsessed with text editors. Try to solve new problems, don't copy the solution to existing problems.

crucialfelix 13y ago
first level of procrastination: programmer writes own to do list software second level of procrastination: programmer writes own IDE
syzo 13y ago
Personally, I've been hoping for an open Sublime Text, so this is pretty interesting to me.

khalstvedt 13y ago

Seems like the dominant sentiment is that the maintainer is being defensive... I'd rather like to think he's being up-front and clear about his intentions for the project.

pbreit 13y ago

I had high hopes for Kod [1] but the developer joined Facebook and stopped developing it. If Lime is intended for Mac, could do worse than starting with the Kod code base. 1: https://github.com/rsms/kod/ https://github.com/rsms/kod/

SmileyKeith 13y ago
Kod had some great potential for sure. I was definitely disappointed when it stopped being actively developed.

mortdeus 13y ago

How about instead of writing just an opensource sublime text clone. We sit down as a community and discuss how we can create an even better editor than Sublime Text. There are some awesome text editors out there that have features I wish were in sublime text but sadly arent. For example, Rob Pike's acme editor has some really awesome ideas like mouse chording, (contextual right click. middle click command executions, etc), 9p vfs interfaces that allow plugins to be written in any language. And then there are little experimental editor ideas like Conception with great ideas that are worth checking into. https://github.com/shurcooL/Conception https://github.com/shurcooL/Conception Sublime Text gets alot of things right, but during my experience using it and using acme. I often find myself wishing there was a way to take both editors and mash them together because using one often makes me miss using the other.

mortdeus 13y ago
Oh and in case people want to see a demo of Acme. Here is Russ Cox giving a tour of acme. http://research.swtch.com/acme http://research.swtch.com/acme
pessimizer 13y ago
Most people think that they have already found an even better editor than Sublime Text. Sublime Text is used by a small minority of programmers.
- ascendantlogic 13y ago
  Do you have numbers to back that up? Or is this purely anecdotal?
  - rplnt 13y ago
    I think it's more of an assumption than anecdotal. Sublimetext is a very expensive piece of software. You have the forever trial thing, but people don't usually want to get hooked up. And now piece of anecdotal - I don't know a single person around me that uses it.

ericstob 13y ago

can you please make it so people can post issues? It is a big part of community. even if you do not personally fix any issues it will allow contributors to collaborate about them.

riquito 13y ago

More than 1600 people starred the project. There is a clear interest in an open source Sublime Text.

swah 13y ago

I keep expecting some editor that will reuse a browser engine to make a modern Emacs.

bathsalted 13y ago

>Python 3 No.

PeterisP 13y ago
Why? I mean, Python 3 is already up for years, and using Python 2x for me personally feels like shooting myself in the foot due to the horrible unicode handling, for example. Why can't we finaly draw the line and abandon Python 2 forever?

DigitalSea 13y ago

Wow, surprised to see everyone bickering as opposed to giving praise. Just because the author doesn't want you to log issues doesn't mean the project is any less open source... The code is there, if you have a problem fork and submit a pull request. The author is merely stating the fact he can't fix issues by himself and if you find an issue and can help, you should submit a fix. Calm down people and learn to say thank you every once and a while. This is seriously cool, it's written in Go (which HN has a raging hard on for), what's not to love about this? I'm grateful someone took the time to get this far, now lets take it further.

jagtesh 13y ago
It takes a lot of effort to get something like this out. Just think of all the things the author could've done with time invested in this. And to make it open source and donate it to the world is just crazy. Props to the author. The naysayers ought to suck it up unless they've poured their free time in an open source project like this.
- DigitalSea 13y ago
  That's exactly it. It's like being invited to an expensive restaurant and getting a five course dinner for free including drinks and then complaining that the dinner wasn't good enough. It was a free dinner!
bobx11 13y ago
Most people don't care to give back to open source, they just want to have something to fix their problem... I am disabling issues from my projects starting today. I think this is a brilliant way to make people realize that work has to get done and if they don't want to do it, they have to as someone personally to do it and it's really a favor! I love it.
- joeyespo 13y ago
  Most people don't care to fix Wikipedia articles either. But I really appreciate the people who do. Turning off the discussions behind those pages would be a terrible disservice to the people who do contribute. Likewise, turning off issues makes it much more difficult for us contributors. You can't search issues to see who's working on what, get advice or guidance from the community for nontrivial fixes, and otherwise have high-level conversations before even touching the code. For those who just open issues, it's not always about laziness. Sometimes, you just don't have that much invested in a particular project. Personally, I still open issues to projects I use infrequently. I can't justify diving deep into a new codebase, reading their style guide, debugging, fixing the broken code, double-checking my fix, adding the proper tests, and documenting it in every case, but I'd be happy to spend the 5 min to search the issues and post a new one if necessary. Please don't do this.

unfamiliar 13y ago

While I agree that quarnster is under no obligation to fix issues people have with the code, I think a simple statement to the effect that they will not be fixed would suffice. Not allowing issues and suggesting that people fork the code and set up their own issues neglects the fact that this will probably remain the main repo for the project, and it would be good to have issues in one place even for contributors to discuss.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

elliottlan 13y ago

Speaking of open source potential - has anybody tried out brackets (http://www.brackets.io/ http://www.brackets.io/) It seems like it could be another worthy alternative to sublime text if it moves in the right direction. Disclaimer: I'm not looking for an alternative to sublime right now - it's stable enough for me to use as it is.

x0054 13y ago

Just today, I was thinking to my self, my life isn't long enough to get fully comfortable with emacs or vi (and I am sure I am going to get hate mail for even saying that :)) So, it makes me happy to see a new, from the looks of it, powerful, text editor for the terminal! I don't get why people are so pissed that this guy is refusing to fix bugs in his code or add features. I get it that Open Source is often massy because of this kind of attitude, but then again, you get MORE than you pay for it, don't you. If this proves to be a popular project, I am sure a community can organize around it. Not to mention that this kind of editor would primarily be used by programmers and coders, it's only fair that at least some of the people who use the software for free would get to contribute to it as well.

Trufa 13y ago
Vim is not as hard as it seems, the learning curve is kind of steep but nothing too crazy to get the basic things going, it's just a different approach to text editing. Don't get me wrong I would never use it (me, myself!) as a IDE, but as text editor, it's pretty great. I don't want to start a flamewar about this, I don't find them interesting, I just want to point out that knowing Vim is extremely useful if you're going to be shh'ing into remote machines as it is basically ubiquitous.
- x0054 13y ago
  I agree, Vim is nice to know. But to each his own, I like the Sublime Text style editors, and having something like it but in terminal sounds really cool to me. Wonder how it will support multiple cursors, have yet to try it.
- tehwalrus 13y ago
  I agree that flamewars about editors are not interesting, so I won't say too much, other than: For SSH'ing, another editor which is (nearly) always there, and which I find convenient, is nano - and it displays its common shortcuts at the bottom, so you don't have to learn anything. I still use nano, even on my mac locally, to edit the odd file quickly in the terminal.