7 ms·

Light Table 0.6.6

167 points by daGrevis 12y ago

ibdknox 12y ago
Highlights for the TLDR crowd: multiple cursors and improved editor performance. I know many of our users/contributors are from here so thanks to all of you for the awesome involvement we've seen. You guys rock :)
- Igglyboo 12y ago
  I haven't used either but they seem pretty similar, how does atom compare to light table?
  - yoklov 12y ago
    They're actually pretty different. LightTable is a much less conventional text editor than Atom.
  - Morgawr 12y ago
    One of the two doesn't come with Google analytics automatically included and enabled by default to track your editor usage. I'll let you wonder which of the two.
    - muhuk 12y ago
      I have searched for "ga.js" & "analytics" in the Ligttable repository, nothing came up. So I assume you mean it's Atom that comes with GA tracking enabled by default.
      - rgbrenner 12y ago
        https://atom.io/faq https://atom.io/faq Why does Atom send usage data to Google Analytics? In the same way that aggregate usage information is important when developing a web application, we've found that it's just as important for desktop applications, especially during the beta program. By knowing which Atom features are being used the most, and how the editor is performing, we can focus our development efforts in the right place. For details on what data Atom is sending or to learn how to disable metrics gathering, visit https://github.com/atom/metrics https://github.com/atom/metrics.
        muhuk 12y ago
        It is unfortunate they've chosen opt-out. This is a tool for developers by developers. Are devs really cool with this, collecting information about them (even if it's anonymized) without their explicit consent? Regardless of who will be the users, opt-in is the civilized and respectful way for this sort of thing.
        serf 12y ago
        I would think that devs would be the most okay with this concept, as they are the only ones that understand what data may or may not actually be transmitted, and the data collection goes towards helping people in the same seat (albeit different projects) as the maker of this product, developers.
        nl 12y ago
        Given that analytics really does let the authors fix problems and inefficiencies that users are having I would imagine people should "be cool" with it.
    - Morgawr 12y ago
      I'm not sure why I am getting downvoted to hell (also Igglyboo's entirely legit question). I just stated a fact, it's really undeniable.
      - rawland 12y ago
        Observed a similar behavior yesterday with critical comments towards Apple's Swift and its similarity to LightTable. I guess a few HN members sense trolling or exert implicit trolling towards critical comments by downvoting them. Got me started to think about: http://mattmaroon.com/2010/11/23/i-quit-hacker-news/ http://mattmaroon.com/2010/11/23/i-quit-hacker-news/ Matt's reasons: 1. Lack of down-vote means vocal minorities are disproportionately represented. 2. Votes on comments are used to express agreement or disagreement rather than value, perhaps because many people simply cannot see the difference between the two. 3. The community is full of ideologues to the point where the comments are most often just predictable talking points being regurgitated ad nauseum. 4. The community is often snobbish and out of touch with how the other half lives. 5. It's a time suck. 6. It removes comments from where they should be, on the destination site. 7. It reduces blogging time. Food for thought. Disclaimer: I'm a devotee of HN; It's home, but also I'm a devotee of critical thinking.
      - nl 12y ago
        You are being downvoted because your point is pretty much irrelevant for most people. Clearly this is about comparing the editors. Analytics is orthogonal to that. If you want to talk about the costs and benefits of Google Analytics them I'm sure there's another thread where it is more relevant. Igglyboo's comment is probably downvoted because they don't "seem similar" at all beyond the idea that they both work with code.
        Morgawr 12y ago
        >Analytics is orthogonal to that Not when it's included in the editor as a default[0]. If we want to strictly compare editors then we should talk about Codemirror instead of LightTable. This point is really moot. I've used both Atom and LightTable and while I'm not going to argue about the pros and cons of either (I ditched Atom for various reasons), even just thinking about putting some Google web tracking device as an opt-out (instead of opt-in) really makes me abhor Atom. You can disagree with me and you can prefer Atom over LightTable, it's all good, however downvoting because you don't like simple statements that are true won't make them any less true. [0]https://atom.io/faq https://atom.io/faq
- mkohlmyr 12y ago
  Tweeted you some praise the second I saw the updates. Love the tab changes in particular. Every time there's a new version of LightTable I tell myself I need to pick up Clojure and get involved and I'm sure I'm not the only one. I'd be willing to bet your project is doing great things for Clojure adoption (or at least awareness) in general.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
apl 12y ago
Is it possible that LT got leapfrogged by Apple a couple of minutes ago?
- phren0logy 12y ago
  I'm guessing you are talking about the visual feedback/debugging with Swift and Xcode? If I were a betting man, I'd guess that these ideas are too useful to be unique, and that we will start to see them more. Also, I think that the LT team had said that they couldn't achieve as much feedback as they wanted to without developing a new language (that I'm guessing is a bit more progressive than Swift) in order to allow for a more interactive experience. So, with no insider info, I'm guessing that if they hadn't started developing their own language they may have been leapfrogged, but given that they don't really have to language design constraints around Cocoa/Objective-C semantics maybe they are still pretty far ahead. The harder part is getting enough programmers to care, even if they come out with something really revolutionary.
  - ibdknox 12y ago
    Yeah, we're working on something much more interesting than Swift, which while cool appears to be just more of the same thing we have now. We've questioned a lot of assumptions and come up with a system that is very different than the way we tend to think of programming currently. The benefits you get from going outside of that box are pretty crazy and we're working furiously to get to the point where we can start showing it to people. > The harder part is getting enough programmers to care, even if they come out with something really revolutionary. That's true, but even programmers will have a hard time ignoring some of the claims we'll be able to make :) In any case, our work on Light Table is a small step compared to where things are headed and at the very least, I can promise there are interesting times ahead.
    - james33 12y ago
      These are certainly some bold claims, love the confidence and excited to see what you guys have up your sleeves. Hadn't heard you all were working on anything outside of Light Table.
soapdog 12y ago
Is there an official way to write plugins and its documentation yet? I'd like to write some stuff for JS work using EnyoJS...
james33 12y ago
This is exciting news, I was a Kickstarter backer, but I've been holding off on giving it a solid try until some features like multi-cursors were added.
vittore 12y ago
ST, Zed, LT, Atom - now I can't decide at all.
- willismichael 12y ago
  There may be an extension for emacs or vim that will do what you want so that you don't have to try any of them.
- Agathos 12y ago
  Don't forget neovim.
peterashford 12y ago
meh I'll get excited when I can CHANGE THE F##KING FONT without editing a F##KING config file (after reading the help and being redirected to watch a #*%!@! video).
- paulrov 12y ago
  I struggle to think of a recent text editor that lets you do this. ST, TM2, Atom all require this. Yeah it kinda sucks for a setting you most likely want to flick back and forth through a few options quickly to get an idea which you like best.
- peterashford 12y ago
  I see I'm down-voted to oblivion. Does that mean that there's a simple way to change the font or I have I just been whacked by a bunch of topic nazis?
cturner 12y ago
A problem I've had with recent lighttable releases is that there's a dependency on recent GCC due to build of webkit that light table uses for its GUI. I understand lighttable 0.5.9 to be the most recent that works.

167 points by daGrevis 12y ago

Highlights for the TLDR crowd: multiple cursors and improved editor performance. I know many of our users/contributors are from here so thanks to all of you for the awesome involvement we've seen. You guys rock :)

Igglyboo 12y ago
I haven't used either but they seem pretty similar, how does atom compare to light table?
- yoklov 12y ago
  They're actually pretty different. LightTable is a much less conventional text editor than Atom.
- Morgawr 12y ago
  One of the two doesn't come with Google analytics automatically included and enabled by default to track your editor usage. I'll let you wonder which of the two.
  - muhuk 12y ago
    I have searched for "ga.js" & "analytics" in the Ligttable repository, nothing came up. So I assume you mean it's Atom that comes with GA tracking enabled by default.
    - rgbrenner 12y ago
      https://atom.io/faq https://atom.io/faq Why does Atom send usage data to Google Analytics? In the same way that aggregate usage information is important when developing a web application, we've found that it's just as important for desktop applications, especially during the beta program. By knowing which Atom features are being used the most, and how the editor is performing, we can focus our development efforts in the right place. For details on what data Atom is sending or to learn how to disable metrics gathering, visit https://github.com/atom/metrics https://github.com/atom/metrics.
      - muhuk 12y ago
        It is unfortunate they've chosen opt-out. This is a tool for developers by developers. Are devs really cool with this, collecting information about them (even if it's anonymized) without their explicit consent? Regardless of who will be the users, opt-in is the civilized and respectful way for this sort of thing.
        serf 12y ago
        I would think that devs would be the most okay with this concept, as they are the only ones that understand what data may or may not actually be transmitted, and the data collection goes towards helping people in the same seat (albeit different projects) as the maker of this product, developers.
        nl 12y ago
        Given that analytics really does let the authors fix problems and inefficiencies that users are having I would imagine people should "be cool" with it.
  - Morgawr 12y ago
    I'm not sure why I am getting downvoted to hell (also Igglyboo's entirely legit question). I just stated a fact, it's really undeniable.
    - rawland 12y ago
      Observed a similar behavior yesterday with critical comments towards Apple's Swift and its similarity to LightTable. I guess a few HN members sense trolling or exert implicit trolling towards critical comments by downvoting them. Got me started to think about: http://mattmaroon.com/2010/11/23/i-quit-hacker-news/ http://mattmaroon.com/2010/11/23/i-quit-hacker-news/ Matt's reasons: 1. Lack of down-vote means vocal minorities are disproportionately represented. 2. Votes on comments are used to express agreement or disagreement rather than value, perhaps because many people simply cannot see the difference between the two. 3. The community is full of ideologues to the point where the comments are most often just predictable talking points being regurgitated ad nauseum. 4. The community is often snobbish and out of touch with how the other half lives. 5. It's a time suck. 6. It removes comments from where they should be, on the destination site. 7. It reduces blogging time. Food for thought. Disclaimer: I'm a devotee of HN; It's home, but also I'm a devotee of critical thinking.
    - nl 12y ago
      You are being downvoted because your point is pretty much irrelevant for most people. Clearly this is about comparing the editors. Analytics is orthogonal to that. If you want to talk about the costs and benefits of Google Analytics them I'm sure there's another thread where it is more relevant. Igglyboo's comment is probably downvoted because they don't "seem similar" at all beyond the idea that they both work with code.
      - Morgawr 12y ago
        >Analytics is orthogonal to that Not when it's included in the editor as a default[0]. If we want to strictly compare editors then we should talk about Codemirror instead of LightTable. This point is really moot. I've used both Atom and LightTable and while I'm not going to argue about the pros and cons of either (I ditched Atom for various reasons), even just thinking about putting some Google web tracking device as an opt-out (instead of opt-in) really makes me abhor Atom. You can disagree with me and you can prefer Atom over LightTable, it's all good, however downvoting because you don't like simple statements that are true won't make them any less true. [0]https://atom.io/faq https://atom.io/faq
mkohlmyr 12y ago
Tweeted you some praise the second I saw the updates. Love the tab changes in particular. Every time there's a new version of LightTable I tell myself I need to pick up Clojure and get involved and I'm sure I'm not the only one. I'd be willing to bet your project is doing great things for Clojure adoption (or at least awareness) in general.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

apl 12y ago

Is it possible that LT got leapfrogged by Apple a couple of minutes ago?

phren0logy 12y ago
I'm guessing you are talking about the visual feedback/debugging with Swift and Xcode? If I were a betting man, I'd guess that these ideas are too useful to be unique, and that we will start to see them more. Also, I think that the LT team had said that they couldn't achieve as much feedback as they wanted to without developing a new language (that I'm guessing is a bit more progressive than Swift) in order to allow for a more interactive experience. So, with no insider info, I'm guessing that if they hadn't started developing their own language they may have been leapfrogged, but given that they don't really have to language design constraints around Cocoa/Objective-C semantics maybe they are still pretty far ahead. The harder part is getting enough programmers to care, even if they come out with something really revolutionary.
- ibdknox 12y ago
  Yeah, we're working on something much more interesting than Swift, which while cool appears to be just more of the same thing we have now. We've questioned a lot of assumptions and come up with a system that is very different than the way we tend to think of programming currently. The benefits you get from going outside of that box are pretty crazy and we're working furiously to get to the point where we can start showing it to people. > The harder part is getting enough programmers to care, even if they come out with something really revolutionary. That's true, but even programmers will have a hard time ignoring some of the claims we'll be able to make :) In any case, our work on Light Table is a small step compared to where things are headed and at the very least, I can promise there are interesting times ahead.
  - james33 12y ago
    These are certainly some bold claims, love the confidence and excited to see what you guys have up your sleeves. Hadn't heard you all were working on anything outside of Light Table.

soapdog 12y ago

Is there an official way to write plugins and its documentation yet? I'd like to write some stuff for JS work using EnyoJS...

james33 12y ago

This is exciting news, I was a Kickstarter backer, but I've been holding off on giving it a solid try until some features like multi-cursors were added.

vittore 12y ago

ST, Zed, LT, Atom - now I can't decide at all.

willismichael 12y ago
There may be an extension for emacs or vim that will do what you want so that you don't have to try any of them.
Agathos 12y ago
Don't forget neovim.

peterashford 12y ago

meh I'll get excited when I can CHANGE THE F##KING FONT without editing a F##KING config file (after reading the help and being redirected to watch a #*%!@! video).

paulrov 12y ago
I struggle to think of a recent text editor that lets you do this. ST, TM2, Atom all require this. Yeah it kinda sucks for a setting you most likely want to flick back and forth through a few options quickly to get an idea which you like best.
peterashford 12y ago
I see I'm down-voted to oblivion. Does that mean that there's a simple way to change the font or I have I just been whacked by a bunch of topic nazis?

cturner 12y ago

A problem I've had with recent lighttable releases is that there's a dependency on recent GCC due to build of webkit that light table uses for its GUI. I understand lighttable 0.5.9 to be the most recent that works.