4 ms·

I love (don't use, but love) editors like this -- that push at some boundaries and rather than having that push be some "side feature" or "addon" -- is the core

I love (don't use, but love) editors like this -- that push at some boundaries and rather than having that push be some "side feature" or "addon" -- is the core part of the editor. An older editor that I thought was amazing was Acme (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acme_%28text_editor%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acme_%28text_editor%29) -- the famous plan 9 editor. http://youtu.be/dP1xVpMPn8M http://youtu.be/dP1xVpMPn8M is a Tour of Acme, some really cool features are built into it. Any text is a command.

klibertp 12y ago
> editors like this -- that push at some boundaries and rather than having that push be some "side feature" or "addon" The problem with this is that it's really, really hard to build a good editor, and when you concentrate on some novel idea the "basic" functionality suffers. For example, both Vim and Emacs have easily accessed commands for moving cursor by words, sentences, paragraphs and moving to the nearest given character (on top of traditional beginning and end of line, of course). Also for selecting them, copying and pasting, indenting, surrounding and so on, all in 2 to 3 keystrokes. Another example is the multilevel, tree-like, infinite undo of both editors. And many more: mark ring, multilevel "clipboard", registers, very easy to access macros, narrow to region (this one could be Emacs specific, but I doubt there's no Vim plugin for this), search (both literal and regex) and replace (both literal and with expression, incredibly powerful) and so on and on, and that's just built-in purely editing features, not going into integration with other tools or plugins. I would have migrated to LightTable long ago if it provided at least some of a more advanced, but purely editing oriented features. It doesn't yet, and it will take it long years to get there because of sheer size of a required featureset. And that's still not counting my 3k lines of personal Elisp and some 20k lines of Elisp in installed plugins. I'm going to give Leo a try, but even if it really is as good as it's web page says I can't see myself migrating to it in the near future. I may use it from time to time for specific tasks, but my daily editing will be done in Emacs; in the worst case I will have to copy&paste bits of text between Emacs and Leo windows if Leo's editing model/core editing functionality sucks enough (I did this with some other editors and I despite copy&paste overhead I was still faster than I'd be staying in the single editor).
- jacquesm 12y ago
  We grow attached to our tools. I built a full screen editor somewhere in the 80's, used it until 2005 or so, when I really could no longer justify (to myself) the effort required of keeping it going. I still type 'e filename' or will use its weird set of control keys when I'm not paying attention. And it's almost 9 years now since I stopped using it. So I suspect you'll be back with emacs before the first day is out. But please do look at leo, it has some interesting ideas embedded in it and there may be ways to get emacs to adopt some of those. Leo is the best implementation of the literate programming method that I've come across to date, and the first time when it all clicked for me.
- vertex-four 12y ago
  The problem is, there's still not a really good composable text editing system. I can drop any number of HTML WYSIWYG editors into a web page in five lines of code, but it's really hard to do that with anything but SciTE for code editors, and SciTE is pretty dreadful. If this existed, we could start building on that widget and have a decent, extensible text editor from the outset, then build on that.

klibertp 12y ago

> editors like this -- that push at some boundaries and rather than having that push be some "side feature" or "addon" The problem with this is that it's really, really hard to build a good editor, and when you concentrate on some novel idea the "basic" functionality suffers. For example, both Vim and Emacs have easily accessed commands for moving cursor by words, sentences, paragraphs and moving to the nearest given character (on top of traditional beginning and end of line, of course). Also for selecting them, copying and pasting, indenting, surrounding and so on, all in 2 to 3 keystrokes. Another example is the multilevel, tree-like, infinite undo of both editors. And many more: mark ring, multilevel "clipboard", registers, very easy to access macros, narrow to region (this one could be Emacs specific, but I doubt there's no Vim plugin for this), search (both literal and regex) and replace (both literal and with expression, incredibly powerful) and so on and on, and that's just built-in purely editing features, not going into integration with other tools or plugins. I would have migrated to LightTable long ago if it provided at least some of a more advanced, but purely editing oriented features. It doesn't yet, and it will take it long years to get there because of sheer size of a required featureset. And that's still not counting my 3k lines of personal Elisp and some 20k lines of Elisp in installed plugins. I'm going to give Leo a try, but even if it really is as good as it's web page says I can't see myself migrating to it in the near future. I may use it from time to time for specific tasks, but my daily editing will be done in Emacs; in the worst case I will have to copy&paste bits of text between Emacs and Leo windows if Leo's editing model/core editing functionality sucks enough (I did this with some other editors and I despite copy&paste overhead I was still faster than I'd be staying in the single editor).

jacquesm 12y ago
We grow attached to our tools. I built a full screen editor somewhere in the 80's, used it until 2005 or so, when I really could no longer justify (to myself) the effort required of keeping it going. I still type 'e filename' or will use its weird set of control keys when I'm not paying attention. And it's almost 9 years now since I stopped using it. So I suspect you'll be back with emacs before the first day is out. But please do look at leo, it has some interesting ideas embedded in it and there may be ways to get emacs to adopt some of those. Leo is the best implementation of the literate programming method that I've come across to date, and the first time when it all clicked for me.
vertex-four 12y ago
The problem is, there's still not a really good composable text editing system. I can drop any number of HTML WYSIWYG editors into a web page in five lines of code, but it's really hard to do that with anything but SciTE for code editors, and SciTE is pretty dreadful. If this existed, we could start building on that widget and have a decent, extensible text editor from the outset, then build on that.