Comment by starseeker | Hacker News Reader

Comment by starseeker | Hacker News Reader

I note that with the exception of the sam code (which unfortunately uses the Lucent Public License Version 1.02, this editor is very liberally licensed (ISC/MIT/CC0).

If the sam code is optional or easily replaced, this could evolve to become a serious, modern text editor with a truly liberal license (something surprisingly absent from the current landscape, to the best of my knowledge - I've done a couple searches for an editor that could be embedded with an LGPL project, and the choices were pretty limited. This looks quite interesting.

From a portability standpoint, is there any chance of creating a native Windows version using something like http://www.projectpluto.com/win32a.htm ? That was another kicker when I was searching previously - only the really big editors like vim/emacs appear to have Windows ports...

nvi? https://sites.google.com/a/bostic.com/keithbostic/vi/

Sure it doesn't have the features of Vim or Emacs (and some would say that's a feature!), but it's perfectly serviceable if you're okay with vi's modality.

Close, but it doesn't appear to be active (the version you get from the download link is from 1996?) and it's using the 4 clause BSD license, which (as I understand it) poses GPL compatibility problems.

Go is a good target for portable text editors these days, IMO: https://github.com/nsf/godit

A good point. I didn't specify in my initial comment (and I should have) but one of our other criteria is to be able to build everything with just a C/C++ compiler. So we'd have to bundle/bootstrap Go just to build the editor, which I believe is too heavy to be practical for that (unfortunately).

Microsoft VS Code is MIT licensed.

For a standalone piece of software, what about licensing matters for your use cases?

It's right there in his comment:

> I've done a couple searches for an editor that could be embedded with an LGPL project, and the choices were pretty limited.

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