CudaText: A lightweight, cross-platform code editor | Hacker News Reader

CudaText: A lightweight, cross-platform code editor

uvviewsoft.com

124 pointsjuliane-sander44 comments

The license seems to be MPL 2.0, the repository is under https://github.com/Alexey-T/CudaText. I did not see that explained on the website.

  sudo dpkg -i cudatext_1.7.1.0-1_gtk2_amd64.deb
  cudatext
  ^C
  cudatext .
  ^C
  cudatext --help
  ^C
  sudo apt remove cudatext

Looks really good, fast and :

* Plugins in Python language. Plugins can do lot of things.

* Configs in JSON. Lexer-specific configs.

Also as some have mentioned this seems like a SublimeText inspired editor. Except this one's open source and built in FreePascal using the Lazarus IDE. Pascal is pretty darn impressive even today, at one point (if it still isn't) the Skype client was based around Delphi, though it looks like they're shifting it to Electron (at least on Ubuntu / Linux).

Edit:

One interesting thing I've noticed about FreePascal is that it compiles to every platform I could even think of, even saw something about compiling for the GameBoy or something ridiculous like that? So maybe this editor in theory could run on a Raspberry Pi. It seems highly responsive and feature packed enough for a Pi or just for any platform really.

On the topic of dev on a low-end machine, yesterday I was eyeing tablet/laptop convertibles, and there are attractive options in the $100-200 range for both Android and Windows now - RCA in particular has been churning out models that review well, sans expected caveats like bad camera or limited battery life. However, my prior experience with an old Asus EEE netbook suggests that VSCode may still be too heavy for these devices. A light Pascal-based IDE might be just the ticket, and in line with the happy path for low-end dev, which heavily favors minimal-overhead, streamlined compilers.

> Written in Lazarus

Which I assume is this: http://www.lazarus-ide.org/ ? Has anyone here used it?

Yes, I wrote Space Invaders like game in Free Pascal using Lazarus. This was my first larger project, so I hadn't much experience before. Lazaurs wasn't bad, but it wasn't something you would like to use nowadays. Developing high-end IDE for pascal is futile now I think.

What do you use nowadays?

"CudaText” can’t be opened because it is from an unidentified developer."

Now, I realize that I can just right-click open it, but I'm wondering - how hard is it to sign executables on OS X these days? Do people not do it because they have to pay for a developer account? I run all the usual suspects on my laptop (Little Snitch, Little Flocker, Block Block) - but it would be nice to have the (admittedly small) extra layer of protection from a signed binary. Particularly one that is downloaded from SourceForge....

Author of MacDown (https://macdown.uranusjr.com) here. The most privelant reason I'm not doing it is indeed the price tag. I do not do macOS or iOS app dev for a living, and paying $99 a year for next to no return is ridiculous.

I completely understand that users would want extra protection (I do too as a user), but if it really feels important enough to you, please step up and help deal with the situation. Start (and help managing) a Kickstarter project, a Patreon campaign, you name it. But please actually do something instead of just throwing out "suggestions."

Looks to be knocking off several ST features (especially find/replace). Launches very quickly.

Looks like the source is on GitHub. They're just using SourceForge to host the binaries. https://github.com/Alexey-T/CudaText

Yeah, I was thinking it might be related to NVIDIA'S CUDA too. oh well.

I use it the last 7 months. Very good. The only problem is a lack of a plugin manager for updating/installing plugins, like Notepad++.

At work I use it as an alternative to gedit and a lightweight alternative to Atom.

Honest reactions from a Sublime Text user on MacOS after using it for ~15 minutes:

- Scrolling on MacOS is agonizingly slow and only scrolls by line instead of by pixel.

- Horizontal trackpad scrolling just doesn't work. That enough is game over for me ever wanting to use this.

- The UI is very cluttered and the default color scheme has very little contrast for things like buttons. There's no sense of depth (drop shadows in particular places can make a big difference). I don't need a terminal and empty file tree open by default. For a code editor, I don't need a toolbar for Save, Open, Copy, Paste, Undo, Redo, etc. Developers don't use those.

- The window allows you to resize the height past the dock (assuming the OS dock is on the bottom of the screen)

- Pressing Esc doesn't dismiss the Find bar unless your cursor is actively in the text input for Find

- Pressing Cmd + F doesn't re-highlight my entire search term so I can type something new

- "Toggle Horizontal/Vertical" under View -> Split Tab just has a check mark. How do I know if it's splitting vertically or horizontally?

- Can't dynamically redraw the editors when moving a split divider back and forth

- Highlighting text is significantly less performant than ST

- Window resizing is significantly less performant than ST

- Turns out I can disable the console, file explorer, toolbar, etc. Make that the default.

- I can scroll vertically until the last line in my file is at the very top of the screen. This is more of a personal opinion but I like when vertical scrolling stops with the last line at the bottom.

- The text cursor blinks at a very slow rate, and it doesn't get reset when you click on a new line. In ST, when you click on a line it gets reset and you get immediate visual confirmation of where your cursor currently is.

- I changed the color scheme to Ebony and now I can't see my cursor at all.

- Why is every option grayed out under Plugins?

- Cmd+Shift+Left only highlights to the beginning of a word, instead of to the first non-whitespace character on the line

- Option+Shift+Left doesn't highlight by word as I was expecting, it only selects backwards one character at a time

- Syntax highlighting for common languages is missing

I'm sorry, but this is a long long way from the polish ST has. For a tool that's used every day, these small things matter quite a lot. For those saying "This is so good", I don't believe you.

I'd like a small Editor that had autocomplete/follow function etc. for C++.

So far Qt Creator is fine but it's hit or miss to get those features working right on each system and it's missing a call tree. Plus, it's heavy and doesn't have a command line interface.

This is so good. Actually, a ton better than the bloated Visual Studio Code.

But not really nearly as feature complete and lousy UX. Alternatively try sublime text perhaps?

You seriously think VS Code is bloated? It's always super fast for me, not even noticeably slower to start than notepad2!

11MB for cudatext, 32MB for Sublime Text 3, 159MB for VS Code on macOS.

How much RAM do you have?

I would assume a big portion of the 150 MB+ executable is the Electron runtime. Unless they switch to a true native app like the others, I don't think it can be any smaller than it is now.

Is the install size something to worry about?

Why does this matter at all? Even a little bit? Even a tiny bit?

I'd way rather my programming editor be flexible, hackable, fully support unicode, and integrate with my workflows. When I need a hyperminimal editor I have vi, which the confusingly named CudaText is much larger than but not substantially more powerful at editing with.

Executable size comparisons are either an important part of managing core OS primitives or a complete waste of time.

Well if the grandparent needs more than a hundred instances of VS Code open, that could be a serious issue.

The second-or-two it takes or Atom or VSCode to be fully ready once opened is extremely disruptive for flow. When I have an idea I need to type it NOW. Only the editors written in C/C++ seem to be able to keep up

lol

A programmer's editor or IDE _might not be the only text manipulation tool you need_ then?

It's 2017. You can keep an app open, you can open more than one at a time. You can use different tools for different things.

And let the web view suck away my RAM like a leech? No thank you. This might be a good suggestion if Chromium does not manage memory usage so poorly.

Nothing wrong with highlighting inefficiencies. I really like VS Code, but it does suffer from the same bloat as other electron/JS apps which is the bloat that can have a noticeable impact over time.

Please do measure and elucidate.

It does include an entire web browser and nodejs deployment. That is pretty heavy for editing text.

Am I missing something, or does this have nothing to do with NVIDIA's CUDA cores. GPGPU might be a little overkill for text-editing, but it'd be pretty cool.

GPUs are a boon for text editors with rendering repetitive elements.

But yeah, probably not CUDA.

A quick sampling of probable files in the repository suggests no CUDA that I can see.

They're just jockeying for a lawsuit for marketing purposes.

I've never understood what gUI code editors provide over vim/emacs.

As seen in the animations, you can select multiple random places and insert text simultaneously which, having used vim for over a decade, I do not know how to do.

Multiple cursor plugin adds the "select random places" which there are more powerful ways to do this in vim specifically search/replace or edit + n + .. will get what you want using a simple search query.

Said functionality just isn't supported as readily and intuitively out of the box as a graphical editor with a mouse. I am not afraid to admit that this is the nature of terminal editors.

It most certainly is, there is just a plugin to do the behavior exactly how you want to do it, which in my opinion after learning other ways is much slower.

    /{oldtext}<CR>cgn{newtext}<Esc>...

Where each . is for each repetition - text won't be inserted simultaneously, but you hit . (or skip over one search match with n) instead of the initial Cmd+click+mousemove+click+mousemove+click in a GUI editor.

You probably also want in your vimrc:

    nnoremap <esc> :nohlsearch<CR><esc>
    set hlsearch

in order to highlight search terms (so you know if you want to apply with . or skip over one with n) and <Esc> to clear highlighting.

There's also terryma/vim-multiple-cursors if you really want to edit all locations simultaneously.

Emacs/Vim doesn't have a GUI?

Suppose this is more of a philosophical and personal idea. Do you consider textual to be the same as graphical?

I draw the line at character addressed displays, i.e. what Unix used to call "visual" editors. Especially when it comes to programming IDEs/editors, where your main UI area is a matrix of monospaced characters anyways. Both variants can have subwindows, boxes, colors etc., the ability to display icons or finer-grained widgets doesn't really seem like a distinguishing factor to me. Heck, once you add mouse addressing there's even fewer distinguishing marks, so I don't think someone can feel elitist just because he's pressing F3 in his Norton Commander clone instead of dragging and dropping files in Finder/Explorer.

A more "programmatic" mode of interaction seems like a better dividing line, i.e. regular command line tools or line editors.

I always thought the early Bell Labs UI experiments and Wirth in general was a more interesting alternative to VT52 smart terminal UIs.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com