Textadept – A fast, minimalist, and extensible cross-platform text editor | Hacker News Reader

Textadept – A fast, minimalist, and extensible cross-platform text editor

foicica.com

141 pointsgiancarlostoro52 comments

There is one reason I've stuck with TextWrangler for so long. It has excellent auto saving features. I can close the application with dozens of unsaved documents, and it opens with the exact same state the I left it in if I re-open. Some of the documents I have open have been sitting unsaved for over a year, surviving restart, crashes and god knows what. AFAIK, I have never lost a document in TextWrangler.

The Textadept manual says:

> By default, Textadept saves its state upon quitting in order to restore it the next time the editor starts up.

But how well does it work in practice? Does anybody have experience?

This same feature is what keeps me staying with Sublime. It's brilliant.

For people using Emacs looking for autosave.

(add-hook 'focus-out-hook (lambda () (save-some-buffers t)))

This is not autosave, this saves open buffers, and may cause saving changes you may have wanted to discard. With non version controlled files this may cause data loss/corruption. See "Auto Save" in emacs manual instead.

Sublime does the "autosave unsaved docs" thing too, and does it flawlessly. (I have other gripes with Sublime, I just don't think this is a USP for TextWrangler.)

At least on the beta channel that hasn't always been flawless. You can find many reports and patch notes regarding corrupted sessions and I've definitely lost some work over the years to that, the last time happening just half a year ago on the then latest version.

+1 for TextWrangler. With it's solid remote file support, inline file browser (if you open a directory or have multiple files open in the same window), ability to not choke on multi-GB files, and solid regex Find+Replace support (including over those multi-GB files), TextWrangler is an amazing piece of software that Just Works©. Combined with an alias[1] in my terminal, it's been such a productivity boost.

[1] On OSX (can give it either a directory or file argument):

  alias tw='open -a /Applications/TextWrangler.app'
  tw /path/I/want/opened/

VSCode does this as well, per project. It works really well.

I've guessed you mention about autosave feature like SublimeText, but I tried TexAdept and found only Save session at the File Menu, it's not autosave, just save the sessions by hand

This does give me some SciTE nostalgia from my programming in the early 2000s. That Scintilla look is really distinctive in some way, which is sort of surprising given how little there is to it -- I saw that first screenshot and immediately knew which editor component was being used.

(Granted "you can use Lua!" is always a hint.)

Yes,SciTE! And if I remember correctly they had a non-monospace font with weird italics as a default. I always thought "How can the first impression of an awesome editor be so bad?"

I adore Gtk2 look and feel. Oh, why you had to go, Gtk2, why? Gtk 2 had a soul, and Gtk 3 feels like it wants to scream "hey, I'm like macOS, but free!"

This is off-topic, but IMO the biggest failure of GNOME 3 is that it called itself GNOME 3. Sure it was mostly the same community working on a similar project. But they could have used a new name, and made it a separate offering! GNOME2 had basically completed its mission. It was stable and consistent and had many happy users. But when a "GNOME 3" exists, people are force-upgraded. Except it feels more like a separate product than an "upgrade".

In fact GNOME 2 lives on but strangely that project had to re-brand itself as MATE: http://mate-desktop.org/.

Gtk2 and GNOME 2 did the same thing to all the happy users of GNOME1/Gtk1.2. It was a community upheaval with big consequences.

I think your Gtk2/Gtk3 gripe is the same. If the goals are different enough, let's please let the projects live happily in parallel.

Ideally this should happen, but with limited man power and motivation, maintaining multiple huge code bases in parallel is something only big corps can hope to do. That's why in open source the old code is forked and carried forward by someone else, if it is worth it.

I'm a happy MATE user. Uses less resources than Unity or GNOME 3, but is more feature-full and polished than XFCE or other small desktop environments.

They depends entirely on the theme you use.

Not terribly impressed. I have been working on a 148MiB HTML file the last couple of days, and opening it with textadept was quick enough but it basically hangs when scrolling around.

Notepad++ handles it without any major problems. VS Code almost does, sometimes it has crashed on closing a tab with the file open. Emacs I should not even try... (Wow: spacemacs asked me to "open literally" and the performance is really good! Nice!)

Emacs is a fast, minimalist, and extensible cross-platform text editor.

Fast, unless you happen to have very very long lines and word wrap enabled.

Syntax highlighting in very large files is what kills it for me. I usually open very very large files in literal mode to avoid lag

Minimalist? Really now.

Well, it depends on what you compare it with. IDEA, Visual Studio, Eclipse, you know. Of course, comparing to nano and nvi, Emacs isn't so much minimalist - but hey, did you ever try to run Emacs with no elisp packages?

Comparing Emacs with ed is a point in ed's favor, sure.

Ditto Emacs and Notepad, or nano.

Comparing Emacs with anything else is more likely to look favorable to Emacs.

It's basically a Lisp machine runtime that happens to include a built-in text editing window.

Compared to the likes of Visual Studio, Eclipse, or Sublime, though, it's certainly minimalist. The typical "Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping" joke is a bit quaint nowadays.

Out of curiosity, how do you end up with a 148 MB HTML file?

Seriously @sandos, what are you working on there ? I want in

goldenmean.info

I'm pleasantly surprised. Just created a simple C file in Windows - the editor identified the file type, compiled it and showed the output in the split view. I might actually keep this piece of software for smaller jobs.

Compiled it with what compiler?

I have GCC in my $PATH.

> the editor identified the file type, compiled it and showed the output

It sounds dangerous to do that silently and by default. What if the program in that state happens to do something destructive?

I had to explicitly press "Compile", and then "Run". It did exactly what I asked it to do.

They got me at split view. I use gedit on both windows and Linux, one thing that is missing is the split view. From time to time i need to see to documents at the same time.

Side note: gedit lost me on their last version with the hamburger menu. Those sub menus makes it impossible to navigate.

Split view was actually one of the things that initially hooked me with emacs many years ago. You can split any number of times and resize, it works in GUI and text mode, and it's instant.

If I remember correctly, that was one of the "killer features" of WordPerfect back in the days, something WordStar didn't have.

Things I loved about TextAdept:

Aside from it being lightweight, you can also run it in the terminal and use the same standard shortcuts whilst in the terminal: ctrl + s, ctrl + c, etc. I mention this in case anyone missed it in the front page.

I was using it for D development, and I can't remember off the top of my head, but I remember being able to compile with TextAdept. I think at most I told it how to compile and then off I went. I saw there was a D plugin that added more features but I don't believe I ever used it.

I really like Lua and hacking things in Lua, so this editor looks like its what I need. But there is one show stopper, that I have no idea how to avoid: scrolling horizontally on my Mac is terrible slow, and I have lots of files with long lines..

The author and the communtity around it is great, all questions that I had have been answered quickly. So every few months or so I download the newest package and look if anyting has changed meanwile.

Just curious, did you file a bug report for this?

Yes, I've had an exchange with the author about this, and he said, it might be possible to tweak this, but his is buried in some obsucure configuration.

What kind of file have such long lines? Have you considered a text editor that can wrap lines?

Data files and source code. Sure I have considered using line wrap, but I don't like it.

I've always avoided this by formatting source code to fit in 80 chars, using "long" data format where possible, and just not editing big data files interactively (I use sed or awk).

Depending on how long the lines are, wrapping may turn out to be a pain in the neck because (part of) one or two lines take up the entire pane. So, though wrapping long lines works sometimes, it genuinely is impractical at other times. Also, like the other poster says, it's a matter of preference too. If someone likes to edit a line while having an eye on the lines below and above it, wrapping doesn't help.

For another Lua based editor checkout howl.io

No official support for Mac yet... Interesting anyways, thanks

See https://github.com/howl-editor/howl/issues/68#issuecomment-1... for instructions to build on OSX. The issues have since been ironed out afaik, but I haven't tested recently.

Can it print yet? Last I looked, it could not.

Any reason there's no Win64 version?

Looks like the site is down, currently.

I don't see a module for git support (and it's kind of difficult to search for); am I missing something?

You miss Magit I suppose.

Or fugitive. I kind of expect some kind of support for git from a extendable coding editor. I've found a generic VCS module BTW.

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