Comment by tomc1985 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tomc1985 | Hacker News Reader

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A longer version of my first comment originally admitted that Notepad's tech stack probably looks a lot like Xray's....

But then I would bet the Notepad engineers didn't wag their dicks on a blog post telling the world how special they are because they figured out how to make the Win32 message pump performant....

I'm happy they're finally treating Electron performance seriously... oh wait, they aren't! Just writing the hard parts in Rust instead :/

It would seem Electron adds far more complexity to projects than its adopters are lead to believe.

Perhaps I am biased against Electron and web-tech-on-the-desktop but there are far better ways to skin this particular cat, to say nothing of the fact that it has already been skinned a thousand times before.

Does the world really need another extensible text editor?

Editing large pieces of text efficiently is a Hard Problem, especially collaboratively without conflicts.

In the case of editors like Xi and XRay, they use CRDTs, which doesn't look anything like how Notepad would represent text.

There's real work here that's actually useful, it's not just "another extensible text editor".

I have never, even once, in my nearly-20-year career had the desire to collaboratively edit a single, specific text file.

Isn't collaboration without conflicts what version control systems are made to do?

I even think it would be annoying if someone would just move cursor around when I edit something. And there definitely would be conflicts if they would try to edit the file at the same time. Who needs this feature?

The way it generally works is that each user has their own cursor.

Google Docs gives everyone their own cursors

Proof by personal experience isn't all that convincing. Maybe you've never done pair programming, but other people have.

If you really need to collaborate on the same file, can't you just share a session in tmux?

>> Does the world really need another extensible text editor?

People said that when Sublime was released

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