New year, same old plans
lighttable.com
lighttable.com
For example, I have yet to find any modern editor that draws inspiration from the brilliantly designed ideas used in Plan 9's 'sam' and 'acme' editors.
For example structured regexps, 3 button mouse chording, and the 'plumb' feature thats basically a context-aware, smarter version of a unix pipe between two executables.
I mean i can go on and on but another thing that i find absolutely annoying about newer editors is that they all use Webkit as the base of their apps core foundation.
This makes it irritating to consider trying to make changes to the code that I believe would overall improve the editor and make it more useful. (at least as far as im concerned)
I can literally make a list a mile long of things I like in other editors and wish i could see condensed into one ultimate code editor to supplant all code editors that had come before.
Does such a thing exist?
But I also wish plan9 got more awareness. Unix pipes are so useful that it’s a shame the plan9 paradigms have largely been ignored or reinvented.
Acme was different to the 'sam' editor and most other Plan 9 programs up to that point (aside from its predecessor, "help", a similar system that was replaced by acme).
Then you wouldn't be "taking your hands off the keyboard", you'd just be engaging in a different motion.
Not everybody agrees, of course.
BTW, does chording work well with mice where one of the ”three” buttons is the scrool wheel?
I can't, however, imagine left+middle chord on modern laptops, there are not that many laptops (mostly ThinkPads as far as I can tell) that have three physical mouse buttons.
So a proof that even that point needs better research. :)
Since we are on a Lisp thread, same applies to those that just bother with Emacs, eventually SLIME, withouth ever spending one second with actual Common Lisp IDEs.
"The Mesa Programming Environment"
http://www.digibarn.com/friends/curbow/star/XDEPaper.pdf
"The Cedar Programming Environment: A Midterm Report and Examination "
http://worrydream.com/refs/Teitelman%20-%20The%20Cedar%20Pro...
One of its strengths was discoverability. Jeff's son Aza iterated on a number of the ideas from the Cat with Enso and Ubiquity but those efforts were not specific to an editor.
This is the first time I hear about this. What make it better? How I learn more?
This has never given me an impression of a good UX.
A more discoverable UI may take a greater number of steps to perform. If the application is used rarely or briefly, that's a good trade-off. But if an application will be heavily used by a user who is incentivized to learn the tool, then their total productivity matters more since it amortizes over the lifetime of their use with the tool.
Text editors definitely fall into the "heavily used" bucket, so a good user experience might mean "you gotta read the manual, but once you do you can go 10x faster".
They're basic verbs you use to interact with text; not a full command. E.g instead of executing "format document" from a menu, you select the document with the left mouse button, and then middle click on the word "format". This executes the "format" command on the selected text. Somewhat like running gg=G in vim.
Aside from that I was a big LightTable fan and really enjoyed its inline instarepl and other features, so it is definitely great to see that LT is not completely forgotten! Kudos!
The project is dead [1][2] as of Jan 24, 2018.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16227130
[2] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/eve-talk/YFguOGkNrBo/E...
I think the same is true of Chris.
I just realized thats basically what we already do today: i use WebStorm and my webapp hot-reloads any code i type. If i wanted i could even rewind the app state. And when i enable JS debug in IDE its like inception and matrix-view combined, but surprisingly userfriendly still.
To easily try this with just about any IDE check out https://github.com/facebook/create-react-app
Many (five?) years later, from what I gather, LT has the eye-candy - the rest is perpetually "under construction". It would be hard for it to be anything else, though, as the main developers jumped ship a few years back to work on Eve (which, as a karmic retribution for all my crushed hopes for LT, also tanked and died recently).
Emacs may be less pretty than newer editors, and lots of its APIs are decades old at this point, but it's still the only self-documenting, easily discoverable and extensible editor this side of Pharo and Squeak, which can be used in practice (due to a giant amount of plugins which bring it up to modern standards) for almost any task.
TLDR: LightTable as a powerful editor for programmers is dead - it may be still possible to revive it, but its scope would have to be massively scaled down. It's not going to compete with Emacs & co. anymore, which is a shame, because when it started it had the potential for this.
The core GNU Emacs is quite a bit less lines of Emacs Lisp.
Do you have any idea how many lines of elisp/c the core is? And how gnarly it is? I've read some stories.
IIRC Emacs' C code numbers ~300kloc and includes both bindings to low-level, systems and GUI functionality, some parts of standard Elisp library (writen in C for performance), as well as Elisp virtual machine, byte-compiler and so on. No JIT yet, but at least there's threading support (take that JS :P).
Starting from scratch has many advantages, but it doesn't really work with programs and systems large or complex enough. Otherwise we'd be using a fresh OS every five years instead of working on one of the 5-6 OSes which were all created 30+ years ago.