Hacker News Reader

Comment by stephenr | Hacker News Reader

I'd love to use a lighter (in terms of resources) editor like this, but after using IDEA (not for java - but it's the single Jetbrains tool that supports all other language packs) the editor in this feels like comparing a car to a bicycle.

Sure, the bicycle starts off quicker, and you feel so much quicker.

But that's where the benefits end, IMO. I just opened up a client project with this (that project is a mixture of php, sql, shell, and some client side browser code).

The symbol recognition compared to IDEA was pretty abysmal. Then I thought maybe I need to try the other way (i.e. find a usage of a symbol manually and then try to resolve it back to its definition).

That the find-in-files results are just another text view with paths in there is probably appealing to some people... me I'd rather you just let me open the file.

View on HN

I like IntelliJ a lot but it has some distractions that make me keep an eye on the Sublime/Vim/Neovim communities because I'd love to switch to something lighter and politer.

A couple of small examples in IntelliJ:

I see the “IDE Fatal Error” light flash about 5-10 times a day. It's quite hard to ignore and you have to dismiss it by opening a window soliciting feedback about what you were doing when the IDE exception occurred. I generally have no idea what caused the exception, so I usually leave the feedback field blank. It feels like being a mechanical turk for exception reports. (There's an 11-year-old YouTrack to auto-submit exceptions in case this annoys anyone else too: https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEABKL-5835 )

Most themes show a large number of stripe marks in the editor scroll area for errors, warnings, “weak warnings”, and more, which lights up the scrollbars for no good reason. You can turn these off in the preferences along with all of the other visual clutter. But I got so frustrated having to track all of those options down whenever I try a new JetBrains IDE that I ended up making a theme that reduces a lot of the visual noise by default, such as only showing stripe marks for errors: https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/14858-blackbird-theme

For the last point, you can double click on a line in the search result page and it will open the file for you. I have to admit I don't particularly enjoy this search UI either, it's rather unintuitive, plus somewhat annoying as well since when you do a new search, if you don't remember to close the search result page the new search results will be appended to the existing page, which isn't what I want most of the time.

Just deselect the "Use Buffer" button in the UI where you type the search, and results will then be shown in a more traditional panel at the bottom of the window.

I mean, the results do appear at the bottom of the search pane.

I wouldn't call dumping a stream of matches with 2+2 context lines into a pane like that 'traditional' in terms of search results.

If I wanted that kind of result, I'd use a command line.

Not really interested in your stream of complaints from iteratively exploring

Then, don't read them?

+1. Sublime is a fantastic lightweight text editor, but the version that I've used simply isn't an IDE. Excited to see what new features are in this one, though!

And on a Mac this is where I fail to see the market for it, particularly at $100.

If you just want something lightweight to open text files but still have some basic syntax highlighting, there are heaps of choices that are better Mac apps. I'd suggest any/all of these three (all of which happen to be OSS but that's not why I recommend them - I didn't actually realise until now that they all are)

- SubEthaEdit: https://subethaedit.net

- CotEditor: https://coteditor.com

- TextMate: https://macromates.com

In what ways are they better? Or just being more "native" in some way? I use sublime mostly because it has multiline editing and regexp find/replace, these seems to have it too, which is awesome.

(by the way, completely random question: do you happen to know a lightweight image editor on osx? I tried few and they were either not working, bad, or some combination of both; on windows I use Paint.NET which does all I need and is fast, quick to start, etc..)

Well they look/behave like regular macOS apps. It's very apparent that Sublime is a cross-platform app IMO. Even IDEA, which has a god damn java UI, manages to integrate better.

They also don't reduce everything to a literal screen of text (seriously, I hit Cmd-, in Sublime to see preferences, and just got an empty text screen... I guess I have to just work out what options it has by randomly trying stuff?).

The extent of my image editing needs on macOS is typically solved by either the "Markup" tool on an image, or Preview (i.e. highlighting/drawing attention to something on a image, and/or cropping an image).

If you want the same language treatment as say, VS Code, install the LSP plugin. It is the exact same thing

Reply on news.ycombinator.com