What is in a modern code editor? | Hacker News Reader

What is in a modern code editor?

blog.meain.io

39 pointsmeain5 comments

Today I was very excited after installing Helix. I gave it a try and loved it. I liked the default theme, the select-before-action approach for editing text, the file chooser, too many good things out of the box. Then, I downloaded elixir-ls and started to notice some flaws. The LSP worked great after installing it. However, after a few minutes it stopped working, it just showed an error message. On the other hand, elixir-ls complained about "Elixir sources not found (checking in /home/build/elixir)". I did not find anything about that error message, maybe the LSP or Helix are "too new" for finding workarounds (keep in mind that the latest version of elixir-ls is v0.12).

I like to play with new toys. However, it's hard to find solutions for novel tech, though.

Nice round up

Something I think would be useful would be to stop trying to distinguish any meaning between “text/code editor” and “IDE”. Those 2 distinctions don’t really work today because modern editors have pretty much everything an IDE would have.

It’s an anachronism from a time when text editors really did very little but edit text, most of the modern ones today have debuggers, intellisense, syntax highlighting, code lenses and plugins as standard.

Language servers also changed the architecture even more by moving the heavy lifting somewhere else and being able to plug back into any UI.

It’s much more of a blurred line today.

On the other hand, I'd like very much for this distinction to continue, so I could continue steering clear of the IDEs :)

Looking up docs: While you can look up docs outside the editor in your browser, it makes it much faster and easier to look up docs within your editor

Yes, being able to look up .info manuals in Emacs is so useful.

Emacs is so good at it that it has 5 different options, eshell, term, shell, vterm and eat.

6, actually: while you should never use it, Emacs has ansi-term.

Woops, forgot that. Let me add it to the list.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com