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Comment by petepete | Hacker News Reader

It's at 0.3, cut them some slack.

This is kind of a problem in that it reduces the number of potential early users, testers and ultimately contributors. Sure it is still early in its development process, but it is important work to do in order to gain traction.

As a non-native English speaker who speaks 4 languages, I have almost never found myself using any other language than English in a code editor or IDE. And I never seen anyone who did, except for very occasional editing of localisation data files.

I have seen used (mainly in comments): Japanese, French, German, Dutch, Chinese (don't know if it was TC or SC; if those are even different unicode ranges or whether they are differentiated by font), and, if I remember correctly, Afrikaans. It's also kinda funny and a little off-putting to see English keywords side-by-side with, like, Dutch variable names.

I'm not going to criticize them but being able to type with my keyboard is pretty high in my list of requirements for a text editor :D

Indeed, navigating keyboard internationalization is a rabbit hole within a time-sink. Luckily, in most cases, you can just plop in a library, and it works, but it's probably not that simple here. All the wtf edge cases, plus the quirks of different operating systems and hardware manufacturers—it's the stuff of nightmares.

An alternative way of looking at this: a text editor's main job is to turn keys pressed into characters to be inserted in the document and commands to be executed.

So what? It isn’t claiming to be ready, for its main job or otherwise.

I do not see any indication of its "not-readiness" anywhere in the README https://github.com/lapce/lapce or their website: https://lapce.dev/

So while it isn't claiming to be ready, their content does not tell otherwise. Yes, the version is 0.3, but Neovim is at 0.9.

Says pre alpha right at the very top of the website.

Oh, you're right, it's there right above the title "Lightning-fast and Powerful Code Editor". I swear they added that after my post ;)

> Yes, the version is 0.3, but Neovim is at 0.9.

I would argue that that's a fault on neovim's side; I'm sure there's a reason, but I would call it 1.x software.

Oh, that's to be version-comparable to Emacs, which is at version 29. Vim being at 9 is just way too optimistic!

duck and run

Keyboard handling is so fundamental that a text editor must deal with it, perfectly, from the beginning. The cited issues aren't merely a severe and high impact bug cluster, but also an inexcusable design defect that disqualifies the whole project; I suppose someone decided to use Rust despite the lack of sufficiently mature input handling libraries.

> Keyboard handling is so fundamental that a text editor must deal with it, perfectly, from the beginning.

That would be nice but in reality it's such a tricky and subtle problem that nobody does it perfectly. All the operating systems and browsers are buggy in different ways, nevermind anything with smaller budgets. The deeper you get into proper text handling, the more you will realize that nobody has solved it.

Perfection is unlikely, but serious developers should aim to be less buggy than the competition and/or limited by operating system and hardware shortcomings.

Handling dead keys and displaying national characters is solved problem and has been since MS-DOS times. It's really not that "tricky and subtle problem" in 2023. Unless one is inventing keyboard handling from scratch again.

That's a very strong opinion about a project that is at 0.3 and is attending to many simultaneous problems, including building their own UI solution.

It's certainly an issue, especially for non-English users, but it doesn't "disqualify the whole project"; it just means that's not what they're prioritising at this time.

Prioritising glamorous and interesting aspects like plugins and "their own UI solution" over boring correctness is not the way to deliver a good text editor.

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