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Comment by whats_a_quasar | Hacker News Reader

Just installed this on windows 10. First time I tried to open it the window hung for 3 minutes until I killed it. The second time, I couldn't reposition the window by clicking and dragging. Third time I loaded it, it hung again.

It's an exciting product pitch but isn't working for me. I see now that there's a "pre-alpha stage" disclaimer on the download page and wish that were in larger font.

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Not sure if you tried the installer or the portable version, but for me, running the latter required me to put it in a location where it had permissions to create the 'lapce-data' sub-folder. (And no, there was no sensible error message when that inevitably failed).

Having said that, there doesn't seem to be very much "there" there, right now. I managed to open a C# project using the 'csharp-ls' language server, but, other than suggesting some refactorings that I couldn't successfully apply, there wasn't much that indicated that this actually worked. Debugging certainly didn't.

It did load very fast, though, so that might make it worth checking out again in, oh, a year or so...

I guess it had a lapse.

Experience on Ubuntu: It opens, but double clicking the header doesn't make it expand. Then `Open Directory` doesn't do anything; no typing, no nothing. So close again, and open from command line with the directory as agument, works. Now I can't see my mouse.

My experience on Windows 11 wasn't as bad as yours, but I opened a small Rust project with Lapce (~20 files) and it uses 1400MB of RAM vs VS Code's 900MB, and has very noticeable latency when navigating the code and typing.

But like you said, it's pre-alpha, and I hope this project succeeds. I'm sure these issues are solvable. It's exciting to see Rust-based non-web UI libraries finally starting to become usable for reasonably complex apps.

Lapce cannot use that much of memory, it's most likely that Rust Analyzer has allocated majority of it.

My VS Code instance is also using Rust Analyzer.

Edit: I just disabled RA in both editors and restarted them. VSCode is now at 320MB and Lapce is at 770MB.

Edit 2: To be clear, my above comments are meant in the spirit of an informal bug report/feedback. I get that Lapce is a labor of love for its core developers, and I'm not shitting on it. In fact I think it's pretty impressive. I'm keeping an eye on it as something to potentially switch to once it matures a bit.

Portable version loaded instantly for me on Windows 10. Remote SSH functionality doesn't work at all unfortunately[1]. Would be nice to try out but I don't do any local dev.

1: https://github.com/lapce/lapce/issues/2985

Correction: Remote SSH works fine, we haven't reimplemented the remote file picker in new GUI toolkit but that can be workarounded by using `lapce` CLI and built-in terminal.

Cool - that works.

How is a project with 30,000 GH stars a pre-alpha stage project?

It boggles the mind. Good for the team building this, lots of respect entering this crowded and race to the bottom pricing product. But I don’t get how this differs from vs code or why someone would be excited about it. I get the feeling people like trying new editors so they throw stars around for every ide project they come across.

None of the features advertised beat neovim nor does it have the crazy plugin ecosystem.

People like their editor to be fast, work on more platforms, be open source, not being tied to Microsoft, etc.

Plenty of reasons why someone would choose Lapce over VS Code.

Probably because it says in Rust. In Rust we trust.

It doesn't work but it's memory safe in being non-functional

You can buy stars

Be a team of 3-4 people working in their spare time to maintain cross-platform native GUI FOSS project that people seem to like

No opinions on the editor itself yet, but just wanted to chime in here to say that I didn't have any such issues on Windows 10.

There are plenty of issues like this in Lapce (no support beyond qwerty layout for instance). Just go for Zed instead.

https://github.com/lapce/lapce/issues/945#issuecomment-12853...

How are they going to run Zed on Windows?

Isn't keyboard layout a function of the operating system? How is a usermode application supposed to support (or not support) different keyboard layouts?

For an editor whose differentiating factor appears to be "written in Rust", having a first-time user experience of crashing/hanging is unfortunate.

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