TextAdept | Hacker News Reader

TextAdept

orbitalquark.github.io

89 pointsTomte31 comments

TextAdept has been around for ages. It's a great lightweight editor.

However, it is missing a lot of features I've grown used to in (arguably more baroque) editors like Emacs, Helix and VS Code. Mostly stuff that builds on LSP.

When I last tried it (admittedly almost two years ago), it didn't have Rust syntax support at all and I couldn't get LSP (which has a plugin module made by the main developer at https://github.com/orbitalquark/textadept-lsp) to work at all.

I'd be interested to hear if anyone tried it more recently and has had a better experience.

It does support Rust syntax in the current version. It seems to have an LSP module but I haven't tested it.

How has your experience with Helix been?

Rather good, once you get used to the key bindings. Language server integration is very good and I love how I can use it without any custom configuration.

My list of “minimal features I need from a text editor” has grown over the years, to include things like multi-caret edit. It’s amazing how something conceptually as simple as “editing text” has grown so powerful and complex over the years.

This one looks good, hopefully the default keybindings match the ones already wired in my brain.

Whadda u use multi caret for?

Changing multiline tabs in python.

What does that mean? If it means indenting several lines almost every editor supports that with a selection and tab key.

Could explain what you mean by that?

You select the lines, then hit the tab key. All lines are indented, rather than being replaced by a tab character.

How you remove the tabs? Hitting backspace would clear the selected lines.

    Shift + Tab

Well today it was “add a comma at the end of every line in this block” and “replace this word and the next instance of it with this other word”.

It’s just nice to be able to select a bunch of stuff (multiple ways to do that) and then do the same thing to all selections at once (including things like arrow keys to move all the carets at once).

What DON’T you use multiple cursors for??

- formatting lists - renaming (sets of) variables - changing function signatures - turning lists into commands (eg git status > copy list of modified files > cursor at beginning of line > black … > paste back into terminal)

It’s incredibly useful, and significantly more intuitive (for me) than writing a macro or a regex replace

Never heard of this before, but I just loaded War and Peace using it and the scrolling and typing speed are rather sluggish (although loading speed was good). Sublime Text doesn't sweat a bit. Same as my Qt C++ block editor. The War and Peace text is 3.3MB running on a 2017 MacBook Air.

I love that War and Peace is still the canonical “lots and lots of text” sample for testing these sorts of things

Interesting. I can see two (perhaps a bit unorthodox) uses for this.

1. As an Emacs-lite on some server I have access to, but don't want to install full Emacs on for some reasons. Currently I use Zile for that. And yes, I know about TRAMP but I have reasons not to use it.

2. As a toy editor for my 7yo son to learn/practice typing on a computer/basic text editing. Currently I just fire up Emacs for him (what else?;-)), but it's easy for him to accidentally press something with unexpected results (and then daddy has to C-/ and/or C-h l). Here, I could probably make a whitelist of possible operations.

I can think of many alternatives for both though.

I do not see what it would have over zile for an Emacs user, or over a number of others for a non-emacs user (I mostly use micro these days).

Another small, minimalist Lua-based text editor is Lite[1], and it's much less "light" cousin Lite-XL[2]

1: https://github.com/rxi/lite

2: https://github.com/lite-xl/lite-xl

I want to replace Notepad++ with a better but still lightweight tool. NPP is clunky (weird text search, file explorer view via plugin is still weird etc). This looks promising at least from features and screenshots.

Give Sublime Text a try.

Geany is very good in that niche.

Right out of the box, with a completely empty buffer, the app's canvas is much wider than the window, so it presents a horizontal scrollbar. Even at maximum width (1920), it horizontally scrolls! This is an absolute dealbreaker for me — it's just far too inconvenient to have to wrestle with text escaping the viewport all the time.

Not sure if it actually is, but the editor widget looks like a wrapper of SCIntilla...

Source code says yes:

https://github.com/orbitalquark/textadept/blob/default/src/t...

So people flagged a correct guess (that's it's a SCIntilla wrapper) and are OK with the public incorrect claim on the webpage (that "the editor consists of less than 2000 lines of C and C++ code, and less than 4000 lines of Lua code.", really meaning "the editor consists of less than 2000 lines of C and C++ code as glue on top of the 30K+ SCIntilla editor codebase").

And I was wondering where your comment went...

how does it compare to vim?

all new "simple, crossplatform" text editors must have an argument for them in a world where vim exists already, and has for decades

"simple"?

just installed on arch. looks nice. needs some better syntax highlightning though

I’m not dropping Emacs for it, but I’m pleased to see another designed for extensibility editor.

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