Pragtical: Practical and pragmatic code editor
pragtical.dev
pragtical.dev
This editor claims to be lightweight, citing that it uses 30MB of RAM. But I assume that's without any extensions loaded.
Back in the day, though, one joke about Emacs was that it's an acronym for Eight Megabytes All Continuously Swapping. This was meant to highlight Emacs's reputation for bloat. Right now when I run Emacs it's using a lot more than 30, let alone eight. I'm pretty sure most of that is all the modes I have installed for every language I might ever use, regardless of whether I'm actually using it right now.
About 15 years back Visual Studio had a reputation for bloat, but my experience was that it was actually quite lightweight and snappy, especially compared to Eclipse and IntelliJ. Until you install ReSharper, which transformed it into 50 tons of molasses.
At work, Visual Studio Code currently consumes about 1GB of RAM and takes 5+ minutes to start up. On my personal computer, a 2013 MacBook, it uses more like 50MB and starts darn near instantaneously. But they're very different beasts; on my MacBook I've got it configured to only load the plugins I need for each project. At work we've got a whole dang Devcontainer that includes configuration to load I-don't-know-how-many extensions, basically anything anyone on the team has ever wanted. The devcontainer extension makes you put the list of extensions to load into a file that needs to be checked into source control. So the only way for someone to get this tool they want is to make everyone else get it, too. All to sling a relatively modest volume of Python code.
And of course if I try to opt out of all of that I make my life even harder. Trying to get by without that pile of crap is just spitting in the wind. Run-time requirements aren't documented; they're shoved into an undocumented and ever-growing list of Bash commands in the Dockerfile. Coding standards aren't documented or managed with something straightforward like Git hooks; they're enforced through a plugin and its configuration.
I do remember when vscode was lightweight. It happened to be a time when not many plugins were available. That put a hard limit on just how much bloat you could accomplish. But, of course, as soon as it got popular people started creating plugins for darn near everything.
Perhaps the problem isn't the editors. Perhaps it's us.
Installing multiple programs on my computer or a server is complicated, and slows things down, and it's insecure and hard to replicate. So we created VMs. And for a while VMs were great. But then we started putting everything we needed in the VMs, and they also became complicated, and slow, and insecure and whatnot. So we have containers. And containers are now slowly getting bloated too. Kubernetes simplified some things, but now we need Helm to deal with K8s, and Helm itself is now quite complicated.
Editors start lightweight and fast, then get bloated with features. So does productivity software. Programming languages start simple and easy to use and understand, and progressively get more features, each of which seems nice in isolation, but soon the codebases use everything, and it interacts, and you need decades of experience to use it all proficiently.
Same for libraries. For network protocols. For standards of all kinds.
It's most definitely us.
Just for clarification, do you mean 50 GiB or 50 MiB? I'm assuming MiB in this scenario, since allocating 50 GiB doesn't mix with an instantaneous startup.
For coming up on a decade I've used Vim with a minimal .vimrc and no plugins. The only time I deviate from this is when I am writing in an s-expression based language. I would probably deviate from this to write Java or C#, but I haven't written either in a while.
There are upsides and downsides. The biggest upside is simply that I haven't spent ANY time learning new editors or new editor features; I'll occasionally learn about a feature of Vim that I didn't know existed, but that's very oriented toward solving immediate problems, because it tends to happen when I run into something that feels like there's probably an easier way to do it, and I'll do a quick internet search. I think a lot of devs spend a lot of time learning tools with the sense that the time spent will be paid back by time savings from using the tools, but the reality is way more hit-and-miss, and I think a lot of people could benefit from being more selective in what they spend their learning time on.
The thing that Vim completely misses is being able to jump to the appropriate file where a class/function is defined. This is more of a tradeoff than IDE folks recognize: when I was using PyCharm/IntelliJ/ReSharper, I found that being able to jump around easily would hide the fact that my projects were growing in size and complexity. The tooling makes this less painful up front, but eventually, you still feel the pain, because eventually there's some bug that cascades through a bunch of files, and you still have to reason about all of them. Finding definitions isn't the core issue with having a lot of definitions, reasoning about how they interact is the core issue, and the IDE tooling doesn't solve that. Being in Vim and having to deal with my project's file structure directly and explicitly means I feel the pain of complexity earlier, when it's easier to fix.
If I'm being honest, I'm not sure that the tradeoffs comes out in Vim's favor here. I don't think we get to have a conclusive answer because there's simply nobody who uses both vanilla Vim and the best IDEs at a high enough level to have an informed opinion about which is better. I'd say I am close because I have used both extensively, but my IDE knowledge is outdated by about a decade.
But, I've said before and I'll say again that entering text into files isn't usually the limiting factor of software development speed. If I'm mentoring a new programmer I'd rather see them learn TDD and/or how to leverage type systems and write code in Notepad, than see them write untested, unchecked code in The Best IDE/Editor Ever. Of course, there's no reason to go to those extremes.
It makes learning and navigating a new codebase much easier. So much so that it doesn't really require IDE tooling the way it does with most mainstream languages. It's harder to get lost when you always know which way is up. Consciously thinking about whether you're doing top-down or bottom-up design also flows naturally from this, for the same reason, and that seems to encourage more thoughtful, readable code design.
Is it more work? Up-front, yes, absolutely. In the long run, though? By the time I finished my first year of CS education I had already been exposed to many many examples of cases where greedy algorithms consistently produce sub-optimal results. Perhaps they aren't teaching people about that in school anymore.
EDIT: The wonderful book Crafting Interpreters has an implementation of backpatching jumps to implement loops. Before anyone says "this is an interpreter, not a compiler", be aware that most modern interpreters contain a compiler. https://craftinginterpreters.com/jumping-back-and-forth.html
Actually liked language a lot, thought it could replace Python as top level AI/ML tool
We don't actually need to speculate on this. Don Syme has explicitly said that this was a deliberate language design decision meant to discourage the big ball of mud antipattern. And the language maintainers continue to cite this as the reason why they don't change this behavior even though they easily could.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/fsharp/language-ref...
ctags+cscope in vim is great at this!
:cs f e <expression>That is a good point. Having IDE features like auto-import, jump to definition, etc., definitively allow for a more messy project structure.
Still, I always wonder how big projects people advocating "no IDE features" actually have worked on (or alternatively - if they are some sort of memory savants). One thing is a small-medium sized personal project. Another is a 10-20 man cooperation where you have only written a portion of the code, and a big chunk of that is a long time since you written. IMO that require lots of code reading, which is very painful without jump to definition... I don't really see how a perfect project organization could sufficiently remove that reading friction.
Writing extensions in Lua is huge. (Same as OBS) Looks very simple and productive.
It's one of the main reasons I've stuck to Sublime... extending with Python is very easy and works everywhere.
Even if both Zed and VSCode are strong in other areas.. Rust extensions makes me cringe (a build toolchain? ugh..) VSCode's inconsistent undocumented Javascript API is a pain in the butt (paste & pray driven development).
Will be keeping an eye on this.
It's so bad they have a whole Github Copilot mode specifically dedicated to it. Pay and pray driven development.
Or Tcl, which I used 20 years ago as for our in-house proxy module for Apache/IIS, extensible in C and Tcl.
Unfortunely out of fashion for anyone besides EDA tooling.
Both are super easy to sync to multiple computers with chezmoi and the configs themselves can be smart enough to behave differently on different machines.
I wish more software used Lua for config.
I really liked Lite XL but back when I looked at it it was a challenge to understand it’s API and functionality.
Looking forward to give this a spin!
I used to like having different projects open in different windows and easily differentiate between them with their color schemes. Kinda like setting a terminal to open with a random color profile
It seems like vscode and sublime want to change the scheme across all the windows.
I suppose it could just be some security crap Corp IT installed on my laptop preventing it from installing.
It looks like it's only taking up 7.9MB in my Applications folder so it must be corrupt or something.
``` cd /Applications/DBeaver.app/; ls -@l ```
And then if you see some extended attributes like quarantine and provenance, you can remove them
``` xattr -d com.apple.provenance DBWeaver.app/; xattr -d com.apple.quarantine DBWeaver.app/ ```
I've got this wrong in the past by adding the README too late in the process. Once I'd fixed that, the reason macOS gives for not opening my app became that Apple can't check it for malicious software. Much better... I think? The right click/open workaround does work.
`xattr -r -d com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Pragtical.app`
-d is delete -r is recursive
Hopefully, Apple won't lock it down further.
[0] https://github.com/pragtical/pragtical/issues/6#issuecomment...
I thought for a while that TextMate bundles[1] were that, especially since JetBrains[2], Linguist[3] and VSCode[4] honor them. However, in the spirit of "the good thing about standards ..." highlight.js does[5] almost the same thing that Pragtical does which makes me feel even worse
I had high hopes for Tree-Sitter since it seems to have really won mindshare, but the idea of having an executable grammar spec[6] is ... well, no wonder it hasn't caught on outside of that specific ecosystem
1: https://github.com/rspec/rspec.tmbundle/blob/1.1.12/Syntaxes...
2: https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community/blob/idea/24...
3: https://github.com/github-linguist/linguist/blob/v7.30.0/lib...
4: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-textmate
5: https://github.com/highlightjs/highlight.js/blob/11.10.0/src...
6: https://github.com/tree-sitter/tree-sitter/blob/v0.22.6/test...
It seems really lightweight: the UI is spartan but snappy, loading a file is instantaneous, etc. Downloading and installing a plugin is as easy as dropping a Lua file into a directory. And even after installing several plugins, the speed doesn't seem affected.
On the other hand, it comes with hardly any feature out of the box, and everything must be covered by plugins. The plugins are really "atomic". For example, one is to auto-indent, another one to auto-format a block; one is to highlight the matching bracket a second one to jump to the matching bracket, and a third one to automatically insert the closing bracket, while yet another one draws rulers to visualize the block between matching brackets. Do you want to set markers and jump between then? another plugin. Build from within the editor? another plugin. And so on...
The plugin "store" looks good, but accessing it from inside the editor is a poor experience: sometimes it just hungs and you have to restart the editor. Additionally the fact that plugins, themes and fonts are all mixed up doesn't make it easy to find what you're looking for.
Final judgement: if I need to select and install 10 to 15 plugins just to make it on par with a stock Vim, I'll stay with the latter.
I have been using Flet (basically multilingual binding for Flutter) to build GUIs the last year or so, and in general the experience has been very good.
However, I've recently started work on a project that has need for a large number of controls--on the order of 2000 controls visible at one time--and I'm running into Flet's limitations. All the Flet controls have animations, which creates a good default experience when there's a few of them, but when you're using 2000 of them, simply passing your mouse over an area with a bunch of controls causes a cascade of small animations and the renderer explodes. Impressively, it usually doesn't seem to cause any performance lag, but it seems like the way they avoid lag is just by dropping the animations half-rendered which causes the window to flash all sorts of broken half-rendered gobbledygook to the screen. My approach has been to turn off animations as much as possible, but there are enough controls visible at any one time that even just rendering the without animations is running into issues.
I'll probably just deal with it for my first version--the core functionality is about number crunching and the user base is used to using much worse UIs--but I'm looking at lower-level tooling that can still remain cross-platform. In this post I'm seeing that Pragtical is advertising that they're written with SDL and I'm seeing some similarities between a code editor and what I'm doing, so it seems like that might be the solution to my problem.
First, the ARM version, when I tried to launch it, had MacOS say it was damaged. Only option was to move it to the trash.
The Universal option did work, but when I tried to open a standard .c file, it crashes. It is fast though and fairly slick looking. But needs work.
You can change the UI font size in Settings / User Interface / Font (double click to edit).
My main objection was "smooth scrolling" which I could turn off as "scroll transition". Bit annoying you can't search settings though. Don't know why I am looking at it though because I value the higher level things new editors will always be missing e.g. refactoring, debugging, test integration, advanced panel management and a million extensions I forget I rely on everyday.
Honestly that's not an issue, I would personally not base my judgment on memory usage, unless it is a memory hog.
I know others do but for reasons that go beyond practical. For those that have things to get done, I suspect they think like I do.
Please don't pass judgement on my preferences or whether they are practical. IntelliJ uses multiple GB of ram. Teams uses most of a gig. My browser uses a couple gigs. Docker containers eat a lot of it. When I am multitasking and everything is a memory hog, I'm forced to choose between using lighter-weight tooling and continually opening and closing apps. Using lighter-weight tooling is the practical choice.
I will be trying this!
void *p = malloc(30 * 1024 * 1024);Generally, a program on disk contains code. Part of that is the description of certain structures. Say you have an editor which can load a file, you have to have structures to hold that file, to keep track of the undo history, to represent the file with colours (syntax highlighting) and whatever. Your editor may have a Lua VM inside running plugins that you load. That VM will reserve additional memory to run those plugins. And so on.
All that only exists while the program is running, but not on disk.
Hrm, I was hoping it would run all in the browser.
Cool idea nevertheless!
like Monaco? Or a proper fully featured text editor?
I'm sure there are some here on HN that will say "nah, I prefer the old fashioned way" but you will be decidedly in the minority very fast.
Even now, I've built a ramen profitable side project mostly by sipping my coffee and approving Cursor's suggestions. 10x faster at least.
Way more productivity gains than even language support.
Consider LSP, where language developers can now publish a single tool for language specific utilities, where before every editor needed to add support for languages separately. Again, pluggability.
Whether it's an extension or "AI first", the impact of AI on IDE's will be massive and an IDE that doesn't do it well will be barely used.
Interesting to be told what I do and do not agree with.