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Comment by modernerd | Hacker News Reader

I just want a fast programmable text editor with a native GUI and good defaults.

But that seems really tough to find, for some reason.

Zed is so close, but I’d much rather see a focus on the “programmable” part and let the AI and collaboration features emerge later out of rich extensibility (i.e. as plugins, perhaps even paid plugins) than have them built-in behind a sign-in and unknown future pricing model.

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In the case of Zed it was always inevitable, a text editor doesn't raise >$10M in venture capital unless there's a plan to stuff it full of premium subscription features.

Warp Terminal is a similar story, >$50M in funding for a terminal emulator of all things...

What I'd give to have a look at the roadmaps to see how they hope to 10x/100x VC investments with a text editor and terminal.

Just look at Postman.

Postman’s success seems almost inevitable in hindsight. Look at how many tutorials involve curl at some point, and Postman was “curl with a GUI”.

The funny thing is Atom was the origin story of Zed, written in some C++ and a lot of Coffeescript exactly so it could be very programmable.

Also, Spacemacs? It's technically a terminal but definitely has a lot of UI features. Very programmable.

> I just want a fast programmable text editor with a native GUI and good defaults.

It's called TextAdept. Much of it is itself built on its own Lua extensibility story, which runs on a fairly compact C core. Both native GUI and terminal versions, using the same user config (keybinds etc). Linux, Mac OS, Windows builds. LSP support built in. Plenty of community-produced extensions around (but of course not as vast a range as VSCode's VSX eco-system furnishes).

https://orbitalquark.github.io/textadept/

Sublime Text is likely closer to what you're looking for.

I retry it every now and then and miss the easy extensibility of Neovim. Can we build something that marries both worlds?

RIP Onivim 2, it was so close to this niche.

By we you mean anybody besides you? Complain-driven development.

Happy to try building one to free you from complaint-driven motivation.

Please do. Editors and IDEs need new ideas.

Is VSCode out for some reason? I don’t care for the defaults for some language plugins, but it seems easier to ship VSCode config than to build a whole editor.

I think the VSCode config is just JSON on disk and I believe you can install plugins on the CLI. You could probably have a bash or Python script do the setup pretty easily.

Edit: responded before coffee, missed the “native GUI”; please disregard

To be fair, you can turn off all the AI stuff with a single config.

"assistant": { "enabled": false, }

It doesn't mean your code is NOT being uploaded somewhere. They could add an easy switch to use the editor 'offline', not that they have to. I'll go back to Helix.

> I just want a fast programmable text editor with a native GUI and good defaults.

What would that be for each OS?

Linux: Kate (at least if using KDE; which one would it be for GTK / Gnome?)

macOS: TextMate?

Windows: Notepad++?

For GNOME, the project's native text editor is: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-text-editor

It is significantly less featureful than Kate or your other apps though.

I use Kate on Windows as well.

I really love the Documents Tree plugin and could never go back to old style tabs.

notepad++ without plugins is there for linux

NotepadNext – a cross-platform reimplementation of Notepad++ | Hacker News https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39854182

Can also recommend CotEditor for macOS as a Notepad++ replacement. Don't know how "programmable" it is or what even falls under that label.

macOS: BBEdit now and forever.

BBEdit Doesn’t Suck!

> with a native GUI

This means 100x more effort in the long run for a cross platform editor. Maybe if developers lived for 200 years, this could be possible. Will need to solve human ageing problem before the cross platform "native GUI" problem.

For a text editor UI, it really isn't quite so challenging: see Sublime Text, or TextAdept, and others mentioned across this sub-thread.

What are the benefits of having a "native GUI" that terminal interface cannot substitute?

Extensibility of neovim or emacs covers all my text editor use cases.

Neovim and Emacs extensibility are great!

Native GUIs offer far better accessibility (TUIs are not screen-reader accessible, and neither is Emacs' GUI currently), hugely improved UI flexibility and consistent developer APIs (Emacs GUI is inconsistent across platforms and tricky to work with, every Neovim plugin reinvents ways to draw modals/text input because there's no consistent API), reduced redraw quirks, better performance, better debugging (as a Neovim plugin dev I don't want to spend time debugging user reports that relate to the user's choice of terminal emulator this week and not to Neovim or my plugin code).

The monetary incentives are not in your (and my) favor.

If a motivated solo dev thought there might be at least 10,000 people who would pay 100 USD a year for a text editor with better extensibility and performance than VS Code and better defaults/richer GUI APIs than vim/Emacs, I can see why it might be tempting for them to try.

I would also cast my vote for sublime text. The performance is amazing, the defaults are great and the extensions cover a lot of the use cases

What does “native GUI” mean?

I understood it as not a wrapped web application, like Electron or Tauri based applications.

Using the same platform-specific graphics API the OS vendor builds their GUI apps with, ideally, but I'll also settle for "not a TUI, not a web application shipped as a desktop app, even if the OS vendor currently builds their GUI apps as web applications shipped as desktop apps".

A GUI that uses native controls and platform UI conventions with the native behavior expected on the given platform, or a near-indistinguishable equivalent of that.

Not electron

What's your current text editor and what's wrong with it?

If something is "so close," probably just use it.

I don't know of a single modern desktop application that is deploying front-ends simultaneously in WinUI 3, AppKit, and GTK.

Emacs? (I don't have any WinUI 3 machines so can't verify, but does support GTK and AppKit if built with such support).

Not Firefox?

There's two ways to make extensions to Zed, providing context for AI. In the post they show off making a Rust -> WASM based extension and also mention a server based model. There's also a third option -- Zed is open source. You don't have to use their auth, it just makes collaboration easy.

> Extensions can add the following capabilities to Zed: Languages, Themes, Slash Commands

This is a great start but it's far from what most would accept as "programmable" or richly extensible.

we call the latter a "Context Server", basically any process that communicates via JSON-RPC over stdio can do it. documentation for that is here: https://zed.dev/docs/assistant/context-servers

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