Flow – A Programmer's Text Editor | Hacker News Reader

Flow – A Programmer's Text Editor

flow-control.dev

43 pointscss_apologist19 comments

I have rarely ever seen a problem and thought to myself I need multiple cursors. I admit it's useful for data wrangling but programming?

What are people using it for? I would love to see some real world usage.

multiple cursor is basic editor 101.

programmer' text editor need to have it as bare minimum. otherwise, i would have to go to sublime or vscode for text editing and then I will wonder why should I bother with this editor.

Yes I get that its a basic requirement for some people. I am asking why.

Today's usage from what edits I can recall:

- I wanted to edit the visibility (pub -> pub(crate)) of most but not all functions in a class.

- I changed a macro to not require commas in a list of items it took in as input.

- I changed a function to deal with utf-8 codepoints instead of bytes, so I wanted to rename all uses of "byte" to "char".

Basically, localized find and replace, with a bit of flexibility.

Got it. Thanks for sharing.

A use case I have also is the creation of a switch case from a list of enums

Nice one!

I use multi-cursor editing daily. It’s very useful for aligning code, quick name changes, joining/expanding to multiple lines, etc.

Works best when paired with a "duplicate cursor at next match" keybind.

Find and replace does all of this, right?

Multi cursor edits feel nice during flow state, they let your brain stay in "edit" mode. However I only use them for edits of around 20-30 lines at a maximum.

Another use case for me is extracting interesting information from debug logs, where I don't want to think of a regex and the lines are similar enough.

I guess if you select the block and can tell it to only replace within that block, yes. As far as I know VSCode/Theia don't allow that. It's either click replace 20 times, copy/paste to a new file and replace all that way, or a quick multi cursor. I prefer the multi cursor. Especially when the language servers glitch out and don't let me rename the symbol gracefully, but there are many other use cases like the alignment as they mentioned.

VSCode can replace within a selected block. Though it takes an extra click. I see you point.

Extracting log entries from large files for troubleshooting, mass editing, mass formatting... This missing feature is the only reason I wasn't able to get far with the vim family: I didn't find a close enough way to do the same tasks as efficiently.

I'm curious too. I find it an occasionally useful feature, but how often I use it goes down as my ability to construct better find-replace/apply-action regex goes up.

This is one the uses

https://streamable.com/r44sjd

Just an aside, but I feel like the codebase could use some comments. I don't use Zig so it may just be my unfamiliarity with the language, but at first glance code like this doesn't seem immediately straightforward:

https://github.com/neurocyte/flow/blob/90aba421a22334467daa7...

This has quickly become my favorite TUI text editor, even though it seemed like "yet another editor" when I first came across it

As someone who doesn't like modal options I used nano, micro, and ox in that order but Flow is a much nicer product than those 3

If you like helix it can also just us the modal editing and keybinds from it as well

Does it worth using flow over vim, or micro if you're a micro user?

As a helix user I tried it out, but I didn't see particular reason to switch to this.

Neovim with a few extensions installed by default. What other features does it have?

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