inspect.lua VS luaforwindows

inspect and strong

I've used inspect.lua to inspect the client table and I can see valid-looking formatCommand settings (using the exact efm folder that u/lukas-reineke uses)

For more complex string matching tasks that the built-in patterns cannot handle, LPeg is a good choice. It's more powerful than regexes while also being easy to use. I also wouldn't expect something like PCRE to ever be included in the Lua standard library. PCRE by itself would already be larger than the rest of the Lua interpreter + standard library.

By the way, for formatting Lua tables I like using inspect[1]. (It's not part of the standard library but oh well, that's the whole topic of today's discussion).

https://github.com/kikito/inspect.lua

However, after installing the package Lua For Windows, that apparently installs the tools in the infamous WindowsApps folder, I can't run lua from the zsh terminal, getting this error:

If you're trying to install for Windows, https://github.com/rjpcomputing/luaforwindows

Earlier, I submitted Lua For Windows to the Winget repository.

I had to resort to going here: https://github.com/rjpcomputing/luaforwindows/releases to get Lua bundled with a bunch of libraries, including IUP. It's out-of-date (Lua 5.1), but that's what CityBinder was made with anyway, so maybe it doesn't matter? It comes with SciTE to edit with.

I had a Windows installation of 'luaForWindows' that, for some reason stopped working. It stopped working in the following way. I could load a lua interpreter, but each time I ran a lua script I got an error about unexpected symbol near ' '. (What a helpful message!) Previously I had uninstalled some Visual C libraries. Reinstalling the libraries, and indeed reinstalling luaForWindows, did not help. I discovered that luaForWindows looked unmaintained so I got lua binaries (in the x64 version) from SourceForge, marvelled at the lack there - or almost anywhere - of instructions, and did the following.

Having a set of "blessed" libraries has definitely been discussed on the mailing list. Also there are plenty of "distributions" like Lua for Windows[1], LuaPower[2], or runtimes like Luvit[3] that add features ootb.

That said - the Lua ecosystem in 2021 is not the same as it was in 2005 or whenever people compare it to. There is a healthy amount of Libraries and choices of libraries for solving most tasks on Luarocks. And I would suggest you produce a better end project by selecting which libraries are included in your project that uses Lua for scripting. You can even further remove your choice of the libraries that _are_ included ootb.

[1] - https://github.com/rjpcomputing/luaforwindows

[2] - https://luapower.com/

[3] - http://luvit.io/