lite-xl VS lite

VS Code feels like nothing but bloat. Sublime Text is still my go-to, as I'm not very well-versed in Neovim yet. I'm also really digging the new C/Lua-based Lite XL - https://lite-xl.com. One of my New Year's resolutions is to learn Neovim properly.

Wondering if you've tried rxi/lite or the community fork, Lite-XL [1] and how you've found the font rendering to be there?

[1] https://github.com/lite-xl/lite-xl

> Web model is objectively better than [...]

Hard disagree. Modern web browsers are incredibly complex beasts that evolved by amalgamating decades of experimentation, poor non-standards, and elaborate counter-measures to fix that mess. I recommend reading <https://browser.engineering>, or even just building Chromium from source, to gain some appreciation. Most applications would benefit from something much simpler. But it's often practical to use as it is, pretty much exactly like terminal emulators.

The main difference being, terminal emulators are still several orders of magnitude less complex than web browsers, but in spite of that still require a lot of complexity to undo the side-effects of having a serial line between the CPU and the character grid. If you like monospaced fonts and character grids, you can probably render that with plain SDL, bitmap fonts with indexed sprite sheets (no Freetype), and in return get non-broken copy & paste, or even a dock icon. You know, the MVP of GUI.

Try <https://lite-xl.com>, it builds its GUI straight on top of SDL.

With that in mind, I tried to search for a good substitute for my precious Vim and amid the search activity I found Lite-XL(https://lite-xl.com). Though I'm back to Vim, the 5-day journey with the Lua-based coding editor was impressive, so I'd like to leave a record to remember the fun during the journey.

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

1. A text editor: This is where you'll write your code. There are many options to choose from, such as Visual Studio Code, Sublime Text, or lite-xl.

lite-xl. VERY extensible, fast, all around great editor. https://lite-xl.com/

There are many text editors extensible in Lua or in Python. They generally don't allow messing with the innards as much (Firefox proved that's a double edge sword with its extension, it's not an unalloyed good).

https://micro-editor.github.io/index.html

https://lite-xl.com

https://neovim.io

https://code.visualstudio.com

http://www.sublimetext.com

And Emacs Lisp doesn't feel super accessible to most software developers under 40. Almost all its conventions come from a small little island, it's like marsupials in Australia, their own little parallel evolution.

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

Playing with browser developer tools and always seeing obfuscated JavaScript makes me sad. I'm not a web developer, but I suspect the security gained is low enough to fall within the author's "unnecessary constraints."

On the other hand, there are projects like https://github.com/rxi/lite

Beyond the rendering which as noted is nothing that hasn't been done before (in general) the inherent OT/multi user + tree sitter functionality is something that entices me.

I'm surprised nobody pointed out lite/litexl here either it's rendering of ui is very similar (although fonts are via a texture; like a game would) and doesn't focus overly on the GPU but optimises those paths like games circa directx9/opengl 1.3

https://github.com/rxi/lite/blob/master/src/renderer.h

> is using pure software rendering (on top of SDL) in a rather naïve fashion

https://github.com/rxi/lite/blob/master/src/rencache.c#L4

I think you'll find that they found the naive approach was sufficiently poor, performance wise, that additional optimizations had to be applied on-top.

> But for quick hacking / porting old demos / writing emulators and also text based UI it can be fast enough.

/shrug

If you want to use it, use it. It's 'good enough'...

> if you vastly lower your expectations

How about lite https://github.com/rxi/lite

You have options: - Sublime Text - VsCodium - Lite - https://github.com/rxi/lite

I like the single lapce.exe and loads reasonably fast.

But this is in a pre pre-alpha stage, so many bugs it's far too early for public feedback. It loads reasonably fast except chrome stats in top left then jerks towards the center. The start page says to bring up the command palette which I was unable to navigate via keyboard.

The open file dialog takes an eternity to load the first time, the path is in a text box that's not editable. Focusing a text file gives an Insert cursor which is in text mode, there's a noticable slow delay before writing the first character, text selection is non existent so lacks basic text editing features.

There is a built-in terminal however there's only a single tab.

The only thing that gives it potential is that the folder/file browsing is super quick even with a node_modules folder so it might be built on efficient rendering that can be improved.

Even for such a basic editor it's 38mb download. For a far smaller + more complete editor checkout Lite:

https://github.com/rxi/lite