med VS lite-xl

Too heavy.

MicroEmacs is small and lightweight. I port it to whatever machine I'm using, and it works nicely in a remote tty window. It doesn't need a customization language, as I just change the source code.

Recently, I added color syntax highlighting to it, and support for unicode characters.

https://github.com/DigitalMars/med

Here's another one with a very small footprint:

https://github.com/DigitalMars/med

It's the one I use every day. The executable on Windows is a little over a meg. It also works on Linux and Mac.

I fixed my editor so that it recognizes URLs, and underlines them. Clicking on one brings up a browser on that site. I should have done that 20 years ago.

No special syntax is required. It just works. I've since been adding URLs in comments all over my code, for references. It's marvelous.

It could be extended to recognize filename.jpg and filename.mp3 to display or play those files, too. Again with no special syntax whatsoever. It just works.

https://github.com/DigitalMars/med

I still use microEmacs, which floated around the intertoobs in the 1980s. Of course, I've modified it substantially over the years, most recently adding color syntax highlighting and Unicode.

D version:

https://github.com/DigitalMars/med

C version:

https://github.com/DigitalMars/me

The "extension language" is it's so easy to just add some code and recompile it, there's no point in adding an extension language.

I like microEmacs a lot because I can use it remotely over a tty interface.

Doing one yourself is fun. MicroEmacs drifted around NNTP in the 80s, and I snagged a copy and began modifying it to taste. I've been using it ever since. The latest version was ported to D:

https://github.com/DigitalMars/med

It's a very easy editor to understand and extend.

> 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.

Lite XL.