ryo-modal VS lite

To build on what others are saying about Emacs, if you start exploring the package ecosystem, you're going to see quite a lot of really interesting packages that are related to improving/experimenting with the UX of editing text. While I'm not endorsing anyone in particular, I think what this list does show is just how easy it is to do pretty much whatever you want in Emacs;

https://karthinks.com/software/avy-can-do-anything/

https://github.com/jyp/boon

https://github.com/clemera/objed

https://github.com/jmorag/kakoune.el

https://github.com/meow-edit/meow/

https://github.com/xahlee/xah-fly-keys

https://github.com/Kungsgeten/ryo-modal

https://github.com/emacsorphanage/god-mode

Emacs 29 also now has treesitter and LSP mode integration built-in, a compilation mode, a comint mode for REPLs, excellent file browsing packages (I use dired/dirvish), and a few other killer features.

Now, if what you truly dislike are "quirky editors", prepare yourself for a world of hurt because vanilla Emacs departs quite a bit from "modern" text editors. I struggled with this for a while, but eventually by buying into the paradigm, I now feel that when emacs try emulating "modern" IDE features like autocompletion, LSP, and DAP UI, I feel like it's a regression, not a progression. The point here is that you might have an "idea" of what good initial UX and lack of quirks would look like, but Emacs might change the way you think.

If it's the latter and you're looking for a way to set up vim/evil like keybindings yourself (separate links for each), Modalka, RYO-modal, and Meow (and probably a few dozen others 'cause emacs) allow you to do that.

You can write custom commands that wrap a little bit of logic around the standard movement commands. Or another option would be to look at ryo-modal or meow.

Along with General, you can take a look at some other packages for keybindings and modal editing. A good option is RollYourOwn Modal mode. In the documentation there, it also lists several other packages with pre-defined bindings. Xah-Fly-Keys is specifically designed for ergonomics and may be interesting to explore.

Because you can roll your own modal mode. This particular approach will make the experience convenient in the way you actually prefer (Emacs' extensibility at its finest) and it'll allow you to slowly move towards the modal editing if it happens to be convenient for you.

Similar to Meow is ryo-modal. What I like about ryo-modal is that it is completely unopinionated and does nothing by default, and instead just provides the tools to make your own modal editing system.

I was thinking that combining this functionality with something like ryo-modal could make for a very satisfying and efficient modal keybind system. However, it doesn't seem like there's any ready made way to do this in Emacs.

ryo-modal is a package for creating modal keymaps. I want to test it, but I need a little help.

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