xi-editor VS kakoune.el

Was confused until I realised I'd confused Zed, with Xi[1] which is also rust based, and which incidentally has a frontend called "Xim"..

Also there's a wiki-editor (like Tomboy[2]) called "Zim"[3].

[1] https://github.com/xi-editor/xi-editor

Project site linked from the GitHub[0] is https://xi-editor.io. Linked doc is a mirror of this[1], which was afaik originally written by Raph Linus.

[0]: https://github.com/xi-editor/xi-editor

[1]: https://xi-editor.io/docs/rope_science_01.html

> thing that gets deleted when you hit backspace

Is there a canonical source for this part, by the way? Xi copied the logic from Android[1] (as per the issue you linked downthread), and I vaguely remember that CLDR had something to say about this too, but I don’t know if there’s any sort of consensus here that’s actually written down anywhere.

[1] https://github.com/xi-editor/xi-editor/pull/837

This is pretty much how copy-on-write ropes work. Check out xi-rope, Ropey or crop, they're all built using B-trees and implement the behavior you described.

Helix is awesome, though once Lapce (spiritual successor to Xi editor) gets the Helix/Kakoune editing model, I may have to jump ship

Home (xi-editor.io)

Maybe take a look at the Xi editor (https://xi-editor.io/) (written in rust I think) that uses a client server architecture.

Have a look at what Lapce uses. The editor is coming along nicely, and iirc, they use the Xi editor as a plug-in.

Raph Levien posted a retrospective about using CRDT’s for collaborative editing in xi-editor here [1]. His conclusion is

“I come to the conclusion that the CRDT is not pulling its (considerable) weight. When I think about a future evolution of xi-editor, I see a much brighter future with a simpler, largely synchronous model, that still of course has enough revision tracking to get good results with asynchronous peers like the language server.”

[1]https://github.com/xi-editor/xi-editor/issues/1187#issuecomm...

Thanks for the tip, meow looks interesting. I never got comfortable in evil-mode, but perhaps meow could be a gateway to trying emacs in anger.

Still waiting for kakoune/helix mode for gnu readline...

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

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

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 emacs had a layer for kakoune as comprehensive as evil, I think it would be a no-brainer, but such as it is, kakoune.el is the closest we have which isn't quite was I was hoping for.

Problem is, unlike the evil package linked above, which was last updated 6 days ago, the only package I've found for Kakoune is this one, which was last updated like a year ago.

I set up https://github.com/jmorag/kakoune.el and made some aesthetic changes, i think that EXWM came soon thereafter

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

Shameless plug kakoune.el

Out of curiosity, what is it that makes you want to change from Kakoune? Perhaps something like terminal emacs with kakoune.el could be of interest to you.

I don't fully understand what you want - but about creating cards while you read https://kakoune.org could be interesting (there's a simple elisp clone: https://github.com/jmorag/kakoune.el). That way you can move along words while reading and if you want to turn a phrase into a card you can simply hold shift to continue marking the desired words and then yank them to somewhere.