xi-editor VS kakoune.el

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...

Maybe architect kernel as a microservice? There was some text editor developed as a microservice; I don't see why it couldn't work for a FX application or game engine.

A while ago there was a post about Zas Editor, an editor for mac that used parts of Xi as the backend. Since then, the website has been taken down and it's presumably abandoned. There was some apprehension about its licensing but it was cool.

I thought that after the failure of the https://github.com/xi-editor/xi-editor project (which Lapce seems to take inspiration from) people would stop trying it, but looks like it's doing the opposite.

Why not collaborate with developers of existing code editors such as Xi Editor (https://xi-editor.io) or Lapce (https://lapce.dev) instead of making yet another one?

As for lightweight alternatives to Atom, there is also Lite-XL (https://lite-xl.com).

My initial thoughts are using something like the xi-editor or parts from it for text manipulation, some rust GUI framework for rendering, like egui or iced, for more language contextual actions like autocomplete I think I'd have to look into the LSP.

Oh I didn't realize that it might have been a serious question, I'm too unfamiliar with the domain to not make stupid misinterpretations it seems, really sorry about that. Anyway no, that's a good suggestion, I think starting there makes the most sense but I'm having some decision-anxiety about where to start. I think xi-editor is likely to be the best place to start constructing an editor without making the project impossible to finish

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.

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.