hckrnws

Glad to see this hit the front page again! I’ve been making some contributions lately and it introduced me to Lua. At its core it’s basically a very thin wrapper around the Scintilla editing component used by many open source editors. I’ve been working on getting some lower level APIs added for more control over the UI.

Mitchell is to be commended for maintaining the editor solo for so many years and keeping the LOC count really low (2000 lines of C, 4000 lines of Lua). If you’re willing to read the source it’s really easy to wrap your head around the whole thing, which can’t be said for Emacs or Vim. When I find the time I’ll finish my vi mode…

I downloaded it recently and found it to be quite useful for quick notes. And I can attest to its "fast" claim, using it on a heavily monitored corporate computer, with CrowStrike and what-not; curiously, and I may being hyperbolic here, but, I got the feeling that it was opening faster than MS Notepad, even with Copilot disabled.

The only thing missing is for me is the "save temporary file" behavior, as I have this habit of making a quick note, close to save up space, both in RAM and view, then later on, fire it up again. Will see if there's a Lua api for this later.

Sounds like you're looking for the scratch file extension [1]

[1]: https://github.com/orbitalquark/textadept-scratch

I've looked into TextAdept a few times. It appeals to me because it's got a standard Qt UI, is fast and lightweight and highly customizable with Lua. But I could never commit the time to fully customize it for daily use. Anyway, I'm committed to emacs. Other Scintilla-based editors with a similar feel (but missing the Lua angle) are Geany and Kate.

> Unlimited split views.

Ok, well now I have to find out what hapoens if I get enough splits to make the width of each less than a pixel.

The splits functionality is one of its weaknesses right now IMO, but there are some improvements in the works.

There is also NotepadNext which is oddly similar, sans the Lua: https://github.com/dail8859/NotepadNext

Related. Others?

TextAdept - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39571814 - March 2024 (31 comments)

What GUI text editor widget does it use, or is it home-grown?

I don’t see it mentioned.

It uses Scintilla. In fact, at its core, it’s basically just a wrapper around the Scintilla message passing API. There’s a Lua script that parses the Scintilla header files to create the Lua tables that interface with the Scintilla library.

? Seems to support GTK, Qt and ncurses?

I saw that in the code on the github repo

looks like it uses scintilla

Nice. Im looking for such projects. Will give it a try

Check out Lite XL (also Lua-based)

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

[2] https://lite-xl.com/

Always nice to see open source text editors, in my opinion. Textadept's codebase is a fine example.

Beautiful landing page

I recommend capitalizing TextAdept, as it took me way way way too long to figure out it wasn't text a dept (SMS which department????)

[dead]

Do we still need text editors in the AI agents era?

/s

Now, everyone can vibe code their own text editor.

We would need it when this era ends.

/s