Discussion

Textadept

najarvg: This is a great project! Is there a place to look up the list of inbuilt lexers to understand the editor language support? Will forward to my (more hands-on devs) team members.

Fwirt: Lexing is handled by one of Mitchell's other projects, Scintillua. You'll find the source for all the built-in lexers in there. https://github.com/orbitalquark/scintilluaThe documentation for Scintillua also gets pulled into Textadept's API documentation as a dependency, so the syntax is also explained there. It's basically a bridge between Scintilla's native lexing and LPeg.

larodi: Without any sarcasm, really, what is the value proposition in this one, that would make someone ditch Sublime Text for it?

Fwirt: For starters, Sublime Text is closed-source. A better parallel would be something like Neovim, which also is extensible with Lua. What draws me to Textadept over Neovim is that it's intentionally kept very small, which means it's very easy to understand and extend. Contrast with Vim and its massive manual. However, like Emacs, almost everything is fair game for customization. For example, I wanted minimap functionality, so I implemented it:https://github.com/Fwirt/textadept-minimapTextadept's biggest strength is also its biggest weakness: Scintilla allows for a lot of features that are nigh-impossible in the likes of Vim and Emacs due to their reliance on terminal behavior. However, Scintilla is not terribly well optimized and does not support GPU rendering, meaning that while there is very little bloat, Textadept can still chug in some edge cases. The most notable instance right now is large files with no line breaks (e.g. minified js libraries). Other Scintilla-based editors also suffer from this to varying degrees, although Notepad++ has some performance optimizations that seem to mostly mitigate it. Notepad++ is also Windows only and not as easily extensible.

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

crefiz: What's the point of this comment?

dang: oneeyedpigeon already explained it, but you can see a zillion examples here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...The purpose is to satisfy extra-curious readers (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...) who might want to read previous discussions of the same story.No criticism is intended! I add this because sometimes people think there's an implied "why did you repost this, it's already been discussed" - but not at all: reposts on HN are fine after about a year or so: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...[editing - bear with me...]

oneeyedpigeon: dang is a mod—as far as I'm aware, they are the mod. When a previously-covered story crops up again, they typically add a comment like this with links to previous discussions, so you can easily see what was said before.

dang: one of the mods, along with tomhow!