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Discussion (43 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
Rob Pike was the system programmer/admin before me when he was a grad student in high energy physics, but he left to go work at Bell Labs.
One day another student, Karl Heuer, and I both were engaging in the common programmer pastime of complaining about the screen editors of the day and saying we could write something better.
Somehow this turned into a competition, and we both spent all night racing against each other writing our editors. It was mostly silent except for the typing, interrupted by the occasional announcement of some feature that was now working to hopefully rattle the other.
In the morning the other student system programmer/admin, Norman Wilson, got in and saw what Karl and I had been up to.
Norman mentioned this in an email to Rob Pike. His response was something close to this:
> Everyone writes a screen editor. It's easy to do and makes them feel important. Tell them to work on something useful.
It was only a couple years or so later that Rob Pike wrote a screen editor. I wonder if it made him feel important? :-)
I'm kind of sad the author stopped shedding unneeded complexity there though... we're not really building a text editor yet, we're building a website with a fancy input field. If we want to build a proper text editor we must eschew the bloat that is the web browser too.
If you want your app to work the same way across platforms, using browser defaults is not the way to achieve that.
If you want users to have a consistent experience within their browser across the web, I get it, but that's not how the Web has worked for a long long time.
On one otherwise tranquil morning Master Foo's meditations were disturbed by cries of distress.
Finding that they came from one of the novices, he inquired "What is the difficulty here?"
The novice replied, "I am frustrated by my tools. Every day I must use many different editors because neither Emacs nor vi nor any of these other random editors has all the features I require."
Master Foo nodded. "How," he asked, "would a master of the Great Way resolve this difficulty?"
The student thought for a few moments, then replied. "Well, it's obvious. I will write the best editor ever. It will do everything I need. It will do everything everyone needs. And the world will be a better place because..."
The novice's speech halted as Master Foo rapped him sharply across the back of the head with his staff.
"Um. Master?" the student asked, rubbing the back of his head gingerly. "In what way have I erred?"
"Fool!" said Master Foo. "Do you think I want to learn yet another editor?"
Upon hearing this, the novice attained enlightenment.
—from The Rootless Root (https://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/unix-koans/index.html)
But complaining about downvotes will certainly earn more of them.
All your best stuff will get downvoted by at least somebody eventually. For some reason, that somebody always gets in early enough that you notice.
1. Being near the top of the page
2. Having a downvote already
You can curtail the bandwagon effect by complaining.
I don't know who thought it was a good idea to put those character-size icons on adjacent lines, or who thinks it's a good idea to leave them there, but... this is one of those cases where it's better to assume it's an accident rather than an attack.
It's also true that there are a lot of asshats^H^H^H^H^H^H^H empty boats around here, but the above advice still applies, I think.
i like text editors but I feel they contain "everything but the kitchen sink" (if you know you know) and that makes them somewhat impenetrable and difficult to modify and bend to new purposes even though they contain so much capability and potential, and the people who do understand them think it's a good idea to drag and drop an URL and have that do a web transaction and download a buttload of text, when what I wanted was just the text... of the url. I'm sure there's some way to turn it off, but instead there should be some way to turn it on. Oh yeah, worse when it's a jpg url, guess what they do with that.
in another direction, the point of markdown was to be editable and readable in source form, not to be a replacement for rendered HTML, but the same people who ruined HTML by overloading it are now fully engaged in ruining markdown by overloading it and making it unreadable in source form.
I had been using Kate which was what an LLM suggested was the closest to something like Sublime Text on Fedora. But even Kate, which was great, had too much going on.
So I asked Fable to take the text editor part (KTextEditor) and wrap it using Rust with an LSP server. It took about 2 days but I have a tiny, super fast little editor. I use Sway to manage things like tabs, fuzzel stands in for fuzzy file search, broot stands in for an explorer view. I've already added Markdown preview support. I might get around to some basic git integration.
Then I got it to turn that little editor into a note-taking interface that I have bound to a Mod-m key binding to keep notes in ~/Notes.
We live in wild times. I hope everyone is taking advantage while they can.
Yep, I'm taking advantage of the times by using the exact same tools I have been for years, and if those fail me, I'll pay for one of the multitude of other high quality editors offered by companies who's business it is to make them, so I get back to writing things in them instead of paying even more to companies trying to persuade me to believe that those products are obselete.
I considered a bunch of options, including vim or neovim or lazyvim, emacs, newer projects like zed. LLM gave a few more I can't recall including helix and Kate. There are so many good options these days, we're all spoiled for choice.
But the main thing is, and YMMV, I am not writing a lot of code anymore. I'm mostly reading/searching/navigating. So all of the powerful editing features are lost on me. No editors really match my current workflow, they all have too much.
So this was an opportunity to try something out, to experiment. See if I could do the real-deal vibe coding thing and judge the result. I just said "I want it to do ..." and then a few minutes later it did. I repeated this until it did enough to use as my primary editor.
I don't recommend it for anyone else, nor do I expect people to agree. Just describing my thought process.
So I just said "do it" and have been merging everything without reading a single line. It wrote all the specs, wrote all the code, wrote all the tests. I just got it to write out a tutorial to take me on a tour of the code it wrote, but I haven't reviewed it yet.
I will push it as OSS once I've made sure it hasn't included anything that I don't want public. But it wouldn't be super useable for anyone else since many of the features (e.g fuzzel and broot) are glue that exists in the Sway configs and some helper scripts.
It's held together by bubble gum and scotch tape. But is does exactly what I want and so far without a single bug, crash or problem. It's my frankenstien editor and I love it. (disclosure: I've been using it for less than a week)
It's obviously not for everyone, but if you fork that repo and prompt your favorite model to make it look and feel like you want, you can get something extremely useful very fast.
They don't make 'em like Sublime Text anymore - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49209354 - Aug 2026 (13 comments)
Is the experiment seriously rendering continuously in a loop?
Around 2001 when I started getting into Linux seriously, I was also reading a lot about cults - Scientology had recently, infamously, forced Slashdot to take down a comment about their secret practices.
One of the things I read was that a common cult trick was to demand that people re-learn basic skills so that they do them the "right" way, like reading (Scientology did that), eating (chew X times!), using the phone etc.
So here's this system that demands I need to learn basic text editing all over? Nope, not joining that cult! We Amiga kids had had graphical editors for a long time!
So I got the best modern text editor Linux had at the time, NEdit from fermilab. It was almost entirely CUA + the conventions we use today (which aren't entirely what we used in 2001). And the unusual features it had, such as square selection and X-style middle click copying, were quick to pick up. It was also tiny, both in binary size and memory footprint.
Sadly it didn't really survive the switch to utf-8. I switched to Slava Pestov's Jedit for many years, and did some cool things with its huge library of extensions. But when VSCode started doing IDE stuff better than most IDEs, I defected to that. Yes yes, electron, Microsoft, I know... but it's just so damn convenient.
It can be used in headless-mode, I've hooked it up to the latest JavaFX text editing component it works very nicely.
[0] https://github.com/phronmophobic/clobber
Configurability is great but without good defaults it can also be a liability. Would-be users will bounce off long before they like the software enough to pore through pages of options.
It is a very flexible system and still quite fast and easy to configure. I’ve been trying Zed and WebStorm looking for better alternatives, but it turns out they have their own problems. Zed isn’t nearly as configurable, WebStorm’s config system is an absolute nightmare (xml for days - and constantly changing, mingling actual config with transient state).
People complain that VS Code is slow; perhaps on some metrics and perhaps it is slower than a much less featured system like sublime. But I don’t think it is meaningfully slower in practice than Zed, and they make a lot of compromises to get that edge.
I do miss the configurablity though
26 different browsers all based on Chromium, 127 different “observability platforms” etc.
So so much redundant rehashed stuff. We can’t accept that though, THIS TIME it’s going to be great and amazing and we’ll get a huge investment and sold to a huge company for millions.
I’m not suggesting that it hasn’t been a huge leap in computing and software in the last 40 years.
But we need to have faith in new being better to keep going. That’s why the new hotness is always so popular.
Tools like VS Code do the job well enough for the majority of people, with just enough configurability and much greater ease-of-use.
Emacs has a similar problem to Lisp: Infinite configurability and expandability (plus the lack of a "blessed set" standard that people actually like enough to use out-of-the-box) means that everyone's environment and tooling ends up becoming incompatible with each other.
Get off my lawn.
It's not about the style of cursor, or if rope is used or not. We already have answers to that.
It's about remote editing, LSP support.