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In search of a non-electron text editor that can fold | Are emacs and (neo)vim my only options? (discuss.online)
submitted 3 days ago by HayadSont@discuss.online to c/linux@lemmy.ml
79 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

The following gif demonstrates folding:

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[–] HayadSont@discuss.online 1 points 7 hours ago

UPDATE: For posterity's sake, I'd like to reflect on the last couple of days.

First of all, I'd like to thank everyone that has contributed to the discussion! Were it not for your recommendations/suggestions/endorsements, then I might not have found a valid alternative.

Secondly, I've taken every single recommendation pretty seriously. As such, I've either installed them to see for myself if I was able to reproduce the functionality found in the gif found above. Or, didn't install them to begin with due to the suggested installation methods not passing through my (rather) strict policy on software. Regardless, in the end, I've only found two pieces of software that satisfied the bill: Kate and KDevelop.

KDevelop is pretty cool, but is more of an IDE rather than a text editor. As such, I've landed on Kate.

But, perhaps more than anything, I've come to really appreciate Emacs (and Neovim). And, perhaps more than ever, I feel ready to take them on 💪. Wish me luck 😊.

[–] barlog@lemmy.ml 7 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Look at Helix and Zed.

[–] HayadSont@discuss.online 1 points 1 day ago

Thanks for the recommendations! Helix doesn't seem to offer this functionality (yet). Unfortunately...

As for Zed, it does seem to be capable of reproducing the functionality found in the gif (or at least to some extent). However, installing it on my distro isn't pretty. Therefore, I wish to install it at some point, but I'll wait it out for now.

[–] greywolf0x1@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Zed is the goat

[–] HayadSont@discuss.online 1 points 1 day ago

Do you happen to have a lot of experience with other text editors (and/or IDEs)? If so, would you like to chime in and compare Zed to the ones you feel confident talking about?

Thanks in advance!

[–] spacemanspiffy@lemmy.world 8 points 2 days ago (1 children)

If you don't want to go the Emacs or Vim routes, try Kate. Neovim is amazing but Kate is too from what I hear. Similar support for LSPs.

[–] HayadSont@discuss.online 1 points 1 day ago

It's not that I don't want to go with Emacs or Neovim. Rather, I want to explore what else is out there.

As for Kate, thank you for its endorsement! I've tried Kate since making this post and it^[Together with KDevelop. Though it has to be noted that KDevelop IIUC seems to rely on Kate for this functionality.] has been the only one which has yielded a desirable result. I can wholeheartedly attest to its quality.

[–] the_wiz@feddit.org 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

ED IS THE STANDARD EDITOR

[–] HayadSont@discuss.online 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

If you're not trolling, then I'd like to offer my apologies for assuming you were.

Perhaps I shouldn't feed the trolls, but I couldn't resist: does ed even support the functionality demonstrated in the gif above? I'm asking this from a genuine position of ignorance.

[–] the_wiz@feddit.org 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Honestly: Yeah, i was trolling (kind of), but:

I DO like to code via ED because the design and workflow of ED (or even better: Sam) makes folding unnecessary because you only put on the screen what is needed right at that moment. Want to see two functions 1000 lines apart? No problem, just print them right below each other on the screen.

[–] HayadSont@discuss.online 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Interesting insights. Much appreciated!

I DO like to code via ED because the design and workflow of ED (or even better: Sam) makes folding unnecessary because you only put on the screen what is needed right at that moment. Want to see two functions 1000 lines apart? No problem, just print them right below each other on the screen.

Hmm..., I suppose this is a workflow I'd have to try out for myself before drawing any conclusions. Though, I got some questions:

  • Why ed? Isn't any other TUI/CLI text editor fit for the job? Apologies if I sound obtuse/obnoxious*. I'm probably just very ignorant of how ed fares compared to the others.
  • Is there any currently maintained version of Sam? A quick search suggests that everyone packaged/grabbed it from this github repo. But, unfortunately, that one has been archived since earlier this year. I suppose I could look into the many forks it has, but I'd rather be picky 😅. Got any pointers for me?
[–] the_wiz@feddit.org 1 points 4 hours ago

Why ed? Well, it keeps my brain from rotting 😀 just half joking... i have noticed that whenever i use a somewhat more "user friendly" software my mind starts to wander off more easily and instead of being more focussed on the programming task i shortly after find myself doing... $THING instead of being productive. So, being the only jack-of-all-trades-computer-guy in a small-ish company i tend to chose the tools that work for me, even if they are a bit... anachronistic.

I think the best maintained version of Sam would be the one included in 9front (if you want some truely special experience) or if you want to stay (somewhat) in the realm of the sane you can use plan9port which also brings in many nice tools out of the Plan9 ecosystem.

[–] DieserTypMatthias@lemmy.ml 10 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (3 children)

Will probably get airstriked for this, but Zed is also a option.

Also, if you're using GNOME, then try GNOME builder. And if you're using KDE, then try KDevelop or Kate.

[–] HayadSont@discuss.online 1 points 1 day ago

Thank you for your recommendations!

Hopefully I'll get around to take Zed for a test drive in the near future.

As for GNOME Builder, for some reason, I wasn't able to replicate what's seen above with it. Perhaps it doesn't support Markdown that well. Or..., it needs/requires a plugin to do its bidding. Would you happen to know more on this? Any help is appreciated!

KDevelop and Kate, on the other hand, have been a very pleasant surprise. I have literally checked about a dozen of text editors since yesterday, and these two have been the only ones that have yielded the desired result. Props and kudos to the dev team!

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[–] anon5621@lemmy.ml 26 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Kate,kdevelop,xed,mousepad,gnome builder.,notepad next(clone notepad++)

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[–] Mwa@thelemmy.club 14 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (6 children)

Geany(Its a lightweight GTK Based IDE)

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[–] Nibodhika@lemmy.world 5 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Others have given you many options, but I would like to know why Nvim or Emacs are not good options for you?

[–] HayadSont@discuss.online 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

No no, don't get me wrong. I think both Emacs and Neovim are excellent. And this little endeavor/search/pursuit has (perhaps more than anything) solidified (and gave context as to) why they're in their own league.

Like, I've tried about a dozen of text editors in last couple of days. And with most^[Heck, I've only been able to confirm that Kate and KDevelop at least do what has been advertised (by others).] of them I've failed to reproduce the functionality demonstrated in the gif.

But even the very best of what I've tried since making this post pales -or at least seems to be*- in terms of extensibility. And, when we add in Emacs' proven^[Neovim is still relatively new. I don't think I can justifiably vouch for its longevity yet.] longevity, it becomes hard to root for any of the alternatives. At least..., so far*.

Still, I had to answer for myself if committing to Emacs (or Neovim for that matter) was justified given the fact that I had not a lot of experience with text editors 😅. Like, as funny as it sounds, I've moved from Word+StickyNotes to (GNOME's) Text Editor to a bunch^[I can recall ghostwriter, MarkText and QOwnNotes.] of Markdown text editors to Emacs. And the switch to Emacs was mostly motivated when I saw Obsidian do the very thing you see in the gif 😂. But as cool as learning the ropes of Emacs was, I think I was experiencing some impostor syndrome shenanigans.

Thankfully, it seems that this has mostly served to be a huge motivation boost. Perhaps I was (more than) ready to conquer Emacs all along...

[–] Nibodhika@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

If you had started with that people would have told you that nothing comes even close. The closest things you will find are Atom (archived), Sublime (closed source) and Helix (still very new and no plugin support, but something to keep an eye on).

Speaking of obsidian, the reason why it took me forever to start using Silverbullet is that Emacs has org-mode which does most of what Silverbullet/Obsidian do out of the box, plus some other stuff that they don't do (e.g. excel like tables).

But I wanted something I could edit remotely through my phone and web interfaces are better than using text editors over ssh connections. Also I have migrated from Emacs to Nvim, the reasons are purely ergonomical (pinky fatigue is a real issue) but after switching I found a jump in the way to think about an editor. Emacs is great, don't get me wrong, and if you decide to learn Emacs I can assure you it will be the best editor you've used, but it still edits things at a character level, while there are concepts for matching brackets or quotes changing the text inside quotes in Emacs is very character oriented, I.e. go to start of quote, start marking, move to matching quote, delete, whereas in vim is sort of a higher level language where you say Change Inside Next Quote using cin", and expanded with some plugins you can even do srnq' to Surround Replace Next Quote with ' (which will change the quotations on the next text from whatever to '). And that's a lot closer to the way I think so it skips a mental step (plus it's a lot less keystrokes and no Ctrl for my pinky).

But those are the reasons why I switched, many people use Emacs for decades without ergonomic issues, whichever of the two you decide to learn you'll understand why they're the staple editors for most people who actually choose an editor.

[–] HayadSont@discuss.online 1 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

Thank you for the raving endorsement and otherwise very informative reply!

Also I have migrated from Emacs to Nvim, the reasons are purely ergonomical (pinky fatigue is a real issue) but after switching I found a jump in the way to think about an editor. Emacs is great, don't get me wrong, and if you decide to learn Emacs I can assure you it will be the best editor you've used, but it still edits things at a character level, while there are concepts for matching brackets or quotes changing the text inside quotes in Emacs is very character oriented, I.e. go to start of quote, start marking, move to matching quote, delete, whereas in vim is sort of a higher level language where you say Change Inside Next Quote using cin", and expanded with some plugins you can even do srnq' to Surround Replace Next Quote with ' (which will change the quotations on the next text from whatever to '). And that's a lot closer to the way I think so it skips a mental step (plus it's a lot less keystrokes and no Ctrl for my pinky).

Hmm...., interesting. I'm still pretty new to evil-mode, but doesn't that bridge the gap here? Btw, I don't know why, but I wasn't able to see for myself how cin" worked within Vim*.

[–] Nibodhika@lemmy.world 1 points 6 hours ago

Yes, evil-mode would have bridged the gap, however I didn't go emacs -> vim in one step, I left emacs back in 2017 because of pinky strain, and other ergonomic issues that made me switch keyboard layout as well (which made me lose lots of agility on emacs) and started using Pycharm for python dev, VSCode for other languages (including Markdown for note taking) and nano for system file edition. I tried some of the other suggestions here like atom, sublime, Kate, etc, but they never became my everything tool like emacs used to be. Very recently I discovered Helix, and I gave it a try and loved it, however the lack of plugin support made me have reservations on diving in. But the interaction mode is very close to vim, so I decided to give vim another go and went through a few tutorials on how to set Nvim up while refreshing muscle memory for vim movements and learning new stuff and it's slowly becoming the everything tool that emacs once was for me.

All of that being said, I don't think I would use evil-mode on Emacs, the reason is that vim is made with those motions from the ground up, whereas in emacs they will be an after-thought so it will probably not be integrated enough (or more likely will require lots of configurations).

I wasn't able to see for myself how cin" worked within Vim*.

It's simple, imagine you have a line of code like so:

my_var = "some string with spaces"

If your cursor is almost anywhere on that line pressing ci" will erase the contents of inside the string and place you in insert mode, i.e. the line will look line this:

my_var = "|"

With | being the cursor in insert mode. There are other similar things, for example ca" (Change Around ") will also erase the quotes, very useful for example to change a hard coded string with a variable.

[–] slacktoid@lemmy.ml 14 points 3 days ago (5 children)

There's also Zed. And helix.

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[–] flubba86@lemmy.world 12 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (5 children)

On windows: Notepad++. On Linux-based OS: Kate. And there's also JetBrains Fleet, that is jetbrains answer to vscode.

[–] ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca 3 points 1 day ago

Kate is for Windows and Mac as well

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