HayadSont @ HayadSont @discuss.online

Posts

10

Comments

159

Joined

3 mo. 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 😊.

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 😊.

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*.

Ah xD, no problem fam! Please keep us updated :P .

I have looked into plugins, but nothing I've found suggests to contain/offer the desired functionality.

Thank you so much for this information! It confirms that Kate is very competent, yet clears where it may fall short compared to Zed.

Aight, I'll keep Kate around for the time being. And I'll definitely take Zed into consideration whenever I'm in search of an IDE.

I think you've done an excellent job at capturing my initial thoughts. It basically felt as if using Emacs was bound to be overkill as my (relatively simple) use case didn't seem to warrant its usage.

But, even if it is (possibly) overkill, I do prefer^[Granted, I haven't tried out Neovim for this yet.] how Emacs handles the folding. So, while there's the very real possibility that I'll not even utilize 1% of Emacs' potential, I feel most excited and (somehow) comfort while working with it 😅.

As for setting things up, I immediately started using Emacs through Spacemacs until the input lag became very noticeable on larger files. Then, I pivoted to Doom Emacs and I've been enjoying it so far. Perhaps I'll create my own config at some point in the future, But for now, Doom Emacs is all I need.

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?

LEO definitely looks like a cool project. It has made me curious and I would like to try it out. Thanks (again)!

However, before I do, I would like to verify if folding^[Also known as collapse/expand] a section/heading in Markdown -as demonstrated in the gif- is possible with LEO. Could you please confirm this for me?

Also, good support for literate programming, which is Don Knuth's perhaps greatest idea.

Very interesting concept. I believe I stumbled upon this video about a week ago. Together with two other videos, It has been at the very top of "Watch Later"-list since. But I haven't gotten around to watch it yet 😅. I believe the topics are related. Am I right? Regardless, I'll definitely take a deeper look into literate programming. Thank you for mentioning it!

You can pretty easily export Org mode files to markdown (and LaTeX)!

Oh wow, thank you for offering me this learning experience!

There may be a setting you need to turn on (I forget and I’m not at my PC), but it works well and is very easy to use.

I'm on Doom Emacs, so perhaps this is enabled by default. But, at least for me, it was as easy as pressing SPC m e. This opens up the export menu. From there; one may select LaTeX, Markdown or any of the many other options to export to. The fuzzy search from M-x also allowed me to find it by typing out the functionality I was seeking.

Granted, I am not entirely content on how Emacs handled the export to Markdown. But I wouldn't bat an eye if Emacs enables me to configure it exactly as I'd want to.

Also, I haven’t really done it, but from what I understand you can also setup emacs to be a really good LaTeX editor.

Again, I wouldn't be surprised. It seems Emacs lends itself extremely well to whatever you throw at it 😂. No doubt; this is dndgame-material for sure*.

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.

Couldn't agree more.

Btw, I would like to take this chance to thank you and @winety@lemmy.zip for the civil, respectful, engaging and informative conversation you were having elsewhere!

Thank you for this crucial piece of information! Much appreciated!

As such, Sublime Text has (kinda) lost all of its relevancy for me.

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!

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.

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.

Well, bundling a full browser and using a mature and popular runtime are very different things in my book.

Thank you for clarifying that distinction for me!

But yeah, if you want an open source tool, JetBrains is not the tool to use.

Thank you for confirming it for me! Regardless, your recommendation has been much appreciated!

Thanks a lot for putting in the work! Uhmm..., how has testing been? Were you able to pull this off with Markdown?

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...

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!