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Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard
Light Table is a free, customizable, functional, and open-source IDE with a modern User Interface, plugin support, command pane, and connection manager
I'll stick with (g)vim personally but there's probably a few of you who'll find this interesting enough, if only to rag on it in the comments.
Source: https://www.fossmint.com/light-table-next-generation-open-source-ide-editor/
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Light Table - A Next-Generation Open-Source and Customizable IDE
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Anyone can make an omelet with eggs. The trick is to make one with none.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Marand on Monday December 04 2017, @05:41AM (3 children)
I used Light Table for a while before going back to emacs and it's a pretty nice editor. In a way, it's basically "emacs, but modern": extensible editor using a Lisp dialect (Clojure, or more accurately ClojureScript) for both the program and configuration. Uses ctrl-space by default to bring up a "console" you can use to call functions, like M-x in emacs, built-in package management for extension, and the config files are primarily Clojure vectors (arrays) though I believe you can use s-expressions and call functions within them to generate those vectors. Probably the most interesting thing it did was introduce the "instaREPL", a variation of REPL use that evaluates expressions as they're typed out and shows their return values in-line, alongside the code.
So, for example, if you type (+ 2 2) in a buffer or file that has instaREPL enabled, it evaluates that and shows it alongside, like (+ 2 2) => 4. It was supported for a handful of languages like Clojure and JavaScript, with others available via plugins, and was really cool. I've gotten something close in emacs for some modes, but not quite as seamless. It also could do live updates for certain languages, so that changes made in the file were shown real-time in an output area, though this was primarily for browser-related work like html and javascript.
It's not all rosy, though; first, and most obviously, it's yet another browser-based editor. It predates Electron and was originally built on node-webkit, but has since been ported to Electron. Either way, though, it's still essentially an editor wrapped up in a standalone Chromium instance, so it's going to be heavier as a result. It does, at least, use this base well, allowing use of the webkit frames for things like the aforementioned real-time output.
The other problem is less of a technical one and more of a people problem. It was originally created, after a successful Kickstarter program, by someone that later abandoned the project and moved on to...something I'm not sure how to describe, a mix of IDE, language, and documentation called Eve [eve-lang.com]. When he did, he made sure to tell everyone how LT wasn't the programming future he wanted it to be, and to check out his new project that would be! It wasn't quite as bad as Elop's burning platform memo when he joined Nokia, but it still pissed off plenty of people that gave him money, because he did part of the work and then went "lol nope failed experiment" and bailed on it, leaving it to the community to continue the work and fix the problems. That means there hasn't been as much development interest as it deserves, so improvements have been slow the past few years.
The people still involved seem to care about it and are still trying to work on it, so hopefully the reappearance of it in discussions is an indication of renewed interest.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 04 2017, @08:46PM (1 child)
Did Granger fail to deliver any of the promises in the Kickstarter? If he fulfilled all of the original goals - and I think he did - then what's wrong with him abandoning the project?
I tried LightTable, but for better or for worse (mostly for worse) I pay my mortgage working on Java. If I could convince an employer to pay me for working on Clojure, I might have used it more often. I may install it again for fun, so I'm glad it came up.
I looked at Eve, but I'm not sure how intuitive it is. Might be fun to try, though. One of the things I give Granger for is being able to accept when he screwed up, and to give his work to real people and watch them use it and recognize what he got wrong. He was the manager for Visual Studio at Microsoft for a while, then he built Light Table, and now this. Eve may never amount to anything, but it might actually end up being pretty cool.
(Score: 2) by Marand on Monday December 04 2017, @09:22PM
No clue, I wasn't involved in it. Doesn't matter, though, because it still gave a bad impression to a lot of people, because it still had plenty of bugs and polish needed when he went "k, I'm out, have fun fixing it!" That had a real effect on development and support, and when it happened a lot of the momentum went away. It's a nice editor, though, and like I said, hopefully development is picking up steam again. It's been long enough now that maybe it can start being seen as a community project, instead of the abandoned experiment of one person.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Tuesday December 05 2017, @04:26AM
The main question is, how hackable is it?
The main power of Emacs is that you can easily step through with a debugging or read the documentation or source code for literally everything. Every bug fix or new feature I ever needed to add to Emacs took 15-30 minutes, far less than I anticipated each time.
If the editor isn't easy enough to extend that you can reprogram it while you are doing actual work (i.e., not having to set aside a block of time specifically dedicated to writing plugins or scripts), then it will never replace Emacs.
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