Brian Masinick
Comparing http://www.antixforum.com/forums/topic/fresh-view-of-text-editors-command-and-graphical-variations/#post-168918
to where I am today,
1) I’m glad I went through the various lists and tried out as many text editors as I did.
2) From the time I began until now, I didn’t alter too many of my main editing choices,
but I did:
a) change my configurations for Emacs, not once, but twice – first to Spacemacs.
from the standpoint of the key bindings I really liked it, but it was slow starting
compared to just about everything and resource intensive. Then I found Doom Emacs,
and it gave me the best of both Emacs and vi with a couple of space key bindings so
I really like it.
b) start using Neovim – nvim – instead of regular vi, and I now have FOUR GUI
interfaces to use with nvim – nvim-qt, it’s pretty simple and fast, nvim-gtk,
similar to nvim-qt, except it uses Gtk instead of the smaller Qt interfaces used
in LX-Qt. Then I found a Lua interface called nvui or nvim-lua, and finally
I found an F# interface to nvim called fvim. All are good.
3) I found a lot of links to acquire editors directly; gradually some of the newer
editors are getting added to various package managers, but even a year or two ago,
when @techore and I were discussing helix, some of the Rust components weren’t very
standard, requiring first to acquire and/or build rust, or cargo, or both. While
in some cases that’s still necessary, I’m finding more and more of them available,
just since I started this excursion.
4) A note on Rust: it really does provide what it says: it’s a very fast, efficient
low level interface to mid to high level functions: here’s the cost: either have
hardware that’s five years old or less, or get to really FEEL where the overhead
comes in. I tried a few of the rust-based editors on my decade+ Lenovo Thinkpad
X201. That unit tends to run hot under load; it could handle some stuff but
I wouldn’t recommend rust-based components much – some browsers use Rust, but be
careful – on old hardware they push the silicon pretty hard; I’d steer away from
top end Web browers for that very reason, and ironically enough I learned that
not from the browsers, but from the text editing exercises!
Helix, Kak/Kakoune, nvim and Emacs will be OK as long as you don’t make them work
too hard. Anything running Rust-based code that is doing a lot of iterative
looping is going to drive up energy consumption, which means your unit will heat
up; so unless it has excellent heat dispersion I’d watch out!
--
Brian Masinick
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