Astro Hacker News - Fine, I'll build my own text editor

nottorp |next [-]

There really is a fps counter on there.

Is the experiment seriously rendering continuously in a loop?

pmkary |next |previous [-]

Text editors are like mechanical watches or fountain pens. There is just so much beauty in the machinery that makes them. For me, there are hardly any other modules that are this satisfying to watch being made. Each time I find a new one (a good one like this), with everything on ropes and rendering and I-beam placement computations and ... it feels like a Christmas gift.

pmkary |root |parent [-]

Just what part of this comment deserved to get a -1 point leaves a whole universe of imagination to me and no answer :/

ameminator |root |parent |next [-]

Sometimes people down vote for no reason. Unfortunately, when one complains about it, they look like a whiner.

pmkary |root |parent |next |previous [-]

Literally I only praised and wrote how much I love something and how beautiful text editors are. And there are people who cannot stand this :))) oh wow!

roarcher |root |parent |previous [-]

A word of unsolicited advice: HNers are a prickly lot and will downvote without explanation because you stepped on some unknowable pet peeve of theirs that probably nobody else in the world shares. This happens all the time but you likely only notice when you happen to get downvoted before any upvotes and end up at 0 or -1. If your comment is reasonable, it will usually come back up.

But complaining about downvotes will certainly earn more of them.

samus |next |previous [-]

[delayed]

dang |next |previous [-]

Recent and related:

They don't make 'em like Sublime Text anymore - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49209354 - Aug 2026 (13 comments)

asabla |root |parent [-]

I used sublime text over so many years. Still find it to be a marvel when it comes to large text files, and how well it still handles them

self_awareness |next |previous [-]

Text editing is a solved problem.

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.

anon291 |previous [-]

I am being pushed to use vs code right now by my team, but we already have a fully programmable and scriptable editor called emacs that is 100000x better. I don't understand why everyone just switches to these random tools. Text editing is a solved problem. Most of the supposed advantages of these tools is just a configuration of vim or emacs.

nxc18 |root |parent |next [-]

If you work on web tech (and who doesn’t these days?) VS Code has the advantage of using the same tech stack you’re already familiar with. If you need to debug a problem, just open devtools. If you want to run a performance profile, do the same. If you want to fix a bug in the extension you’re using, just open a PR and fix it.

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.

xedrac |root |parent |previous [-]

I use emacs daily (with vim keybindings of course), but I completely understand why vscode is so popular. It's extremely easy to get started with, has features galore, and sane defaults. Emacs takes much more effort to get productive with, although this is improving with each release.