Xi looks great, has a very clever design, and clearly is a next generation platform for building a useful and powerful editor.
I'd love to see this project continue and be a success. I think there is plenty of room for yet another text editor.
Here's where I'm going to be a bit of a party pooper.
Pragmatically speaking all of the great stuff Raph is talking about doesn't really matter. What Raph cares about are the kind of things people who build text editors like to geek out on and again that's all great.
Imma let you finish but VSCode and Atom and the entire Electron ecosystem have once again proven that a sub-optimal but powerful platforms with low barriers to entry win most of the time.
I'm rarely impressed by software projects (close or open) and I'm even less often impressed by Microsoft but what they've been able to do with VSCode in such a short amount of time, and the VELOCITY with which they are continuing to move means that for all practical purposes I will probably be in an Electron based editor for the foreseeable future.
I'm not saying I don't want Xi to continue to grow and be as great as it can be, I'm just being pragmatic.
>Pragmatically speaking all of the great stuff Raph is talking about doesn't really matter. What Raph cares about are the kind of things people who build text editors like to geek out on and again
Unfortunately that's not true. If only MORE people that build text editors actually DID geek out on such things. Alas, we have 30+ years of editors that got all those wrong.
>Imma let you finish but VSCode and Atom and the entire Electron ecosystem have once again proven that a sub-optimal but powerful platforms with low barriers to entry win most of the time
Well, they don't win with me. But even if so, I don't see why you can't have an optimal platform AND a big ecosystem. Or how json-rpc (which is what the plugins will need to talk to) is a high "barrier to entry".
if the editor is slow its certnly not due to core. but most likely that its parsing 10k files for intellisense. even the most naive implementation of a text editor will be fast.
Based upon momentum I believe the Electron based ecosystem has already won, yes.
The momentum there eclipses... Eclipse, as well as many other closed and open source editors.
If you don't see the Electron ecosystem as a winner today would you say they'll have won if all editors stay at their current momentum of new features and bug fixes?
How is it that text editors are all the sudden this weird competition where you have to win?
I get what you're saying, but I think you worry too much about social proof and momentum. It's also grossly unfair to Xi, a project in its infancy. As you mentioned earlier, there is room for another great editor. If the same logic had been applied towards the Electron based editors a few years ago, you'd be arguing against them based on 'pragmatism' because Emacs/vim exists.
What I'm trying to say is, people remember when you try to improve on things, even if you don't quite make it. Nobody remembers the guy commenting on a thread shooting it down. Decide which one you want to be.
I wouldn't call it "winning" but you do need a big piece of the userbase to be relevant (when we are talking about text editors that are 90% plugins and 10% core, like Atom, Sublime, VsCode, Vim, Emacs...)
When I write code in a language I don't find the best language plugin for language X in "my editor". Instead I search for "which editor has the best plugin for language X". And in most of the cases, the difference between different editors is much smaller than the difference in quality between language plugins.
So basically, unless an editor "wins" (say becomes one of the top 5 most used) then there will be very few plugins for that text editor for the next thing that you need a plugin for.
(And let's hope a non-electron editor is the next to gain that momentum.)
I have a different algorithm: Instead of asking "what editor has the best plugin for X", I just use emacs. If emacs isn't great at X when I start using it for X, it'll be there soon enough.
you picked one that is already in that top. Try that with the 100th most used editor.
I disagree it’s worth sticking to on text editor for programming tasks. The productivity boost of a good complex plugin is huge, way bigger than anything one gets from productivity in the text editing itself that comes from familitarity with the editor I think.
Look at the state of e.g Rust dev in Atom/VSCode/.. today. It will get there but it might be years for the one in spot #3 to reach the #1
My point was that if you want the best plugin (not good enough) then the editor must vary.
And secondly, if you do stick with one editor it’s surely one of those biggest ones as otherwise the chance is slim of even finding half decent plugins.
I think it’s fair enough to say that, from the perspective of community momentum and extension momentum, they’ve “won”, sure. It’s also fair to say that in many cases a user’s text editor doesn’t need quite that breadth of extensibility and/or feature-richness, and that winning that war (or battle) isn’t really all that important to at least some subset of users.
That’s where Xi fits. It’s saying “these things we don’t get from other editors are important”. Users are free to decide which feature or attributes are most important to them. At the end of the day, users win!
What exactly does 'won' mean to you in this context? Other than the fact you're tying it to some vaguely positive notion around momentum, it's not at all obvious what claim you're making.
10 years ago Eclipse was most popular editor and was considered the best. Java, C++, PHP. Aptana, IBM IDEs and many more. And now it is pretty much gone.
I really wonder what you are basing this opinion on. The most recent stable release (Oxygen) was released last June, and Eclipse Che, their cloud IDE last October. In Stack Overflow's 2017 Developer 2017, 20% of Web Developers use Eclipse, 25% of Desktop developers use Eclipse, 22% of SysAdmins use Eclipse, and 27% of Data Scientists and Engineers use Eclipse.
There's a reason there are hundreds of text editors and only a handful of remaining general-purpose desktop operating system and only a handful of remaining microprocessor ISAs.
In the 1980s and 1990s the i386 ISA had tremendous velocity, which is why it still exists whereas DEC Alpha does not. In contrast, to the situation with microprocessor ISAs, it is practical to use a text editor without a lot of velocity -- or at least it is practical for me because of the way I use my text editor: basically, I just want something with a clean internal architecture that is as easy for me to learn how to modify as Emacs currently is.
Modifying or customizing vscode has a low barrier to entry only if you already know web technologies. if you do not, then it has a very high barrier to entry compared to most other text editors.
Atom and VS Code definitely haven't won for me. I don't use them, and personally I think they mostly suck. The plugin ecosystem seems to be the only benefit. But I actually need to use my system resources for things, so I'd rather not waste them for some minor conveniences in my editor.
Based on this video, I feel I'll almost certainly be using Xi for most of my editing in the future.
In the world of text editors, VSCode sure does seem to outperform Notepad++. I can open larger files with ease and while in those files it feels more responsive.
But for extremely large files, I use EditPad Lite.
I'd love to see this project continue and be a success. I think there is plenty of room for yet another text editor.
Here's where I'm going to be a bit of a party pooper.
Pragmatically speaking all of the great stuff Raph is talking about doesn't really matter. What Raph cares about are the kind of things people who build text editors like to geek out on and again that's all great.
Imma let you finish but VSCode and Atom and the entire Electron ecosystem have once again proven that a sub-optimal but powerful platforms with low barriers to entry win most of the time.
I'm rarely impressed by software projects (close or open) and I'm even less often impressed by Microsoft but what they've been able to do with VSCode in such a short amount of time, and the VELOCITY with which they are continuing to move means that for all practical purposes I will probably be in an Electron based editor for the foreseeable future.
I'm not saying I don't want Xi to continue to grow and be as great as it can be, I'm just being pragmatic.