The following gif demonstrates folding:
ED IS THE STANDARD EDITOR
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
edeven support the functionality demonstrated in the gif above? I’m asking this from a genuine position of ignorance.Honestly: Yeah, i was trolling (kind of), but:
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.
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 howedfares 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 But, unfortunately, that one has been archived since earlier this year.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?
Why ed? Well, it keeps my brain from rotting 😀 just half joking… i have noticed that whenever i use a somewhat more “user friendly” software my mind starts to wander off more easily and instead of being more focussed on the programming task i shortly after find myself doing… $THING instead of being productive. So, being the only jack-of-all-trades-computer-guy in a small-ish company i tend to chose the tools that work for me, even if they are a bit… anachronistic.
I think the best maintained version of Sam would be the one included in 9front (if you want some truely special experience) or if you want to stay (somewhat) in the realm of the sane you can use plan9port which also brings in many nice tools out of the Plan9 ecosystem.
Aight. This conversation has been much appreciated, thanks fam!
Perhaps I might have to give
eda go at some point if I find myself hacking more with elisp rather than outputting actual productive work. But, at least for now, this is (thankfully) not really a concern for mine 😜.As for Sam, I should either install a different OS (i.e. 9front) for the truely special experience. Or…, build it (myself) with plan9port. Did I get that right?
Well regarding plan9port, it is really, really easy to acquire… just clone the Github repo (https://github.com/9fans/plan9port), run ./INSTALL and everything else sorts itself out ;-)
- Why
Look at Helix and Zed.
Zed is the goat
If you don’t want to go the Emacs or Vim routes, try Kate. Neovim is amazing but Kate is too from what I hear. Similar support for LSPs.
There’s got to be a Micro plug-in for this.
WAIT, if I’m reading this right, it’s had code folding since last year: https://github.com/zyedidia/micro/pull/2942
I’m gonna try this right nowThanks a lot for putting in the work! Uhmm…, how has testing been? Were you able to pull this off with Markdown?
I got distracted. At first glance, it seems that PR was for the groundworks, I haven’t been able to figure out how to actually do it. I’ll try again in a bit.
Ah xD, no problem fam! Please keep us updated :P .
Others have given you many options, but I would like to know why Nvim or Emacs are not good options for you?
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[1] 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[2] 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[3] 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…
If you had started with that people would have told you that nothing comes even close. The closest things you will find are Atom (archived), Sublime (closed source) and Helix (still very new and no plugin support, but something to keep an eye on).
Speaking of obsidian, the reason why it took me forever to start using Silverbullet is that Emacs has org-mode which does most of what Silverbullet/Obsidian do out of the box, plus some other stuff that they don’t do (e.g. excel like tables).
But I wanted something I could edit remotely through my phone and web interfaces are better than using text editors over ssh connections. 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 dosrnq'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).But those are the reasons why I switched, many people use Emacs for decades without ergonomic issues, whichever of the two you decide to learn you’ll understand why they’re the staple editors for most people who actually choose an editor.
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 dosrnq'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*.
Will probably get airstriked for this, but Zed is also a option.
Also, if you’re using GNOME, then try GNOME builder. And if you’re using KDE, then try KDevelop or Kate.
tbf, i love zed and using it for big stuff and neovim for basic scripts is the perfect balance for me
i’ve heard that some people love using kate because, with some plugins, it really can do all most people need. i’ve seen a dude make a video on it but would need some time to find it again if there was any interest.
I remember something called lapce too
Edit 0: https://github.com/lapce/lapce
Removed by mod
I have to agree with the positivism surrounding Kate. It has been the only one (together with KDevelop) out of the 5 text editors I’ve installed and tested since yesterday that actually did what I desired from it. Props to the devs! Let’s see if it can dethrone Emacs 😜.
Emacs will always be abe to do things you can’t do with other editors. It’s a text based interface toolkit that happens to also have a good text editor and IDE capability. Buuut, you need to spend a lot of time to set things up. I use it since probably more than 20 years and I still often need to look up and learn stuff. If you want a tool and not a workshop, get a simpler editor.
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[1] 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.
Granted, I haven’t tried out Neovim for this yet. ↩︎
On windows: Notepad++. On Linux-based OS: Kate. And there’s also JetBrains Fleet, that is jetbrains answer to vscode.
Kate is for Windows and Mac as well
Thank you!
I tested Notepad Next, which seems to be Notepad++’ cross-platform alternative. However, I wasn’t able to get the folding functionality on a Markdown file. Am I doing something wrong?
I’ve tried Kate since yesterday, it has been one of the better ones for now.
JetBrains Fleet seems like a cool project. But I’ll probably wait until it’s open sourced. Thanks anyways!
Also notepad++ on wine on Linux … Not my favorite but it’s there
Yeah… but why? Kate is better in about every way. And while we’re on the topic, Kate is also available on the windows store, with a real Windows build.
Sublime.
Thank you! Unfortunately, I’ve come to the understanding it’s not open source. So it’s unlikely I’ll go for it.
Textadept!.
Geany(Its a lightweight GTK Based IDE)
Thank you!
Question: According to this table, Geany’s capabilities might leave some to desire when it comes to code/text folding. Is this correct? Or is the table simply outdated?
Yw and I think it’s up to date that list (i just looked at article last updater)
Thank you for confirming my suspicions. I took it for a test run and wasn’t able to replicate the above functionality either. Hopefully it’s an error on my side, but it’s very possible that I will not stick to Geany.
Did you try plugins but sure it’s fine
I have looked into plugins, but nothing I’ve found suggests to contain/offer the desired functionality.
ahh okay
Aight. Anyhow, this has been a lovely conversation fam! Thanks for your contributions!
There’s also Zed. And helix.
Amongst all the other great alts here
Also neovim is really dope! Just have to throw that there
There’s also Zed.
Noted. Thank you!
And helix.
I believe this doesn’t have folding (yet). Unfortunately.
Also neovim is really dope! Just have to throw that there
xD , Neovim is definitely pretty cool.
I use Zed as my primary editor these days. It’s just about ready for prime time!
(Source: 12 years of web and Linux hacking)
By admission of my fellow Lemmy-users, I’ve gone and tried out many text editors over the course of the past few days. Unfortunately, I didn’t like the installation options for Zed in my current distro of choice (i.e. Fedora):
- its flatpak is unverified
- not found in Fedora’s own repos
It is found within Terra’s repos. However, users report that -at least for Zed- some of the installed packages from Fedora’s own repo are replaced by Terra’s. This interaction can be prevented by giving preference for Fedora’s own packages, but it seems like a can of worms I’m not very interested to engage with at the moment. Hopefully this situation will be resolved rather sooner than later.
Anyhow, have you got the chance to work with Emacs and/or Kate over the years? If so, could you chime in and give your thoughts on how Zed fares in comparison? Please note that I’m (mostly) asking within the confines of a relatively simple text editor used to take notes with.
Honestly I never really got into using any of the terminal based editors- I like a pretty GUI, personally.
That being said I have been a KDE user for the last couple of years and actually have quite a favourable view on Kate. It’s a very competent editor with a great deal of extensibility.
The big difference between the two is their focus. Zed is written to be targeted at developers and as such has some capabilities that Kate doesn’t (afaik) like an AI assistant panel, handling multi megabyte text files with grace, and being able to directly connect to remote file systems over SSH.
If you’re not looking for those features I think you’d be very happy with Kate!
Kate,kdevelop,xed,mousepad,gnome builder.,notepad next(clone notepad++)
That’s a lot of options! Thank you.
You might have a look at LEO:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_(text_editor)
I used it extensively for some time to write big documentation. It is good.
But I’d guess that for most tasks, Emacs org-mode is the most powerful option.
Interesting. First time reading about it*. Were it not for you, this might have been completely off the radar. So thank you for mentioning it!
But I’d guess that for most tasks, Emacs org-mode is the most powerful option.
Yeah, it has been slowly growing on me 😜. But I would like to explore all other options before I fully commit.
What makes LEO great for consistent larger documentation is that one can write things like footnotes or a glossary in nodes which can be linked into multiple pages - much like files with multiple hard links in a file system.
Also, it can re-read exported generated files into a structured outline, which is managed under version control.
Also, good support for literate programming, which is Don Knuth’s perhaps greatest idea.
Yeah, it has been slowly growing on me 😜. But I would like to explore all other options before I fully commit.
You’ve already discovered the best editor. There’s no need to explore more. ;)
