I have to admit that some of the gimmicks that were supposedly available in the ‘curses version didn’t seem to work for me, which is sad. The list, I should mention, doesn’t seem quite complete though. Customizable keybindings, if you hate those ones from two decades ago. Controls that mimic the “CTRL+C for copy, CTRL+V for paste, CTRL+O for open, CTRL+S for save, CTRL+W for close, CTRL+Q for quit” keybindings that date back a decade or two. And I like what I see.īoxed popup dialog windows. Ordinarily I would put forth jed as my candidate of choice, but textadept might be another possible usurper.Īs I understand it, textadept is primarily intended to run under a graphical environment, but the version I installed out of AUR includes textadept-curses, which you see above. (I prefer a menu item because I don't do this task often and the cognitive overhead of a menu item is lower than a keyboard shortcut or calling a function.) I added this in the menu.I’m always on the lookout for good text editors, mostly because I think the fragile and uneasy triumvirate of vim, emacs and nano - which rules the Unix multiverse with a quavering fist and super-funky key controls - is ripe for being overturned. So, how did I implement this system in Textadept? The first thing I did was add a menu item for opening the capture file if it's not already open. I need to enter a few keystrokes and start typing. There's no time or mental energy available for an elaborate system while I'm working. After trying many different solutions, what I found works best is a file called capture.txt where I know everything will be safe until I have time to review each item, make a decision about what needs to be done, and take appropriate action. There's simply no way I can properly organize the several dozen of these that come along each day while I'm working. It's an unending stream of a few big items and a lot of small items. I have a lot of information flying at me during the day: a link I come across that is not of any particular use right now but that may be useful in the future, a few pieces of reference material someone sent me for a service project, a request for a meeting, an example that came to mind randomly that I want to incorporate into tomorrow's lecture, a minor comment from a coauthor about a problem with one of the figures in our paper, a clarification on a rule for the graduate program. First, some background on my workflow so you understand what I need to do. I might post more on this topic in the future, but let me give you an example of one customization I've done with Textadept. ![]() Textadept, by just being a text editor out of the box, doesn't have that problem.) (But it's correct - Emacs is not a lightweight text editor, and you can end up going down rabbit holes when you try to change a key binding, unless you're willing to accept verbosity. That last bit wasn't important from the perspective of scripting. Just as Emacs is an interface for Emacs Lisp, TA is an interface for Lua, and with a lot less overhead. I asked why I wasn't using a better text editor. It maybe isn't for everyone, but in Emacs when I was doing this to duplicate a line: This was a practical thing to do: I can use TA as a browser on really old laptops. I have functions for searching the web, I can search YouTube and open the videos in VLC, and so on. It calls out to lynx and loads a readable text version of the page. It's so small and lightweight that, just for fun, I wrote a "web browser" inside TA. I slowly built up functionality inside TA to the point that I realized I could replace everything I was doing in Emacs. Emacs always has a lag when I start it up, whereas TA is instant. You have the full power of Lua inside TA. That's not to say TA does everything you can do in Emacs, but it replaced all of the scripting I was doing with Emacs. ![]() I don't want to start a flamewar, but I moved most things I was doing in Emacs to Textadept a while back because I found Textadept more convenient. Textadept - probably influenced by Emacs - is one that I've used extensively as a frontend for a programming language. ![]() Other text editors do have that capability. Unfortunately, it's not an accurate statement. I think many Emacs users have this view, and as a long time Emacs user, I love the ability to write libraries of functions and interact with them from a text editor. Other editor users simply have no concept of how easy it is to whip up some quick script to perform some task in emacs. Yesterday on Hacker News, someone commented
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