
Textadept – A fast, minimalist, and extensible cross-platform text editor - giancarlostoro
https://foicica.com/textadept/
======
unicornporn
There is one reason I've stuck with TextWrangler for so long. It has excellent
auto saving features. I can close the application with dozens of unsaved
documents, and it opens with the exact same state the I left it in if I re-
open. Some of the documents I have open have been sitting unsaved for over a
year, surviving restart, crashes and god knows what. AFAIK, I have never lost
a document in TextWrangler.

The Textadept manual says:

> By default, Textadept saves its state upon quitting in order to restore it
> the next time the editor starts up.

But how well does it work in practice? Does anybody have experience?

~~~
mrec
Sublime does the "autosave unsaved docs" thing too, and does it flawlessly. (I
have other gripes with Sublime, I just don't think this is a USP for
TextWrangler.)

~~~
Darkenetor
At least on the beta channel that hasn't always been flawless. You can find
many reports and patch notes regarding corrupted sessions and I've definitely
lost some work over the years to that, the last time happening just half a
year ago on the then latest version.

------
kemayo
This does give me some SciTE nostalgia from my programming in the early 2000s.
That Scintilla look is really distinctive in some way, which is sort of
surprising given how little there is to it -- I saw that first screenshot and
immediately knew which editor component was being used.

(Granted "you can use Lua!" is always a hint.)

~~~
wink
Yes,SciTE! And if I remember correctly they had a non-monospace font with
weird italics as a default. I always thought "How can the first impression of
an awesome editor be so bad?"

------
self_awareness
I adore Gtk2 look and feel. Oh, why you had to go, Gtk2, why? Gtk 2 had a
soul, and Gtk 3 feels like it wants to scream "hey, I'm like macOS, but free!"

~~~
nfoz
This is off-topic, but IMO the biggest failure of GNOME 3 is that it called
itself GNOME 3. Sure it was mostly the same community working on a similar
project. But they could have used a new name, and made it a separate offering!
GNOME2 had basically completed its mission. It was stable and consistent and
had many happy users. But when a "GNOME 3" exists, people are force-upgraded.
Except it feels more like a separate product than an "upgrade".

In fact GNOME 2 lives on but strangely _that_ project had to re-brand itself
as MATE: [http://mate-desktop.org/](http://mate-desktop.org/).

Gtk2 and GNOME 2 did the same thing to all the happy users of GNOME1/Gtk1.2.
It was a community upheaval with big consequences.

I think your Gtk2/Gtk3 gripe is the same. If the goals are different enough,
let's please let the projects live happily in parallel.

~~~
Santosh83
Ideally this should happen, but with limited man power and motivation,
maintaining multiple huge code bases in parallel is something only big corps
can hope to do. That's why in open source the old code is forked and carried
forward by someone else, if it is worth it.

------
sandos
Not terribly impressed. I have been working on a 148MiB HTML file the last
couple of days, and opening it with textadept was quick enough but it
basically hangs when scrolling around.

Notepad++ handles it without any major problems. VS Code almost does,
sometimes it has crashed on closing a tab with the file open. Emacs I should
not even try... (Wow: spacemacs asked me to "open literally" and the
performance is really good! Nice!)

~~~
snaky
Emacs _is_ a fast, minimalist, and extensible cross-platform text editor.

~~~
sigzero
Minimalist? Really now.

~~~
yellowapple
It's basically a Lisp machine runtime that happens to include a built-in text
editing window.

Compared to the likes of Visual Studio, Eclipse, or Sublime, though, it's
certainly minimalist. The typical "Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping"
joke is a bit quaint nowadays.

------
dvfjsdhgfv
I'm pleasantly surprised. Just created a simple C file in Windows - the editor
identified the file type, compiled it and showed the output in the split view.
I might actually keep this piece of software for smaller jobs.

~~~
dbdr
> the editor identified the file type, compiled it and showed the output

It sounds dangerous to do that silently and by default. What if the program in
that state happens to do something destructive?

~~~
dvfjsdhgfv
I had to explicitly press "Compile", and then "Run". It did exactly what I
asked it to do.

------
firefoxd
They got me at split view. I use gedit on both windows and Linux, one thing
that is missing is the split view. From time to time i need to see to
documents at the same time.

Side note: gedit lost me on their last version with the hamburger menu. Those
sub menus makes it impossible to navigate.

~~~
cup-of-tea
Split view was actually one of the things that initially hooked me with emacs
many years ago. You can split any number of times and resize, it works in GUI
and text mode, and it's instant.

~~~
mhd
If I remember correctly, that was one of the "killer features" of WordPerfect
back in the days, something WordStar didn't have.

------
giancarlostoro
Things I loved about TextAdept:

Aside from it being lightweight, you can also run it in the terminal and use
the same standard shortcuts whilst in the terminal: ctrl + s, ctrl + c, etc. I
mention this in case anyone missed it in the front page.

I was using it for D development, and I can't remember off the top of my head,
but I remember being able to compile with TextAdept. I think at most I told it
how to compile and then off I went. I saw there was a D plugin that added more
features but I don't believe I ever used it.

------
patrickg
I really like Lua and hacking things in Lua, so this editor looks like its
what I need. But there is one show stopper, that I have no idea how to avoid:
scrolling horizontally on my Mac is terrible slow, and I have lots of files
with long lines..

The author and the communtity around it is great, all questions that I had
have been answered quickly. So every few months or so I download the newest
package and look if anyting has changed meanwile.

~~~
cup-of-tea
What kind of file have such long lines? Have you considered a text editor that
can wrap lines?

~~~
patrickg
Data files and source code. Sure I have considered using line wrap, but I
don't like it.

~~~
cup-of-tea
I've always avoided this by formatting source code to fit in 80 chars, using
"long" data format where possible, and just not editing big data files
interactively (I use sed or awk).

------
sigzero
Can it print yet? Last I looked, it could not.

------
TravelTechGuy
Any reason there's no Win64 version?

------
jason_slack
Looks like the site is down, currently.

------
astrobe_
I don't see a module for git support (and it's kind of difficult to search
for); am I missing something?

~~~
snaky
You miss Magit I suppose.

~~~
astrobe_
Or fugitive. I kind of expect some kind of support for git from a extendable
coding editor. I've found a generic VCS module BTW.

