
Lime Text – Open Source Sublime Text alternative (2014) - type0
http://limetext.org/
======
dilap
As an emacs addict/user, what I really want is a credible alternative to that
cockroach of editors.

Price of admission: run in a terminal, run graphically, run on every possible
system, be open source, be ridiculously, easily extensible.

What a successor might add:

Not be riddled with bugs.

Not be ridiculously, terribly bad at actually displaying text (quickly,
smoothly, large amounts).

Not be extended in a language that's so slow that most "intelligent" modes end
up being piles of half-correct regex hacks.

Not not care about correctness, in general.

Hop to it, dear idealistic genius whiz-kid reader!

Or fund me, overly-$-laden startup lottery winner. I'll take a crack at it.

~~~
timehastoldme
Atom (hear me out):

\+ runs graphically

\+ runs linux, macos, windows (nothing else?)

\+ open source

\+ ridiculously, easily extensible

\+ not riddled with bugs (slowness is not a bug)

\+ for small files, comparably quick to Sublime on my machine

\+ major dev community; already much better than 6 months ago

\- slow in some instances, esp. large files

\- doesn't run in terminal

\- doesn't run in less-popular OSes

+/\- moderate RAM usage, decreasing

~~~
omginternets
Honestly I don't get the Atom hate. It's a great editor.

I came to Atom from Sublime because the plugin ecosystem was growing much
faster and the community felt more active. I haven't looked back since.

And no, Atom not designed to open 30Mb files. Complaining about this is akin
to stomping on a land mine and complaining that your Timberland boots didn't
save your foot. Just use Atom for its intended purpose: editing source files
written by reasonably reasonable people.

~~~
KZeillmann
I just want to be able to look at the first 10 lines of a 15MB JSON I
downloaded of the internet without having the entire application crash. It
doesn't seem like too much to ask. There's a big difference between asking for
a 15MB file and a 500MB file. 15MB is a pretty reasonable size for a text
editor to be able to open without crashing, IMO. Unfortunately, I have to peek
at those in Vim instead. Nothing wrong with Vim, but I hate having to switch
editors to look at one file.

~~~
di4na
head ?

~~~
elmigranto
head — [https://linux.die.net/man/1/head](https://linux.die.net/man/1/head)

tail — [https://linux.die.net/man/1/tail](https://linux.die.net/man/1/tail)

less — [https://linux.die.net/man/1/less](https://linux.die.net/man/1/less)

------
cyberferret
Funny - Sublime has been taking a pounding from all angles over the years, but
still seems to be bouncing back off the ropes and swinging hard.

This project looked familiar, and I seem to recall coming across it a while
back. As others have pointed out, the blog hasn't been updated since 2014, so
it looks like a stalled project. Another points victory to Sublime perhaps? ;)

~~~
cbHXBY1D
It's hard for these other Electron based editors to completely replace Sublime
when they are so much slower. People say that they don't notice how slow Atom
or VS Code are, but try running them on a 5+ year old laptop like mine.

~~~
izym
This one isn't Electron based, but rather it uses QML (i.e. Qt Quick).

------
preek
The headline on the Landing Page says "Elegant Free Open-Source". I for one
applaud these great selling propositions.

And I'm speaking after using Emacs and VIM for 15 years having not seen one
other editor concept that was ultimately superior.

Sublime Text was horrible in that it offered an easy refuge so many young and
inexperienced people. But ultimately it was a closed source prison that they
got pulled into. And yes, I'm a professional developer having founded multiple
companies. I'm a capitalist, nothing wrong with selling software. However,
having great tools that last a lifetime available is one of the most important
point I learned and like to teach to my students (I'm a lecturer, too).

Why lock yourself in? Just because it looks more shiny and is easier in the
first week? That's a good reason to use many things, but not your primary
driver as a professional software engineer.

Hooray for these new editors that look shiny and are open source. And then,
when the students ask how I did those crazy things in Emacs, they still get
those huge eyes and want to gobble all the information in. This kind of
curiousness happens rarely with people locked into proprietary systems.

~~~
CJefferson
The problem with Emacs and vim, to me, is that they don't fit in.

I'm currently trying to take up Emacs (I pick up one of vim and Emacs every
few years. Not sure why. Feels like a thing I should do). Here is some of my
list of Emacs problems.

* The big one. Every other app on my Mac uses the same shortcut keys for cut, copy, paste, save, open, search, search + replace, spell check. That's probably 95-99% of the keys I press, and Emacs has to be special and support none of the standards. I know there are good historical reasons for this, but that's no use to a new user.

* Server mode doesn't seem to "understand" Macs -- when I shut down my Mac it just hangs and I have to force kill it. Without server mode I end up with loads of Emacs which seem to load slower than atom can open a window.

* I like editting text ,(as opposed to code) in a variable width font. Doesn't seem well supported.

* The default settings seem very limited, so then I wonder if I should use something like spaceman's, but that is massive and brings it's own bugs.

I can be comfortable, and fairly productive, instantly in sublime, atom, lime
and vscode. Why can't Emacs, by default, have a "be like a Mac app" mode?

~~~
thomasahle
Personally I'd prefer if everything else were more like vim. Most platforms
seem to have complete abandoned keyboard navigation as a priority.

Actually the vimium plugin for Chrome is great in that respect. I guess I can
do 80% of my work with vim keybindings now.

~~~
preek
Spot on!

One of the biggest strengths is just this. I use VIM key bindings everywhere:
Chrome, FF, Terminal, even Emacs. Back in the day where I also did much work
on Windows, I also had them in Visual Studio and MSSQL Manager.

------
nhaliday
This was an interesting attempt but I think development kind of stalled. The
original creator, quarnster, left the project.

~~~
barbs
You're right. Blog and roadmap haven't been editted since 2014.

~~~
lightdot
Git commits to the project are from August this year.

I see many projects with a similar public perception issues. Pages and blogs
need to reflect their activities better.

------
keyle
As much as this is refreshing, Sublime just works though.

Even Sublime 2 wasn't that bad you'd want Sublime 3. For heavy projects I use
IntelliJ. I was happy to pay for Sublime. I remember switching from Textmate
to Sublime because it had compelling arguments.

Sublime is the perfect editor between Notepad and IntelliJ. Anyway I hope this
is just as good.

~~~
themodelplumber
Do any of these text editors you mention include a screensaver? I was just
trying BREEZE for MS-DOS today and found that feature really appealing. I came
back to my desk and the entire UI had just vanished and turned into a field of
twinkling stars. I would love it if one of my more modern text editors did
that.

~~~
flukus
Does anyone use desktop screen savers anymore? It used to be amazing how much
customization some people put into to something that only appeared when they
weren't using it.

More apps need boss mode though.

~~~
falcolas
I do, to lock my mac on demand. I think there's another way to do it now, but
I'm stuck in old habits.

------
charlesetc
People might be interested in this one too - got a weird name, and it's still
under development, but it seems pretty good
[http://www.vim.org/](http://www.vim.org/)

~~~
nitemice
Really, this is more like
[NeoVim]([https://github.com/neovim/neovim](https://github.com/neovim/neovim)),
in the way it's structured and with its aim to rebuild its namesake in a
modular fashion with swappable UIs.

~~~
chmike
As an old prgrammer feeling the limit of neuron counts and possible premise of
alzheimer, I avoid tools where you have to know by hart all the commands or
have to read a long help text to find what you need.

I use vim as editor for system files, but I only use the 1% of its
capabilities I really need. All these shortcuts make me sick because I can't
remember them and can't easily find them. That's also why I don't like Atom,
sublime, Visual and all that kind of editors. I'll give a try to this Lime
editor.

The best IDE around, in my humble opinion, is QtCreator because the interface
is remarkably simple and intuitive. I regret no one tries to copycat this one.

~~~
flukus
Vim is a language, not a bunch of commands to remember. A sufficient vim user
would probably be unable to tell you how exactly they accomplished something.

I gave QtCreator a try just a couple of weeks ago actually. I wanted to give
qml a go and expected this to be where it shined. But the create project
dialog wouldn't fit on the screen and the create button wouldn't enable for
some reason (possible something off screen).

~~~
mullsork
> But the create project dialog wouldn't fit on the screen and the create
> button wouldn't enable for some reason (possible something off screen).

This really reminds of using KDE3.x & QT in general a decade ago or so :)

~~~
flukus
I never encountered it with KDE, but I always ran it on the standard 15 inch
monitor of the day.

------
hossbeast
Am I the only one sick of projects declaring, "written in rust", "primarily
developed in go", etc? Why do your users care about your implementation
language? Do you have any features worth mentioning? If your main selling
point is that you used the shiny new language, I'm already doubting the
usefulness of the endeavor.

Just the straw that finally broke the camel's back . . .

~~~
dcw303
I've been guilty of this. When meteor.js was new, I made an issue tracker, and
proudly submitted it to HN with a title something like "Issue tracker made
with Meteor".

Some things I found:

1\. You have a much better chance of getting upvotes if you appeal to a
popular technology. Had I not mentioned Meteor I suspect I would never have
made it to the front page.

2\. In my case, most of the initial interest came from those more interested
in the underlying technology than the application.

3\. I found it very difficult to market the project as an issue tracker as it
was already established as a meteor project.

~~~
qznc
I guess this one?
[https://github.com/dcw303/mindmeld](https://github.com/dcw303/mindmeld)

Could not get it to run. Broken with current meteor?

~~~
dcw303
That's the one. It hasn't been updated since Meteor 0.6(?) a few years ago, so
I'd be amazed if it still worked.

------
no_protocol
> Lime Text is a powerful and elegant text editor primarily developed in Go

It's very interesting to me that this is the most important statement the
creators can make about their project. Of course anyone making a text editor
will say it is powerful and elegant. As an end-user, I rarely care what
language a text editor is written in. At least not right up front. It might
matter if I'm interested in extending or modifying it. Maybe this fragment can
be improved.

The second half of the sentence actually gives me an idea what problem it is
solving and why it exists:

> that aims to be a Free and open-source software successor to Sublime Text.

(Awesome!)

The second paragraph is also very interesting and draws my interest.

I love the "Roadmap" button, neat touch. It shows very clear goals and a
reasonable amount of progress.

~~~
matmann2001
For the people they are targeting by calling it a successor to Sublime, the
language actually does matter.

Many, likely most, Sublime users are taking advantage of the myriad of plugins
written for Sublime in Python. I immediately discounted the usefulness of this
product simply because it is written in Go, which would mean I need to find
new equivalents for the plugins I use on a day to day basis, or write Go
versions of them myself.

I honestly don't have enough to complain about with Sublime that would make
switching worth that amount of effort.

~~~
Arcsech
For what it's worth, it does aim to be (mostly) compatible with the Sublime
Text Python API[0]. The base editor is written in Go, but the plugins are
Python (much like Sublime itself is C++, but uses Python plugins).

That said, I wouldn't get too excited about this - not much has really
happened on it since April 2015.

[0]: It's the fifth point on the roadmap:
[https://github.com/limetext/lime/wiki/Goals](https://github.com/limetext/lime/wiki/Goals)

------
TheAceOfHearts
I'm a very happy Sublime Text user, but I wish it were open source. I don't
mind paying, since I get so much value out of it. If it were open, others
could make contributions, and I wouldn't have concerns of my favorite editor
dying off.

From the activity graphs, it looks like development on Lime Text has stalled a
little. There's some updates in the wiki entries, but not much more. Hopefully
things pick up!

In relation to editors, I've been playing around with Spacemacs and evil mode
enabled, but so far I haven't found the time to give it an honest chance as my
daily editor.

~~~
usaphp
Being open source has really small relation to project not dying off. In your
own example Lime Text stalled even tho its open sourced, same with textmate
which went open source.

------
jakobegger
Something about the phrase "Successor to Sublime" rubs me the wrong way. It's
condescending and misleading.

I initially thought, did the author of Sublime open source his work like the
author of Textmate? But no, it looks like this looks like an independent
project, and since Sublime is still updated, can there be a successor yet?

~~~
Camillo
It's what the French call a "dick move".

~~~
omginternets
If you're thinking of "coup de bite", that doesn't mean what you think it
means.

------
lucio
Why "successor"? Has SublimeText died somehow? Last time I've check my copy
was running happily.

~~~
jayflux
To be fair, this was back in 2014 when people thought sublime was dead and
abandoned by Jon. However now that's not the case and the dev team are rolling
out releases again, and expect a stable v3 to come out soon

------
jdefr89
Don't enough text-editors exists, things are getting outta control now. Vim,
Emacs, Sublime, Atom, Lime... Shit, pick one of the four and be happy damn.

Same thing is happening with programming languages. There is a new one
everyday that doesn't offer anything better than what we had before. Everyone
just has their eye on the shiny new toys I guess...

~~~
minitech
You’re not obligated to use it. All existing editors (and languages) also have
their flaws* and room for improvement, and I’m happy to see people try.

* Preempting the “then send a pull request”: sometimes the flaws are fundamental or otherwise unlikely to change, like VimL, Emacs’s keybindings, Sublime Text’s closed-sourcedness, Atom and VS Code’s Electron bloat…

------
kahrkunne
OK, but what does it do that Emacs doesn't (yet - give it a week)

------
Philipp__
I am afraid this is project is stalling. I would like open source alternative
to Sublime. I use Emacs as of now, but it is funny how so many years down the
line, we can't make good, robust editor that is _focused on performance_. Sure
eye candy should be present in some degree (I am bitch about colors and nice
UI, since I spend a lot of time in it, I like to make it look cool to me, but
I always put performance and function on first place). Xi looks like it has
potential, but it is pretty early in development. I just hope Ralf sticks to
it, and in few years I think we will have great editor, with right technology,
right philosophy and hopefully right community.

------
oridecon
[https://github.com/limetext](https://github.com/limetext)

[https://github.com/limetext/backend](https://github.com/limetext/backend)

------
RKoutnik
Given that the goal for the plugins API is "I’ll probably never implement this
100%, only the api bits I need for the plugins I use." [0] I don't see this
getting traction. Piggypacking off an existing ecosystem is a great way to
bootstrap a project but so long as it's wack-a-mole to discover if all your
plugins work, this remains a pet project in my mind.

[0]
[https://github.com/limetext/lime/wiki/Goals](https://github.com/limetext/lime/wiki/Goals)

------
wybiral
Looks interesting. I'd recommend packaging some installation options instead
of just source. I plan to check it out later, but it would sit higher on my
queue if it were easier to try out.

------
Karunamon
It'll be interesting to see how this stacks up performance-wise.

My main reason for using Sublime over something like Atom is that Atom is a
hog, both in the large (memory) and slow senses of the word.

------
marknadal
This looks really awesome...

But how on earth do I start using it? No download, no install, nothing! That
is going to be a major hurdle to adoption.

------
yoosuf
Textmate, Atom and Sublime were been successful editors, I've seen limeeditor
since 2008 or something they've been there for windows only, and now trying to
do with cross platform, very interesting.... the roadmap looks promising too.
Hope we wil be able to get an nice editor soon

------
anindha
Why not just pitch Jon (creator of Sublime) on open sourcing his editor. A
business model where there is a community version and a professional version
could work. I am sure you would be able to hit a Kickstarter goal pretty
easily.

Disclosure: I've worked with Jon previously

------
tomhoward
Previously seen on HN 2 years ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8196245](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8196245)

------
ForFreedom
Is there a direct download link for the mac?

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poisonarena
pretty cool seeing an opensource alternative to something I like so much

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damiien
did Atom hasn't be open source Sublime alternative?

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sanketbajoria
Pretty cool

