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They don't make 'em like Sublime Text anymore - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49209354 - Aug 2026 (13 comments)
by dang - Fine, I do this since several decades.
I use an editor-construction kit named "Emacs" to build my own Editor, and IDE, and git porcelain, and organizer, and wiki. And many things more.
IDE with e.g. LSP integration, rustix and many other programmer-related modes and enhancements like tree-sitter. Git porcelain with magit. Organizer with Org-Mode. Wiki with denote.
- I literally just got Fable to write me a text editor. Well, I'll be honest, I got it to wrap the KDE KTextEditor library which is like 90% of a text editor.
I had been using Kate which was what an LLM suggested was the closest to something like Sublime Text on Fedora. But even Kate, which was great, had too much going on.
So I asked Fable to take the text editor part (KTextEditor) and wrap it using Rust with an LSP server. It took about 2 days but I have a tiny, super fast little editor. I use Sway to manage things like tabs, fuzzel stands in for fuzzy file search, broot stands in for an explorer view. I've already added Markdown preview support. I might get around to some basic git integration.
Then I got it to turn that little editor into a note-taking interface that I have bound to a Mod-m key binding to keep notes in ~/Notes.
We live in wild times. I hope everyone is taking advantage while they can.
- The author travels the same path that ended up eventually with VS Code.
Reminds me strongly of Marjin Haverbeke's talk at Full Frontal conf in 2011: https://ffconf.org/talks/respectable-code-editing-in-the-bro... - Using Canvas, then contenteditable, and then DOM.
Haverbeke went on to create CodeMirror and ProseMirror.
by Isofarro - Text editors are like mechanical watches or fountain pens. There is just so much beauty in the machinery that makes them. For me, there are hardly any other modules that are this satisfying to watch being made. Each time I find a new one (a good one like this), with everything on ropes and rendering and I-beam placement computations and ... it feels like a Christmas gift.by pmkary
- Seems to me that in the short term everybody screams “DO NOT OPTIMIZE THAT CODE”, in the medium term everybody shrugs “buy a new computer”, and in the long term everybody gradually migrates to the solutions that optimized that code.
I think the mainstream narrative around performance optimization is simply wrong. Inefficiency isn’t a constant, it’s a percentage. You look at software that’s 10x as fast and say yours will run that well in 20 years, and it does, but by then the other guy is 100x as fast, the gap is actually wider, everybody’s doing things that take advantage of all that speed, and you’re either 20 years in the past, still dog slow, balancing the two, or given up. Your software stays bad, and it happens again if you wait again, forever.
The idea that optimization matters less over time is short-term thinking.
It’s not the end-all, of course. Other things matter, context matters, it’s possible to over-invest, it doesn’t matter if your execs can just force people to use it, many of us are genuinely only planning two years out, etc.
by kqp - Yes, who would have guessed that the <textarea> element, designed specifically for this use case and built into browsers for 3 decades, would be the most performant and behaviorally consistent way to implement editable text.
I'm kind of sad the author stopped shedding unneeded complexity there though... we're not really building a text editor yet, we're building a website with a fancy input field. If we want to build a proper text editor we must eschew the bloat that is the web browser too.
by akersten - Sometime around 1980-81 I had a part time job while an undergraduate in college doing system programming/admin for the Caltech High Energy Physics department.
Rob Pike was the system programmer/admin before me when he was a grad student in high energy physics, but he left to go work at Bell Labs.
One day another student, Karl Heuer, and I both were engaging in the common programmer pastime of complaining about the screen editors of the day and saying we could write something better.
Somehow this turned into a competition, and we both spent all night racing against each other writing our editors. It was mostly silent except for the typing, interrupted by the occasional announcement of some feature that was now working to hopefully rattle the other.
In the morning the other student system programmer/admin, Norman Wilson, got in and saw what Karl and I had been up to.
Norman mentioned this in an email to Rob Pike. His response was something close to this:
> Everyone writes a screen editor. It's easy to do and makes them feel important. Tell them to work on something useful.
It was only a couple years or so later that Rob Pike wrote a screen editor. I wonder if it made him feel important? :-)
by tzs