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  • Who thought a dark-grey font on black background is a good idea? I can barely read parts of the website. And from the screenshots it looks like the application itself has the same style?
    by lclc
  • I am already a zellij user and not sure if I want to drive everything from an IDE instead. I definitely see the appeal though.

    I like the discoverability of the text prompt commands. I like that the terminal is more of a first class citizen. I like that I can run this with just `go run`.

    The themes are pretty bad right now IMHO. I use solarized/gruvbox themes- both light and dark.

  • I'm always looking for new gui code editors. For me right now Vscode is still the top (and since I've been trying Lean out it's required). Zed is a very close second.

    One thing I would like to see on the home page is a video showing it being used. Also would like to see how it looks in a light theme. The repository says it's keyboard driven does that mean it's modal or can I still use it like a normal modeless editor?

  • > One thing I would like to see on the home page is a video showing it being used. Fair point. I've been meaning to record a video for a while, but I hate being in front of a camera.

    > Also would like to see how it looks in a light theme. Not great. I prefer dark themes so I haven't spent enough time making it look good on a light theme.

    > The repository says it's keyboard driven does that mean it's modal or can I still use it like a normal modeless editor? There's three modes, vim, emacs and standard, which determine the key bindings not just when opening a file, but also everywhere else. https://docs.rune.build/learn/standard-editor

  • Lovely write-up! Will take a look at rune as an alternative to my Zed setup.

    Not because I dislike Zed, I'm just addicted to trying out IDEs :)

  • Thanks! We spend so many hours staring at these UIs.. I totally get it. It’s like driving a new car.
  • The open ledger and profit-sharing for contributors might be an even more interesting innovation than the IDE itself. I like my existing IDE but Rune looks very nice so I'll certainly give it a whirl.
  • Thanks! We're still working on the legal details, but should have something finalized in the coming weeks.
  • Exciting to have a hackable Go based editor. The onboarding was pretty nice from a Vim user. Although I'm having some trouble with my fish shell also having vim bindings.
  • Author here! The post explains some of the details behind using Go as the primary language for building an IDE. It also introduces our novel contributor program, which will distribute some of Unstable Build's proceeds amongst participating developers, as opposed to making them sign a CLA to surrender their rights to a company. Happy to answer questions!
  • Appreciated the sans CLA contribution and GPLv3.

    I’m intrigued overall by the terminal centric notion, I’ll check it out, thanks for building.

    I’m curious how the remote capabilities work, I’m often / ssh/mosh into a tmux eMacs session.

  • I am a huge advocate of this kind of app paradigm:

    It’s now really easy to spin a terminal emulator and make cross platform terminal apps that work the same on Windows, macOS and Linux regardless of users terminal. You can also make sure the term sends everything required to make the app “nice”, like mouse hover events.

    I started using this paradigm for some of my own company’s apps around 3 months ago because it was neat to allow the app to spawn DWM windows for sub windows, dialogs etc. but the app can also fall back to standard TTY for using over SSH or from within a docker or any other terminal. Also, using your own terminal window gives proper taskbar integration (stacking windows) and you can set your own app name/icon.

    (It’s possible to 1-shot this in Python using the prompt “use ghostling as a reference, write a terminal emulator in Python using raylib and libghostty that hosts my app” and the first pass was around half the speed of Ghostty.)

  • I disagree. First we got everything as HTML/Electron apps, now the trend is everything as TUIs. Cross-platform, better, but still worse somehow.

    What falls to the wayside are the actual and real productivity and usability improvements afforded by "real" GUI apps over the last 40-50 years.

    Don't get me wrong I'm a huge terminal user and absolutely love the clarity of a terminal and flexibility of a shell. But if I have to "learn" to use a TUI app - and they're not as simple to use as their authors might believe - I might as well learn to use the full GUI app with all the niceties available because of it.

  • I like the idea of making it trivial to work across multiple machines but I’d really prefer not to have to trust your coordination server and encryption approach etc.

    Could this (optionally) just run over Tailscale (I suppose ssh is always an option)

    https://docs.rune.build/learn/network

  • Yes, SSH is always an option, but it could totally work with a Tailscale network. In fact, we embed tsnet in Rune and use headscale as the coordination server, so there's nothing special about Rune's network. In the future, we're planning on adding more clients (iOS, Android), so hopefully it'll be more compelling then.
  • You mentioned “it’s like driving a new car” in another thread; I tried Rune in an earlier incarnation, and it was more drastic than a new car. I’m a vim user, and so enabled the Vim option in onboarding - that was a big mistake, because I literally could not do anything without using vim motions. I felt like a helpless noob on my first unix, how-do-I-exit-this-dam-text-editor.

    I realized that your onboarding was also training, and that I could not do anything with Rune without going through that training, and so I immediately exited and uninstalled. The friction was much too much.

    I’m not sure if the onboarding is still like that :) If it is, my feedback would be have much much lower friction to try (or warnings for those who claim to use vim :).

  • I've gotten this feedback from other folks as well. I just can't seem to strike a balance between "what do I do now" and "this is too much training".

    > You mentioned “it’s like driving a new car” in another thread; I tried Rune in an earlier incarnation, and it was more drastic than a new car. I’m a vim user, and so enabled the Vim option in onboarding - that was a big mistake, because I literally could not do anything without using vim motions. I felt like a helpless noob on my first unix, how-do-I-exit-this-dam-text-editor.

    I'm almost tempted to take this as a compliment. I personally hated every other editor's "vim mode". I wanted Rune to be more than a regular editor with vim mode. fwiw you can turn-off vim mode in the terminal (and iirc, console and agent as well) and keep it in the editor.

  • > we will give participating contributors a contractual right to share in the revenue generated by Rune, directly or indirectly.

    this sounds like a terrible idea. the only incentive to contribute to your project should be to fix a bug or contribute a feature upstream you yourself need.

    consider the fallout of Hacktoberfest, 'Tide' or the ai produced PR spam for social clout on GitHub as of today and then imagine what happens if someone provides a direct financial incentive to do it.

  • For a brief moment I thought this is about the game Rune[1] and got excited as I have played that a lot when growing up. Alas, that wasn’t it.

    [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rune_(video_game)

    by _hao
  • I came here only to post that comment, unfortunately, I already did before I saw yours.

    Tells us something about the age distribution on HN :D

  • that was the one where you heal by biting the heads off lizards
    by shoo
  • I must have the attention span of an ant. This happened to me TWICE today.
  • The game has a cool moment where the hero defeats Loki's minion by pushing him into some water. Loki then spells his blood in the water, reviving and corrupting the minion.

    You beat the minion, but to leave the area, you need to bathe in the same blood, and become corrupt like the monsters. You then return to your village, giant and powerful but no longer a person.

    https://youtu.be/s-j5n-Sw10M