(Graphical) IDE’s are great for development, but they’re slow to start and heavy to run. Sometimes you just want to take a quick look at an xml or dockerfile and you don’t want to spin up the whole IDE for that.

I’ve recently rediscovered notepad++ for that (on windows), what’s your prefered easy-acces-tekst-editor?

  • tatterdemalion
    25·
    1 year ago

    Helix. Instant startup. Minimal configuration required. Has all of the killer features I want from an IDE anyway.

    EDIT: I assumed people would just research this anyway, but a more complete list of features I enjoy from Helix:

    • very responsive
    • modal editing
    • declarative configuration file format (TOML, not Lua)
    • language server protocol
    • debug adapter protocol
    • written in Rust so I am more likely to be able to submit a PR if I need to

    Some cons (all known issues on github):

    • no plugin API yet
    • inline LSP diagnostics are overly intrusive and can overlap your code
    • cold-starts the LSP when you start the editor, so you might need to wait for symbol queries in a large project
    • jennraeross@lemmy.world
      6·
      1 year ago

      Helix deserves more love. Blazing fast, sensible defaults, good lsp support, vim-ish bindings. It’s really my perfect editor

        • jennraeross@lemmy.world
          3·
          1 year ago

          For anyone trying it out for the first time: If you aren’t sure how to do something, it’s probably hitting the spacebar in normal mode. That will bring up a list of shortcuts, including the debugging, file chooser, and actions (for the lip)

          • tatterdemalion
            2·
            1 year ago

            There is also a pretty good interactive tutorial. Just run the :tutor command.

      • beefsack@lemmy.world
        2·
        1 year ago

        It’s such a cool editor, but after decades of Vim motor memory I just can’t seem to wrap my head around the cursor / selection changes. I really wish there was an option to just make selection work like Vim.