> We live in wild times. I hope everyone is taking advantage while they can.
Yep, I'm taking advantage of the times by using the exact same tools I have been for years, and if those fail me, I'll pay for one of the multitude of other high quality editors offered by companies who's business it is to make them, so I get back to writing things in them instead of paying even more to companies trying to persuade me to believe that those products are obselete.
No shade on keeping using what is working. I was moving from Windows to Linux Fedora so I was in the market for a new editor. VSCode just wasn't working for me any more.
I considered a bunch of options, including vim or neovim or lazyvim, emacs, newer projects like zed. LLM gave a few more I can't recall including helix and Kate. There are so many good options these days, we're all spoiled for choice.
But the main thing is, and YMMV, I am not writing a lot of code anymore. I'm mostly reading/searching/navigating. So all of the powerful editing features are lost on me. No editors really match my current workflow, they all have too much.
So this was an opportunity to try something out, to experiment. See if I could do the real-deal vibe coding thing and judge the result. I just said "I want it to do ..." and then a few minutes later it did. I repeated this until it did enough to use as my primary editor.
I don't recommend it for anyone else, nor do I expect people to agree. Just describing my thought process.
What features did you end up implementing? I assume tree-sitter based highlighting, lsp, and maybe fuzzy search? Did you implement anything different that you didn't get out of existing editors that you tried?
Very few features on purpose. Every editor I tested had all the features I added and more.
It is worth noting that KTextEditor is a fully-featured library. Like, line numbers+gutter (for eventual git status icons), undo/redo, save, warn on exit for unsaved changes, syntax highlighting, color theming. It does 95% of what we'd all call "editing". But it doesn't do things like tab interface, project explorer, terminal pane, output windows, etc.
What the library didn't have were LSP features, of which I only implemented a few (error squiggles under things that fail the type check, go to definition). Notable absent are completions and hover features for things like help. I also only added (and tested) LSP servers for typescript, Rust and Go.
My plan has been: do as little as possible until I need something, then ask Fable to add it.
edit: I guess one thing I added I didn't see everywhere else was a built-in Markdown preview. But many editors have that (VSCode definitely does) so it isn't special.
> Very few features on purpose
Not a criticism just an interesting sign of the times that this is ambiguous and before vibe coding it would have been obvious from the context which you mean (deliberately minimal) but now it could just as easily mean that Fable implemented features without asking you