It's been done. https://github.com/google/xi-editor

There's some cool things to note about Xi which make me more excited about it:

  * It's being written by Raph Levien, known for his work on Inconsolata, Ghostscript, and font-rs[1] among other things.
  * The design goals include incredibly high performance, beauty, reliability and developer friendliness[2].
  * It's very fast at handling large files, though the editor is still missing a lot of functionality.

Raph was also interviewed on the New Rustacean podcast[3] and talks a fair bit about Xi.

  [1]: https://github.com/google/font-rs
  [2]: https://github.com/google/xi-editor#a-modern-editor-with-a-backend-written-in-rust
  [3]: http://www.newrustacean.com/show_notes/interview/_2/part_1/index.html

I don’t see how this would be better than just Neovim with a few plugins. I switched from Vim to Neovim and love it. Highly configurable and rock solid for everything I have asked it to do. Although I miss things like a live Markdown editor with preview like what you see in VS Code, but that is a small price to pay for ultimate control over your editor.

I use this plugin for previewing markdown https://github.com/suan/vim-instant-markdown

Rather, it has been started. Xi currently is a very cool technology demo, but not a viable editor.

I've just recently switched over to it for my day to day work. Admittedly there are rough edges, but I think it's fair to call it viable for sufficiently small values of viable. I expect to do a major push later in the year to polish it to the point of being really viable.

Even better: A rendered of graphic UIs.

The point about using electron is that you can use the browser to render the UI, and is filled with a lot of baggage. Imagine a UI rendered just for build UIs, not tied to JS or DOM or CSS, but able to work react-like.

You mean like react-native?

That's still JS. React Native doesn't get rid of JS, it just exposes native platform APIs to JS.

JS isn't the problem though. V8 is pretty efficient and lightweight. The problem is that Electron pulls in all of the DOM stuff when there are lighter alternatives built into most operating systems.

> V8 is pretty efficient and lightweight

How much lightweight? Similar to Lua?

Yeah, but not with the full weight of node, js or (html)DOM.

For the UI something like TCL or Lua or just some DSL is better.

Sublime Text. Not Rust or C, but still much faster than Atom\Code. (Though I have to say Code team did a great job, it's nearly as fast as Sublime now. While Atom is still useless garbage)

Code is nearly as fast? Try opening a 10 mb file with syntax highlighting.

I'm curious, is this something you do in real life is it a synthetic benchmark? Either I open code files that are a few kB (needs syntax highlighting) or I open logs (which don't). Maybe your workflow is different from the rest of us but I can attest that for my needs, VS Code is rock solid.

I do. I have log files that I want to syntax highlight. In notepad++, this is a breeze.

notepad++ is not that great handling big files > 100MB, given that it is written in c++ and yes unfortunately sometimes you have such large log files.

Not sure if you've tried this recently, but I have. Code will open e.g. my 6.3MB (unminified, unzipped) vendor.js file for an app I work on, with full syntax highlighting, instantly. And scrolling is buttery smooth in it. :)

This was one of my problems with Atom. Code works just fine even with bigger files.

Text Adept [0]

Blazing fast and responsive even with 20MB+ files (in my experience), is extensible, and is cross platform.

Admittedly, not a IDE, and in C instead of C++. Extensions in Lua.

Not sure why it doesn't get more love.

[0] https://foicica.com/textadept/

What features do you want? There is Gnome Builder, KDevelop (also on windows), QtCreator, Visual Studio 2008, even vim itself. These are just some of the options.

Sublime Text

well electron is 67% C++