Re:Helix: a post-modern modal text editor
by zozbot234 on Tuesday June 01, 2021 @05:09PM
(#27361324)
LSP and Tree-sitter seem to have the right approach, aiming to provide a standard layer that can support a wide variety of languages and ecosystems throughout. Language-agnostic tools can interoperate with this approach too but they only provide very basic features, not really enough to compare well with existing workflows.
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Re:Helix: a post-modern modal text editor
by linsomniac on Tuesday June 01, 2021 @06:23PM
(#27362232)
Just this morning I upgraded to NeoVim 0.5 and set up TreeSitter and LSP with Lunar. I haven't had much time to play with it today, but it's looking good so far. https://github.com/ChristianChiarulli/LunarVim
LSP seems like a real blessing for editor authors, since "it can't do anything useful with my preferred programming language" has been a big lock-in.
?. This is a back handed compliment? Can you explain?
If you're trying to get people to try your new editor, no matter how awesome the ideas that you're trying, you're going to lose a chunk of your audience if it doesn't support C syntax highlighting, a chunk if it doesn't support Python intellisense, and so on and so forth. You can have the best idea in the world, but people will play with it, and decide that they love it but can't use it for "real work" unless you slog through adding native support for a bunch of languages and runtimes/compiler suites.
That's a huge burden.
Now, if you implement LSP, you get "for free" support for C#, C, Python, Rust, etc etc. People can evaluate your editor on its merits as a text editor, not on whether you had the time and energy to add support for their favourite language.
I guess he means that LSP (at least in theory) enables "simple" editors to offer features which in the past have been the domain of IDEs (code completion etc.), and for editors supporting LSP, the support for a given language will (again in theory) be as good in one editor as in the next one you might want to try out...