I actually thought that was where this article was going, and was very surprised when it wasn't mentioned.

I will say though (as a lighttable backer with the fancy-schmancy t-shirt to prove it) that the current builds of light table are... incomplete. The idea of lighttable is very exciting, but I haven't really found the current builds to be much use. They are too similar to existing editors / workflows, and as it's beta you're sacrificing stability for not a whole lot of gain.

I agree. would add that a comprehensive solution is needed - not just one for particular types of development.

I was working in background on my own system before light table appeared. am back on it now in my spare time since light table is aiming away from my requirements. every time I see an article like this i think I should have worked harder to get it working by now

> aiming away from my requirements

Out of curiosity, what are your requirements?

It's hard for me to imagine that LT is really aiming away from anyone :) It's a platform for building whatever workflow you could want, integrated with any system/language/service you can find. That particular aspect of it hasn't been released quite yet, but it will be the major focus of the beta.

What about document oriented editing? Forms and word processor kind of functionality?

I'm researching browser development frameworks and languages to develop an XML editor. Editing should work more like Google Docs than CodeMirror, and with rudimentary form support (think key-value metadata, not complex forms).

So far I have settled on using contenteditable, but structural editing of XML in document oriented fashion is still an open question. One user action can result in many XML tree changes, like pushing enter twice inside a paragraph should split it in two (and thus close and create any number of tags). Also, there is no schema to describe XML document's editing workflow. Your post on IDE as a value gave me insight for a possible implementation.

Also, big thank you for LT. I'm enjoying using it immensely.

Hi. Apologies if that came off as too curt - typed quickly on my phone. With the above said, I still light table is miles ahead of what everyone else is doing.

My background is as an architect (buildings). For me, most of the issues I'm interested in solving are to do with interaction with visual information (2d and 3d) rather than working with reams of code.

I was most excited where I saw the Light table demo where there was dynamic editing of a game (inspired by the Brett Victor video?). The more recent developments seem to have largely focussed on making it have the full functionality of a traditional editor with some additions. What I am looking for is something that can take over not just from a code editor but also take over from other kinds of programs. Examples might be something which can replace my photoshop actions palette or something where I can organise my screen to compare Google Earth and Openstreetmap data side-by-side or on-top of each other (and click on things to query what they are). Generally these are conceptually simple tasks which current tools and workflows make very difficult to implement.

I have to run but I hope the above makes sense. I'd probably need much more text for a fuller explanation. Happy to discuss.

What is missing for you that makes it "incomplete"? We're always trying to make sure we have the necessities taken care of and I'm happy to say quite a lot of people are doing their work in LT these days - so if there's stuff we're missing that keeps you away entirely, it helps us to hear about it!

Light Table is very interesting (I've used it for some Clojure stuff), but it's competing with emacs. It's gonna be very hard to beat emacs. The legacy of thousands of lines of very useful code & unbelievable extensibility is a big one to overcome. I don't mind saying that I foresee emacs getting a lighttable-mode for dynamic languages before Light Table beats emacs. But I usually have a LightTable install on my computers; it's that promising of a project. :-)

First developments of an LT mode for Emacs:

http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/LightTable https://github.com/Fuco1/litable

Also interesting discussion at:

http://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/1c923n/how_does_the_d...

I am an Emacs user for decades, and I am amazed that Emacs is still superior to almost every other editor. I think the incredible easy plugin system and many powerful plugins (like org-mode) are the reason why Emacs is still alive today. But I am curious how LT develops.

Trying it out now, thanks for the link!