Zenity

Nah just some early adopters who found this post because it was shared on the 10x Twitter and Discord after it made the HN homepage. I don't know why none of us had accounts before, it may have something to do with the particular niches most of us are from (game dev etc), where HN may not be as popular as you might expect.

I only signed up because I saw a lot more questions than people reporting their experiences with it, so I figured you would like to hear from people who actively use it (and why). Some of us then prodded Stewart (the dev) to also sign up so he could answer the more specific questions.

This got me curious, so I gave it a try. It opens instantly (as always) and parsing the complete codebase in the background took about two minutes. After that everything is practically instant and there is no problem searching through the code, finding references, code completion, etc. Reopening the project is also instant and it takes less than ten seconds to fully load the cache in the background. Since I don't know the code I can't really comment on whether everything got parsed correctly, but the random bits I tried seemed to be right.

This doesn't seem to be worse than the Unreal codebase, which 10x also handles with ease. I highly doubt that there is a codebase in existence which could bring 10x to its knees. It does use quite a bit of memory, but nothing a modern setup shouldn't be able to handle. Currently it seems to be about 4GB for both Unreal and LO each, with LO being just slightly larger.

This of course are extreme cases, so you can imagine what performance for "normal" projects is like.

Yes it is using its own parsing engine. The developer is prioritizing the most common language features but also constantly working on adding more edge cases as people run into them. The parser is designed to do a sensible thing in all cases, so while occasionally it may not get it perfectly right (yet), that doesn't break the parser completely.

What this custom solution is doing that others don't is simply that it is incredibly fast. You really need to try it to fully appreciate this though, especially on large codebases it makes a significant difference. Not just because it never lags or stalls while working, but also because it makes it much less painful to work with those codebases if you can instantly find and jump to anything.

The speed and simplicity is the main selling point, but unlike other lightweight editors it doesn't achieve this simply by being "less". From my perspective the main selling point is that it is a lightweight and performant editor that can actually replace Visual Studio + VAX / JetBrains for game developers (especially Unreal Engine projects and comparably large codebases). For that use case there just isn't anything comparable on the market right now.

Whether it is equally useful in other scenarios already (especially if you are happy with your current setup) I can't really judge, and I would agree that the website could do a much better job selling it. The developer is still updating the website often, but his priority is working on the actual app of course and he is doing everything by himself from what I can tell.

In a nutshell, right now I would say that 10x is mainly a great choice for game developers. But that's only because that is where its strengths are most unique right now, not because it is intended to be only that. It still isn't even fully released yet, and I think it has a lot of potential to be much more than "just" a performant editor for game developers.

The monthly cost is for supporters and to get priority support on Discord (absolutely worth it IMO given how fast the dev responds to issues and requests). AFAIK the final pricing model for the release is not decided yet.

Yes, with some minor limitations as it receives much less testing. I was using 10x with The Machinery (RIP) for some time and the developer was super responsive fixing any C-specific issues (and even added some TM specific features when I asked nicely). If more people start using it for C and report any issues found, it should get even better.

I would say it may even be better suited for C to some extent since that is a much simpler language with less chances for the parser to get confused by some obscure corner case. C++ really is the worst case scenario for a parsing engine, so once it works reliably for that, support for other languages should also become much more feasible.

What got me into 10x is actually how similar the default setup is to Visual Assist (including default shortcuts). And since it supports Visual Studio solutions, 10x will just work out of the box with any Unreal project or many other similar large C++ projects. You could even switch back and forth without a problem while evaluating 10x, which is what I did the first couple of months or so when I started using it. It has already come a long way since then though, and I've been using 10x exclusively for quite a few months now (full time working on an Unreal project and some personal side projects). The developer is a former game dev himself, so he understands our particular needs quite well and is very responsive to them. The fact that 10x can easily manage those kind of codebases is what really differentiates it from other "lightweight" text editors in my book. Building and debugging still goes through Visual Studio for VS projects (with good integration and no required setup), so switching causes no disruption.

Compared to Visual Assist it may not have all the bells and whistles yes, but especially the code navigation (which to me is the most important aspect) and code completion is quite advanced already and incredibly fast, even compared to Visual Assist. Parsing the entire UE4 codebase for the first time (in the background) takes a couple of minutes. Opening it from cache is practically instant, all search operations / code completion are also near instant with no stalls whatsoever. In terms of refactoring it is more limited, but renaming symbols works well and that covers about 99% of the cases were I regularly use refactoring tools anyway.

And unlike Visual Studio or JetBrains IDEs, 10x is so fast and lightweight that I would like to use it for all of my text editing needs. That makes customizing it much more satisfying as well, which is quite easy to do with a straightforward Python API.

As you can probably tell I really love this editor, it has had a quite dramatic impact on my enjoyment of work already. It won't be for everybody (and it doesn't try to), but I would encourage everybody to give it a try. If it is the kind of editor you are looking for, I think you will be very happy with it.