Hacker News

35 points by Alephinitesimal 13 hours ago | 15 comments

pmkary 59 minutes ago

Text editors are like mechanical watches or fountain pens. There is just so much beauty in the machinery that makes them. For me, there are hardly any other modules that are this satisfying to watch being made. Each time I find a new one (a good one like this), with everything on ropes and rendering and I-beam placement computations and ... it feels like a Christmas gift.

pmkary 52 minutes ago

Just what part of this comment deserved to get a -1 point leaves a whole universe of imagination to me and no answer :/

pmkary 49 minutes ago

Literally I only praised and wrote how much I love something and how beautiful text editors are. And there are people who cannot stand this :))) oh wow!

ameminator 25 minutes ago

Sometimes people down vote for no reason. Unfortunately, when one complains about it, they look like a whiner.

roarcher 43 minutes ago

A word of unsolicited advice: HNers are a prickly lot and will downvote without explanation because you stepped on some unknowable pet peeve of theirs that probably nobody else in the world shares. This happens all the time but you likely only notice when you happen to get downvoted before any upvotes and end up at 0 or -1. If your comment is reasonable, it will usually come back up.

But complaining about downvotes will certainly earn more of them.

dang 2 hours ago

Recent and related:

They don't make 'em like Sublime Text anymore - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49209354 - Aug 2026 (13 comments)

asabla 21 minutes ago

I used sublime text over so many years. Still find it to be a marvel when it comes to large text files, and how well it still handles them

nottorp 21 minutes ago

There really is a fps counter on there.

Is the experiment seriously rendering continuously in a loop?

samus 23 minutes ago

Every time someone has that idea they discover that text editing is hard! Kudos to the author that they considered accessibility as well.

anon291 2 hours ago

I am being pushed to use vs code right now by my team, but we already have a fully programmable and scriptable editor called emacs that is 100000x better. I don't understand why everyone just switches to these random tools. Text editing is a solved problem. Most of the supposed advantages of these tools is just a configuration of vim or emacs.

xedrac 29 minutes ago

I use emacs daily (with vim keybindings of course), but I completely understand why vscode is so popular. It's extremely easy to get started with, has features galore, and sane defaults. Emacs takes much more effort to get productive with, although this is improving with each release.

nxc18 20 minutes ago

If you work on web tech (and who doesn’t these days?) VS Code has the advantage of using the same tech stack you’re already familiar with. If you need to debug a problem, just open devtools. If you want to run a performance profile, do the same. If you want to fix a bug in the extension you’re using, just open a PR and fix it.

It is a very flexible system and still quite fast and easy to configure. I’ve been trying Zed and WebStorm looking for better alternatives, but it turns out they have their own problems. Zed isn’t nearly as configurable, WebStorm’s config system is an absolute nightmare (xml for days - and constantly changing, mingling actual config with transient state).

People complain that VS Code is slow; perhaps on some metrics and perhaps it is slower than a much less featured system like sublime. But I don’t think it is meaningfully slower in practice than Zed, and they make a lot of compromises to get that edge.

jotato 11 minutes ago

I’m trying to phrase this to not be “that guy” but have you used Code on large code bases? Vscode on my m2 Mac routinely crashed when doing file search. That is why I switched to zed.

I do miss the configurablity though

muppetman 17 minutes ago

That’s easy. Because if they accept that emacs is good enough, they have to then accept that probably whatever thing they’re building is almost certainly worthless.

26 different browsers all based on Chromium, 127 different “observability platforms” etc.

So so much redundant rehashed stuff. We can’t accept that though, THIS TIME it’s going to be great and amazing and we’ll get a huge investment and sold to a huge company for millions.

I’m not suggesting that it hasn’t been a huge leap in computing and software in the last 40 years.

But we need to have faith in new being better to keep going. That’s why the new hotness is always so popular.

self_awareness 50 minutes ago

Text editing is a solved problem.

It's not about the style of cursor, or if rope is used or not. We already have answers to that.

It's about remote editing, LSP support.