Maybe you've got something awesome here, but you had only a few seconds to catch my interest with your subtitle, and you instead used it to tell me what part of it you love rather than what part of it I will love. Don't do that.
The primary audience of neither HN nor github is 'end users'.
> Don't do that.
I don't know exactly how this fashion of people phrasing their personal suggestions as imperious commands started, but I'm looking forward to its inevitable demise.
Bulletpoints not related to rust itself, and that will lead to features/usability/accessibility/"many other things" but are not there yet:
* Client-Server architecture
* Server has core editing logic, and provides a JSON based RPC interface. I forget if it's HTTP or stdout.
* Client can be written in any language/UI Framework that can talk to the server.
* Plugins can be written in any language that can talk to the server.
* Uses some fairly efficient data structures and a fairly efficient language, so it's likely that when it's done it will perform quite well. Did I put enough weasel words in there?
It's a very interesting project but if your goal is a usable editor you should probably use one that works and has an installer/package in the repo.
That's great advice for production software.
At this point, it looks like the editor is firmly Alpha quality, and they probably care more about new contributors than new users. I'm sure they'll update their messaging once they're more polished.
(I'm not the one who posted this, but I was a Xi contributor)
As far as I can tell, this editor is aimed at tech savvy people like developers, sys-admins etc. They may not care about the exact language or framework, but I can assure you, they do care about things like security and performance.
Rust is one of the most discussed topics in the developer community these days. I can’t fault the OP to use it to highlight the post. Had they said something else, I’d likely have ignored it as Yet Another Text Editor like Visual Studio Code, Sublime Text, Atom etc. IMO, they did a good job highlighting how it is different.
However, it's also likely that even naive end users who want reliability, security and less downtime may one day reasonably prefer Rust-based software, or insist on it, particularly as all software becomes more complicated.
After all, battery manufacturers keep telling me their batteries are "alkaline." Do they think I'm a chemist? No, they think I can count hours of use and one single technical word tells me a lot about that.
So I created: https://github.com/google/xi-editor/issues/668
Depending on which frontend you pick, you might, emphasis on might get the following features:
* It launches.
* It renders an interface.
* Pressing a letter inserts a character.
* There is a cursor.
* Pressing a key moves the cursor.
* You can open files.
* You can save files.
I don't say this to be rude to either you or the project authors or maintainers. I just want to be clear that it's very, very, very early on still, and the core functionality is still being worked on.