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Comment by protonfish | Hacker News Reader

Why is everything an IDE? I don't want an integrated development environment - I want a modular one. And as one of those modules, I would love a simple, lightweight code editor. UTF-8 only, auto-indent, a file list column, a good find-in-page feature, and file type dependent syntax highlighting and multi-line comment key. That's all I need. It seems I am always stuck between bloated IDEs (or bloated text editors like VSCode and Atom) or painfully low-featured ones like notepad or nano.

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There are plenty of mid-level editors out there. Sounds like Notepad++ and Sublime Text are up you alley.

Also, it depends what you mean by bloated, but VS Code can be stripped down to work just like the two I listed above. Language servers aren't required by any means. If you're looking for sub 50MB ram usage, then stick to the two above and search for "Sublime Text alternative" and I'm sure you'll find more equivalents than you ever wanted.

I've used Notepad++ and Sublime Text and like them a lot, but I could really use something that can run on a Raspberry Pi too. I guess I should have included that. Being able to use a single text editor across platforms would be terrific.

I prefer Atom.io over VSCode for simplicity. It's much closer to working the way I want out-of-the-box. There's so much junk I have to disable in VSCode to get it where I like.

https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Gedit

There's been talk about work on a build of sublime for arm64 -- I think if you poke around on their forums there was a link or contact to get a beta copy for licensed users.

Geany is cross-platform and runs on RPi

I would recommend micro editor then (https://micro-editor.github.io/). It's like a souped-up and much nicer to use nano. It supports syntax-highlighting out of the box, auto-indents, etc. I think you might like it :)

You seem to be spec'ing either vim or emacs, there.

Sorry, I guess I didn't know I had to include "and without a completely unnecessary non-standard interface that requires a massive learning curve to get started." as a feature.

Well, if you want all the things, you're going to end up at "write your own", it seems. If you can't find yourself a text editor, of all the things programmers love to write to scratch their own itches and which we have coming out of our metaphorical collective ears....

That sounds a lot like Geany

https://www.geany.org/

I see it more as an good modular editor that they dressed up as an IDE cause that is what the people say they want.

I would also prefer a good editor (rather than an IDE), if only it had really intelligent context-aware autocompletion and would let me rename variables/classes/etc reliably (without using dumb search-and-replace).

Wait, how would the editor be able to auto-indent Python code!? Since python is white space sensitive and don't have "end" or } to mark the end of a block.

Like every editor. Colon, new line, indent. Statements, backspace dedent.

gEdit? Kate? jEdit? One of those might fit your needs.

While there are a lot of options, I'd guess you'd really like JED.

I'm serious, give it a spin, it's underrated.

and old book about unix describes it as such.

each individual program is its own module, fs to link them (files or pipe)

You have basically described the Zeus Lite editor. However it only runs on Windows :(

Geany and micro complement each other nicely as the CUA keybindings match.

Do you feel most beginners would agree with you?

Seems like you want vim or emacs?

Why is more tools a problem?

You have heard of vim and emacs haven't you?

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