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Comment by stonogo | Hacker News Reader

I have apparently completely lost touch with what people mean by 'minimalist' these days. Can someone help me understand why that word is applied here?

Looking over the feature list and the ReadMe, this editor seems really attractive and checks most of my boxes for a good main editor, but I hit that word and cannot figure out what I'm missing here...

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I think in 2023 "minimalist" just means "not written in something like Electron"!

While this certainly doesn't match my idea of minimalist either, it does look interesting - I'm always enthusiastic about projects that target systems beyond Windows and Linux - and this one can run on Haiku.

And thank goodness for that. Electron is the scourge of modern software and causes global warming.

I think it has some fierce competition there - in fact I might even argue that modern software itself is the scourge!

presumably they meant visually minimal (not that i would agree...). It is indeed minimal compared to say, intellij IDEA, or even VSCode.

Author here: Yes, that's what I meant. I agree it's not the most appropriate adjetive to describe the editor. But one of my intentions is to keep the UI as clean as possible (I'm not a fan of cluttered editors with several panels on screen all the time).

Considering IntelliJ has different setups, you'd have to compare the zen or distraction mode of IntelliJ with the minimalist setup here, which seems to be more cluttered than what JetBrains is offering.

Author here: You can hide everything in the editor (minimap, line number info, side panel, etc). I guess could add a Zen mode that hides everything at once for simplicity. The editor will remember your view settings, so it's very doable to have a zen mode by default.

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