Diakonos: A Programmer's Text Editor in Ruby | Hacker News Reader

Diakonos: A Programmer's Text Editor in Ruby

stepthreeprofit.com

11 pointsblanu6 comments

Personally, I use nano. This is not out of ignorance, mental damage, or a deep moral perversion as my friends that use emacs and vi insist. I want an editor which is small and quick to install. It must be available on all platforms and easy to install (if there's no Debian/Ubuntu package in the main repositories, forget it). I'm not going to mess around with configuring it.

Most sane people would use mg under these circumstances:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mg_(editor)

But seriously, why optimize for such an uncommon case? 99% of the time you'll be programming at your own workstation, where you can install and reconfigure anything you want.

I am particularly excited about finally having an editor that's not written in C.

Hmm, I wonder if such a thing has existed since the early 80s? I think it starts with an E...

(Yes, Emacs has a little C, but so does Ruby. The important stuff that you will actually want to hack on is written in a high-level language, though.)

Finally, there is yi if you really want to ditch C:

http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Yi

It is quite impressive.

Not only that, but if you use Emacs, then I highly suggest learning to use Tramp. Ever since I discovered it, I've stopped using vim in terminals to edit remote files.

Yup, although I personally have had better luck with sshfs. Then you can interact with the remote files with all your favorite shell utilities, as well.

I've tried using Tramp several times over the past few years on multiple operating systems and environments. However, it has always been unbearably slow for me, even with persistent SSH connections via ControlMaster/ControlPath. Any pointers?

Wow. This is now my new console editor. I've always used nano (after pico) for nix editing. Never been worth the trouble to get comfortable on emacs or vi (all my coding is mostly on Windows or MacOS)

Having syntax coloring and the simplicity of good old of ctrl-c, ctrl-v, and ctrl-z is perfect.

Both emacs and vim run on MacOS and Windows. Emacs even supports the CUA keybindings, although if you're going to use those bindings, you might as well not bother with emacs.

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