aethy

This is a bit less simple, but still decidedly more so than many other editors.

It has very few dependencies, statically builds, and is just generally pretty extensible, whilst also being not an embedded web browser.

What drew me to it was just the ease of creating new functionality. When I found it, it didn't have any perl syntax highlighting, so I looked into how to add that.

It took me literally five minutes to get basic highlighting working. I'm not joking, with no previous exposure to the editor, and having not touched lua in years. After I had finished, I just kinda sat there, and went: "Huh.".

I looked over the editor, and pretty much got the gist of it in a single day. I can't say that's ever happened before to me for something so feature-filled. I've tried to add plugins to other non-browser editors (like Code::Blocks, or Padre), and it was always a complete shitshow, and incredibly time-consuming and confusing (I still have trouble compiling Code::Blocks on my system, due to a huge esoteric error dump that popped at one point, and is proving frustratingly difficult to resolve). Lite just kinda worked out of the box with no real resistance. I really liked that about it.

"all-in-one" is my build that bundles all necessary files into the executable, so ships a completely portable, mostly statically built lite-xl as a single file.

- Configs in lite are all done in lua files, and there are two files that you can edit without ever having to create a plugin that are automatically loaded by the editor: your system wide user config (a lua file), and a project file (.lite_project). Both of these can bind keys, create buttons, add functions, and whatever you like, really.

- Fuzzy finding we can do, but it's not great. We're doing some work on this, but at the moment, we'll probably disappoint you.

- We should start pretty instantaneously on a vanilla config, though for large directory trees, there's an architectural issue that does make us take a bit longer, that hopefully will be resolved in a release or two. So if you have a smaller directory tree, then lite should be pretty quick; if it's large, perhaps hold off looking at it.

- lite offers fully portable releases, and infact, I have an all-in-one build that bundles everything into a single, mostly statically linked executable; it's generally very flexible about how things are deployed.

We tend to add almost all extra functionality via plugins; so if you don't want a particular feature, you can simply remove the plugin, and be done with it.

Adding support for halfway decent Perl syntax highlighting took literally 5 minutes with no familiarity with the editor at all, and not having used lua in years.

It was extremely straightforward and refreshing, compared to say, writing a plugin for something like Code::Blocks.

Given the prevalence of mac, this makes sense to support; but apple makes it really tricky to do things if you don't actually have mac hardware; even getting the x86_64 mac build built properly is a real struggle. So, we'll certainly try.