Re: [dev] [announce] mle: a small terminal-based text editor

From: Snobb <snobb_AT_gmx.com>
Date: Wed, 29 Mar 2017 22:42:57 +0100

On 29/03/17 10:53P, Marc André Tanner wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 29, 2017 at 08:22:04PM +0100, Snobb wrote:
> > I liked the idea of vis in its early stage until it went the "lua" way.
>
> I'm sorry that you feel that way, but you can still completely disable Lua
> during compile time and get a working editor (albeit with less features).
My understanding is that if lua isn't compiled in you can't even have an .rc
file, correct? So without lua, the editor goes with default hard-coded
settings and no way for even minor customisation like number of spaces per
tab, tabs or spaces, etc.

> In my opinion Lua is among the least sucking languages for the purpose it
> is used in vis. It is simple (almost everything is a table) but still
> versatile and powerful. Also the implementation is rather nice. Up
> to a point you can think of Lua as a runtime replacement for the C
> pre-processor commonly used by suckless projects for configuration
> purposes. Both approaches are better than writing your own configuration
> parser.
I haven't had much experience with Lua (apart from writing a fairly trivial
Wireshark dissector a while back, but no C embedding) but from what I've seen
it does look pretty good. It still sounds like a bit of an overkill to use Lua
for config parsing alone unless there are some scripting features on the
roadmap, which they are in case of vis.
I never use plugins/scripts in editors, so I for one would have opted for
suckless config.h. :)

Just FYI and completely out of scope: In my most recent vis "takes" I went as
far as installing lua and all required lua modules, but there were little
things that needed to be fixed. Eg. /usr/local/share/vis/* files were
installed with wrong permissions, termkey may be a pain to install on some
OSs, some lua errors that lexers cannot be found even though they're there
(and with fixed permissions), etc. I wouldn't use the color schemes and all
that stuff anyway, so couldn't motivate myself to get it to work and
eventually gave up.
Vis looks impressive in a video demo I've seen somewhere in the web though and
I like the idea of blending vi and sam.

/Alex
Received on Wed Mar 29 2017 - 23:42:57 CEST