[cturtle]

Lite (and lite-xl) is an amazing little editor. I especially love how fast the program opens. There’s just a few small things that bother me enough to keep me from using it, but I remain impressed by the code and how lightweight it is.

[aethy]

Hey; I'm part of the dev community over at lite-xl; what're your top asks? I can see if we can throw it into the feature queue (though the queue is already pretty long).

[cturtle]

Thanks for reaching out! At the moment I can't think of anything specific. It was just some small papercuts that added up enough to prevent me from using it regularly, not a lack of features. But lite-xl did show me that building a text editor isn't as difficult as I first thought, and I now have many ideas for my own personal editor that I might make one day. If I ever give lite-xl another try I'll be sure to share any requests

[aethy]

Fair enough; totally understand. If you ever can think of anything please don't hesitate to fire up an issue on the tracker. We're (very slowly) going through them.

[samatman]

Personally, I'd like to see Lpeg integration, and support for Scintillua lexers:

https://github.com/orbitalquark/scintillua

Which would give fairly complete syntax coverage, and a good foundation for building more sophisticated tools.

Lua patterns are fairly primitive, while the opposite is true of Lpeg.

[aethy]

It's unlikely that we would include that in core lite-xl due to size and complexity, but we aim to have an extremely robust plugin system (all current syntax definitions come from plugins).

It is totally possible to integrate an lpeg and scintilla plugin which could drop in replace the existing syntax support.

We already have a community member doing this, but with TreeSitter, though I'm not sure where that effort is at, at the moment.

[mega_tux]

If remember correctly, the [Howl editor](https://howl.io/about.html) has Lpeg and use of scintillua. It looks great and it's older but I'm not sure why Lite got more press coverage.

[keyle]

any plans for an M1 native build?

[aethy]

Yes; people have built these before, so it's not really a problem with the source (I've even cross-compiled it for arm android); it's more just not part of the pipeline yet.

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.

[engfan]

Emacs standard/core key sequences (not just single keystrokes), e.g. C-x C-f to open files.

[anyfactor]

Exactly how fast is the startup time?

Faster than Sublime Text? Faster than gVim? Faster than Notepad.exe?

I don't like the word "fast" when it comes to describing the startup time of a text editor. Cold boot startup is a reasonable metric to benchmark reliably.

Some text editor out there is being marketed as "blazingly fast" because of the sole merit of the language they used to write it. But on a personal level, I found it to be as fast if not a bit slower than VS Code.

[jmiskovic]

Here it opens faster than Sublime Text and much much faster than VSCode. Between Notepad and lite-xl I'd say the startup time difference isn't perceivable, and lite is far far more powerful.

It might not make a difference when using it as IDE - you fire it up in the morning and keep it opened. I use lite-xl as a second editor for occasional note entry and it starts up instantaneously. I found that using a second dedicated editor just for notes is excellent for window management and for cognitive context switching; I hated having notes buried somewhere in main editor tabs among open source code files.

[anyfactor]

Thank you for the recommendation. Just installed it is indeed fast. Will use it for a couple of weeks to see how things goes.

I have a separate 2009 ear 2 gb ram laptop which I am using as my note/comm device. I am using "mouse without borders" to control that device. I have a github repo as my note repo with VS code online. But I am looking for a better solution. I need to sync notes on both devices with vim bindings.

[aethy]

If you're at all interested (though I'm not doing releases yet), I have a fork called 'write-xl' (https://github.com/adamharrison/write-xl), which does have a git plugin that autocommits+pushes to git on double save (double ctrl+s), as well as a bunch of other standard markdown creative writing stuff (bolding on ctrl+b, spellcheck, etc..) . I use it on my android tablet for creative writing, and have disabled a bunch of the more expensive computations to get a smoother experience.

Are you interested in releases for something like that?

[anyfactor]

Sorry, for the late reply. I would definitely be interested. How can I try it?

I am not super familiar with lite-xl's plugin system and have only installed one plugin yet (the vim plugin).