Lapce – Fast and Powerful Code Editor written in Rust

[dzhou121]

Author here. I didn't expect this will go on Hacker News. Although the editor has been my daily drive for almost one year now, it's really rough on the edges.

The plugin system as described in the README hasn't been implemented yet.

[gsliepen]

This looks very nice. However, the description mentions "lightning fast" and "powerful". Unfortunately, those things don't mean anything without further clarification. If you really want to show your editor is faster than other commonly used editors, consider posting a benchmark of cases where speed matters (like loading a large file, inserting in the middle of a large file, search/replace, latency of pressing a key and having the screen updated, and so on). It is harder to quantify "power" though.

[spyremeown]

Hi, thanks for writing some free software!

I'm not a Rust person, how do you install this? Is it something like "rustc install" or something like that?

Thanks!

[alskdj21]

Hey! I really appreciate the built-in modal editing and remote development support. It would be good if we can have linux builds.

[DeathArrow]

Why did you opt for WASI for plugins instead of native compiled code?

[thecleaner]

Lsp support as well ? You have got to be kidding me. How did you add these feature so quickly ?

[lnxg33k1]

Edit: Alright nevermind just saw in the repo that the UI is in Druid, have a nice day and again thank you

[syrusakbary]

This is awesome! Looking forward the WebAssembly WASI integration :)

[vmchale]

Damn this is really cool - thanks!

[chespinoza]

Hi, it looks nice! I really appreciate efforts like this, does it only supports Rust?

[cassepipe]

You can also check out Helix (Kakoune-inspired, written in Rust, built-in LSP, terminal editor). https://helix-editor.com/

There's also Amp (Vim inspired, written in Rust) although it looks as though development has stopped https://amp.rs/

[depressedpanda]

What makes you say that the development of Amp has stopped? There doesn't seem to have been a release since Feb 2020, but last push to main was 17 days ago.

[chespinoza]

Wow, I didn't know about those editors, they look awesome man, thanks for sharing.

[DeathArrow]

This feels like fresh air compared to tons of tools written in Javascript and running in a browser.

[manojlds]

JetBrains recently announced Fleet. Written in Kotlin and Rust.

[amelius]

Seems like you have been picking the wrong tool for the job.

[buster]

My first thought was, not yet another terminal editor written for fun, but when I read druid, lsp, wasi plug-ins... That sounds very intriguing!

[runiq]

Yeah, this reads like my bucket list of Rust technologies if I ever decided I'd want to implement a text editor. Definitely going to try this out. Thank you for bringing this to our attention, OP!

[debdut]

VS Code is so bloated af Waiting for this to be stable! Would love to contribute! Any next features doc, so I can pick a topic and submit some PRs. Awesome work :)

[throw_m239339]

VS Code isn't bloated if you never install any extension. You can't hold Microsoft responsible for third party bloat.

[johnisgood]

VSCodium is fine, so is emacs and vim. I use them along with IntelliJ IDEA. This "code editor" looks pretty minimal in comparison to the ones I mentioned... at least as far as the screenshot goes.

[jokoon]

sublime text is the best editor currently, in my view.

apart from code folding.

[sharikous]

The bloating cycle should merit its own xkcd comic I guess. VS Code was specifically successful because it was perceived as much less bloated then IDEs, yet much more user friendly than most editors. Now we hear complaints that it is bloated. What will be next?

[hdjrudni]

Ya...it's going downhill :-( I liked it as a lightweight editor. Now it's just another IDE. But instead I have to sift through thousands of half-baked 3rd party plugins to get the functions I need. Editors/IDEs should do one thing or the either well.

[pjmlp]

Other than having to put up with Electron, nope it isn't bloated, in fact it is still missing lots of nice IDE like features.

[mlinksva]

https://github.com/lapce/lapce/blob/master/docs/why-lapce.md strikes me as really nice -- the author tried really hard, with lots of code to show for it, to get what they wanted from vim, then neovim, then xi, and only after thoroughly understanding the tradeoffs each made embarked on creating their own editor.

[Ygg2]

Any option to sponsor? I'd like to contribute with money since my time is kinda devoured.

[forgotmyoldacc]

The 0.0.1 release crashes on MacOS 12.0.1, would be nice to try it out when its more stable.

[megapoliss]

yep, it crashes on Archlinux as well

Just wonder, what is the point of promoting something as "being written in Rust", if at the end it crushed the same way as "being written in C/C++/whatever".

[karavelov]

It crashes on Ubuntu 20.04 also with `memory allocation of 18446744073709551615 bytes failed`

[geniium]

It seems to crash on windows and macos based on the issues in github.

[sharikous]

It crashes in Catalina too, unfortunately. I was looking forward to trying the build.

[stormbrew]

> Built in remote development support (inspired by VSCode Remote Development)

Well... This has me intrigued. This is basically the only thing that keeps me on vscode.

[chrysoprace]

Xi, the backend that it's built on, is unfortunately in maintenance mode and it seems like it has been for a while now.

[panzerklein]

According to readme it's not a Xi frontend, but rather it uses same algorithms for string manipulations

[rapsey]

Druid is also in a poor state at the moment (it pulls master from git) and it's not using wgpu at all. I assume it used to use a piet wgpu branch but it is not anymore.

[zokier]

As always, if something is advertised as "fast" (or especially lightning-fast), it would be really nice to see some performance characterizations to explain in what way it is fast. Otherwise it feels so very meaningless label that is so often slapped on things on very weak grounds. And just because the building blocks might individually be said to be fast, it doesn't automatically mean that the conglomerate of them is still fast; performance is a fickle thing.

[Dave3of5]

The open folder command is unbound by default on windows. Is it meant to be like that ?

I literally couldn't open any folder.

Also on windows by default it leaves a separate command window hanging which seems odd. Why isn't this logging done within the app terminal itself.

[revskill]

Why always lightning, why not sound-speed ?

As soon as memory management issue is solved, i could see all future software will eventually be written in Rust (or similar language)

[yisonPylkita]

Looks promising. Always nice to see a movement to slim-down RAM and CPU usage of our tools.

Will this editor allow me to run it with rust-analyzer code completion?

[slowtec]

I would love to see that the community join forces and combine all the different projects: https://github.com/flosse/text-editors-written-in-rust

[schrute]

The product crashes on MacOS Catalina, Arch, Ubuntu and Win 10. Lightning fast indeed. /s

[jokoon]

No windows build?

[trbn]

https://github.com/lapce/lapce/releases/tag/v0.0.1

[geniium]

Yes but not sure it works for you