5 ms·

I literally just got Fable to write me a text editor. Well, I'll be honest, I got it to wrap the KDE KTextEditor library which is like 90% of a text editor. I

I literally just got Fable to write me a text editor. Well, I'll be honest, I got it to wrap the KDE KTextEditor library which is like 90% of a text editor. I had been using Kate which was what an LLM suggested was the closest to something like Sublime Text on Fedora. But even Kate, which was great, had too much going on. So I asked Fable to take the text editor part (KTextEditor) and wrap it using Rust with an LSP server. It took about 2 days but I have a tiny, super fast little editor. I use Sway to manage things like tabs, fuzzel stands in for fuzzy file search, broot stands in for an explorer view. I've already added Markdown preview support. I might get around to some basic git integration. Then I got it to turn that little editor into a note-taking interface that I have bound to a Mod-m key binding to keep notes in ~/Notes. We live in wild times. I hope everyone is taking advantage while they can.

inatreecrown2 15d ago
do you want to share your text editor?
- boxed 15d ago
  I also had Claude write me an IDE: https://github.com/boxed/TurboKod https://github.com/boxed/TurboKod It's obviously not for everyone, but if you fork that repo and prompt your favorite model to make it look and feel like you want, you can get something extremely useful very fast.
  - rfgplk 15d ago
    Actually looks really good
    - boxed 15d ago
      Heh thanks. It started as a joke idea, but now it's my daily driver. Especially the review mode is useful now that so much work goes through LLMs.
- stillpointlab 15d ago
  I was planning to. It is 100% vibe coded, the first project I did that way. I'm one of those who've been reading all the code in my major projects. But when I got frustrated with editors and off-handed mentioned to Fable something like "I like Kate, but it has way too many option I will never use" it told me that the core part could be wrapped pretty easily (like 50 lines of C++). So I just said "do it" and have been merging everything without reading a single line. It wrote all the specs, wrote all the code, wrote all the tests. I just got it to write out a tutorial to take me on a tour of the code it wrote, but I haven't reviewed it yet. I will push it as OSS once I've made sure it hasn't included anything that I don't want public. But it wouldn't be super useable for anyone else since many of the features (e.g fuzzel and broot) are glue that exists in the Sway configs and some helper scripts. It's held together by bubble gum and scotch tape. But is does exactly what I want and so far without a single bug, crash or problem. It's my frankenstien editor and I love it. (disclosure: I've been using it for less than a week)
  - andsoitis 15d ago
    Love this approach, for what it's worth! Thanks for sharing.
- wolletd 15d ago
  It's important to share all vibe coded software to poison future LLM trainings!
brailsafe 15d ago
> We live in wild times. I hope everyone is taking advantage while they can. Yep, I'm taking advantage of the times by using the exact same tools I have been for years, and if those fail me, I'll pay for one of the multitude of other high quality editors offered by companies who's business it is to make them, so I get back to writing things in them instead of paying even more to companies trying to persuade me to believe that those products are obselete.
- stillpointlab 15d ago
  No shade on keeping using what is working. I was moving from Windows to Linux Fedora so I was in the market for a new editor. VSCode just wasn't working for me any more. I considered a bunch of options, including vim or neovim or lazyvim, emacs, newer projects like zed. LLM gave a few more I can't recall including helix and Kate. There are so many good options these days, we're all spoiled for choice. But the main thing is, and YMMV, I am not writing a lot of code anymore. I'm mostly reading/searching/navigating. So all of the powerful editing features are lost on me. No editors really match my current workflow, they all have too much. So this was an opportunity to try something out, to experiment. See if I could do the real-deal vibe coding thing and judge the result. I just said "I want it to do ..." and then a few minutes later it did. I repeated this until it did enough to use as my primary editor. I don't recommend it for anyone else, nor do I expect people to agree. Just describing my thought process.
  - TonyStr 15d ago
    What features did you end up implementing? I assume tree-sitter based highlighting, lsp, and maybe fuzzy search? Did you implement anything different that you didn't get out of existing editors that you tried?
    - stillpointlab 15d ago
      Very few features on purpose. Every editor I tested had all the features I added and more. It is worth noting that KTextEditor is a fully-featured library. Like, line numbers+gutter (for eventual git status icons), undo/redo, save, warn on exit for unsaved changes, syntax highlighting, color theming. It does 95% of what we'd all call "editing". But it doesn't do things like tab interface, project explorer, terminal pane, output windows, etc. What the library didn't have were LSP features, of which I only implemented a few (error squiggles under things that fail the type check, go to definition). Notable absent are completions and hover features for things like help. I also only added (and tested) LSP servers for typescript, Rust and Go. My plan has been: do as little as possible until I need something, then ask Fable to add it. edit: I guess one thing I added I didn't see everywhere else was a built-in Markdown preview. But many editors have that (VSCode definitely does) so it isn't special.
lelanthran 15d ago
> We live in wild times. I hope everyone is taking advantage while they can. I dunno, hey. I'm not about to yolo my way for all things that are important. For things that are unimportant I will just use the existing stuff. The goldilocks zone (things that an irritation, but not important), sure, I'll vibe a little Python/shell whatever, but pre-LLMs, I was already reducing my friction with little scripts anyway. For example, in a recent comment of mine I posted a little wish script that I created in 2002, to have a simple GUI mp3 player, which I have been using daily since 2002.
- shjssusuus 15d ago
  You being able / willing to maintain the same routine for over twenty years is not something I want to condemn or anything, but it is IMO a good indication that our lives are very different. My whole life swifts gears every five years or so. I can’t imagine living in a world where I’d be needing a “script” to handle my “MP3 playing”. Besides vast changes in hardware and OS realities I regularly go from not listening to music for months to listening every day and besides getting those “MP3”s will get tiring because I won’t listen to the same music for years, I want variety, stuff I don’t know. Spotify is the only real option these days. In five years it will be different I’m sure. If your life’s substrate is so stable and unchanging it supports decade long unaltered daily habits.. Let’s just say it’s not universal. If we simplify everyone’s life to “just do X unaltered for twenty years” much if not all of modern life’s complexities would fall away. I can see how you can be dismissive of AI; it doesn’t change your underlying reality at all in fact it only introduces noise into your perfectly stable bubble.
shoobiedoo 15d ago
> We live in wild times. I hope everyone is taking advantage while they can. To do what exactly? Everyone can churn out their own "kinda different but mostly the same" app thing?
- hk__2 15d ago
  > "kinda different but mostly the same" Isn’t that the description of our whole lives?
- stillpointlab 14d ago
  To experiment. Given the availability of new tools there is opportunity to try new things.
- satvikpendem 13d ago
  Yes, so what? Personalized tools are great.
rd07 15d ago
Kate is a good editor and it needs more publicity and more extensions. But, in my experience, as far as speed goes, it is slower than Sublime Text in my machine though still tolerable.
- stillpointlab 14d ago
  I didn't try Sublime on the same machine so I can't compare. Kate is less polished but genuinely a good choice if someone wants FOSS. I would have no qualms recommending either.
brettermeier 15d ago
Why you burned all the tokens and energy for something that is out there like 1000 times? I don't think this is the future, would be a stupid future.

inatreecrown2 15d ago

do you want to share your text editor?

boxed 15d ago
I also had Claude write me an IDE: https://github.com/boxed/TurboKod https://github.com/boxed/TurboKod It's obviously not for everyone, but if you fork that repo and prompt your favorite model to make it look and feel like you want, you can get something extremely useful very fast.
- rfgplk 15d ago
  Actually looks really good
  - boxed 15d ago
    Heh thanks. It started as a joke idea, but now it's my daily driver. Especially the review mode is useful now that so much work goes through LLMs.
stillpointlab 15d ago
I was planning to. It is 100% vibe coded, the first project I did that way. I'm one of those who've been reading all the code in my major projects. But when I got frustrated with editors and off-handed mentioned to Fable something like "I like Kate, but it has way too many option I will never use" it told me that the core part could be wrapped pretty easily (like 50 lines of C++). So I just said "do it" and have been merging everything without reading a single line. It wrote all the specs, wrote all the code, wrote all the tests. I just got it to write out a tutorial to take me on a tour of the code it wrote, but I haven't reviewed it yet. I will push it as OSS once I've made sure it hasn't included anything that I don't want public. But it wouldn't be super useable for anyone else since many of the features (e.g fuzzel and broot) are glue that exists in the Sway configs and some helper scripts. It's held together by bubble gum and scotch tape. But is does exactly what I want and so far without a single bug, crash or problem. It's my frankenstien editor and I love it. (disclosure: I've been using it for less than a week)
- andsoitis 15d ago
  Love this approach, for what it's worth! Thanks for sharing.
wolletd 15d ago
It's important to share all vibe coded software to poison future LLM trainings!

brailsafe 15d ago

> We live in wild times. I hope everyone is taking advantage while they can. Yep, I'm taking advantage of the times by using the exact same tools I have been for years, and if those fail me, I'll pay for one of the multitude of other high quality editors offered by companies who's business it is to make them, so I get back to writing things in them instead of paying even more to companies trying to persuade me to believe that those products are obselete.

stillpointlab 15d ago
No shade on keeping using what is working. I was moving from Windows to Linux Fedora so I was in the market for a new editor. VSCode just wasn't working for me any more. I considered a bunch of options, including vim or neovim or lazyvim, emacs, newer projects like zed. LLM gave a few more I can't recall including helix and Kate. There are so many good options these days, we're all spoiled for choice. But the main thing is, and YMMV, I am not writing a lot of code anymore. I'm mostly reading/searching/navigating. So all of the powerful editing features are lost on me. No editors really match my current workflow, they all have too much. So this was an opportunity to try something out, to experiment. See if I could do the real-deal vibe coding thing and judge the result. I just said "I want it to do ..." and then a few minutes later it did. I repeated this until it did enough to use as my primary editor. I don't recommend it for anyone else, nor do I expect people to agree. Just describing my thought process.
- TonyStr 15d ago
  What features did you end up implementing? I assume tree-sitter based highlighting, lsp, and maybe fuzzy search? Did you implement anything different that you didn't get out of existing editors that you tried?
  - stillpointlab 15d ago
    Very few features on purpose. Every editor I tested had all the features I added and more. It is worth noting that KTextEditor is a fully-featured library. Like, line numbers+gutter (for eventual git status icons), undo/redo, save, warn on exit for unsaved changes, syntax highlighting, color theming. It does 95% of what we'd all call "editing". But it doesn't do things like tab interface, project explorer, terminal pane, output windows, etc. What the library didn't have were LSP features, of which I only implemented a few (error squiggles under things that fail the type check, go to definition). Notable absent are completions and hover features for things like help. I also only added (and tested) LSP servers for typescript, Rust and Go. My plan has been: do as little as possible until I need something, then ask Fable to add it. edit: I guess one thing I added I didn't see everywhere else was a built-in Markdown preview. But many editors have that (VSCode definitely does) so it isn't special.

lelanthran 15d ago

> We live in wild times. I hope everyone is taking advantage while they can. I dunno, hey. I'm not about to yolo my way for all things that are important. For things that are unimportant I will just use the existing stuff. The goldilocks zone (things that an irritation, but not important), sure, I'll vibe a little Python/shell whatever, but pre-LLMs, I was already reducing my friction with little scripts anyway. For example, in a recent comment of mine I posted a little wish script that I created in 2002, to have a simple GUI mp3 player, which I have been using daily since 2002.

shjssusuus 15d ago
You being able / willing to maintain the same routine for over twenty years is not something I want to condemn or anything, but it is IMO a good indication that our lives are very different. My whole life swifts gears every five years or so. I can’t imagine living in a world where I’d be needing a “script” to handle my “MP3 playing”. Besides vast changes in hardware and OS realities I regularly go from not listening to music for months to listening every day and besides getting those “MP3”s will get tiring because I won’t listen to the same music for years, I want variety, stuff I don’t know. Spotify is the only real option these days. In five years it will be different I’m sure. If your life’s substrate is so stable and unchanging it supports decade long unaltered daily habits.. Let’s just say it’s not universal. If we simplify everyone’s life to “just do X unaltered for twenty years” much if not all of modern life’s complexities would fall away. I can see how you can be dismissive of AI; it doesn’t change your underlying reality at all in fact it only introduces noise into your perfectly stable bubble.

shoobiedoo 15d ago

> We live in wild times. I hope everyone is taking advantage while they can. To do what exactly? Everyone can churn out their own "kinda different but mostly the same" app thing?

hk__2 15d ago
> "kinda different but mostly the same" Isn’t that the description of our whole lives?
stillpointlab 14d ago
To experiment. Given the availability of new tools there is opportunity to try new things.
satvikpendem 13d ago
Yes, so what? Personalized tools are great.

rd07 15d ago

Kate is a good editor and it needs more publicity and more extensions. But, in my experience, as far as speed goes, it is slower than Sublime Text in my machine though still tolerable.

stillpointlab 14d ago
I didn't try Sublime on the same machine so I can't compare. Kate is less polished but genuinely a good choice if someone wants FOSS. I would have no qualms recommending either.

brettermeier 15d ago

Why you burned all the tokens and energy for something that is out there like 1000 times? I don't think this is the future, would be a stupid future.