lite-xl is goat

a little context is needed to explain where i come from.

so i've been using vscode for a long time now, and it's been really nice to use; it supports everything i use and it has a lot of stuff that makes life easy (especially when your only experience with code editors before vscode is notepad).

however, it has one problem:

It's heavy asf

in hindsight, i shouldn't have expected anything different from something that's basically an all-in-one IDE written to run in a web browser of all things, but i didn't know about electron or how it works, so i was shocked. shocked especially because i was running windows on a hard drive, and it took north of 30 seconds just to launch on top of taking all my memory (literally; i only had 4 gigs of memory back then)

Upgrading my computer didn't help as much as I wanted.

I tried doubling the memory from 4 to 8 gigs, and now i could run a browser window alongside my code editor, yay

as you'd expect, it wasn't much of an improvement. launch times were still horrible, and it still gobbled up all the memory it could get (not to mention how much it was hammering my decade-old dualcore CPU)

in desparation, i looked for replacements.

i tried the following editors:

Atom: I thought atom would be lighter since it's less ambitious, but turns out it took like twice the memory. ouch

Pycharm (for python): turns out it's written in java, and it took almost 800 megabytes just to launch and open an empty project. yeouch

notepad++: finally something light, but AAAAGH IT BURNS MY EYES

Sublime Text: this actually looks nice, but two problems: it uses the default windows menubar and titlebar which doesn't integrate well with the rest of the program, and the free version pulls a winrar by contstantly begging you to buy it. gneurshk

after all this, i finally found lite-xl.

this is lite-xl.

I don't exactly remember how i found it (i think somebody wrote an article about it which got recommended to me by google discover), but i checked it out and realised that it's basically sublime text, but better in the following ways:

it doesn't use the native menubar, instead opting for icons for most-used options, the rest being accessible though the command prompt that opens in most editors by pressing ctrl+shift+p. as for the titlebar, you don't have to use the native windows titlebar! the inbuilt one is slightly buggy in windows as of now thanks to an SDL2 bug, but it works well enough and integrates better than the windows titebar.

it's even lighter, barely ever crosses 20 megabytes of memory usage and launches instantly (using it for the first time makes you feel like something's not right because it's almost too fast, like apk in alpine linux; however, turns out it just is that fast)

free and open source, so I never have to pay for it

stupidly easy to write plugins for (in fact, I wrote the gemtext syntax highlighting plugin in about 2 days of poking about and i'm using lite-xl to write this article right now. considering how it takes forever for me to be able to do anything at all, this is crazy simple.)

last but not least, it has a small but very lively community behind it (of which i have become a part by asking too many questions all the time), and the people working on it are extremely talented programmers who're even younger than me (makes me jealous how good they are while still in school). If you ever have a problem, people will try to fix it the best they can.

anyway, i like lite-xl and will shill it till the end of the universe. use it if you want, don't use it if you don't want to.

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