Some of the improvements are marginal, but not all, from a developer perspective moving between editors that support everything from syntax highlighting, intellisense, refactoring etc, to then using an editor that has none of that is quite a shock.
Go look at early versions. The concept of files was secondary for example. Program flow meant something. Not it's just a text editor. I am hopeful big changes are coming though.
I could not care less about the colour scheme. But oh God please could we get stable, fast, reliable syntax highlighting and code completion, reliable refactoring, non-joke continuous integration support, collaborative editing, better testing tooling?
I am sure we can find flaws. In fact the VS2015 intellisense is a major step back. But compared to the VBA editor which litterally hasn't changed since the 90s, I mean litterally not a single new feature in 20 years! Like if that was a feature no one was using!
It's a full IDE rather than a text editor with some IDE-like functionality. Most importantly (to me): much better refactoring tools and much better debugging tools.
No need to immediately hand over money, there's both a free 30-day trial, and you can regularly get an early access (i.e., beta) version of the new version for free.
I think recognizing that there are tradeoffs is the best way to get me to consider your stance. It says you've used it long enough to be honest about its flaws. Anything else just feels disingenuous to me.
I totally agree with you, though. The ease of refactoring alone is a big enough win to get me on board.
Biggest one off the top of my head is in the category of developer productivity (which i pay a lot for already), and specifically it lets me use my editor of choice (Helix/Kakoune currently) while getting powerful new features.
Huge hurdle, obviously, but my thought was an expanded set of LSP features from JetBrains, disconnected from their IDEs. They spend quite a bit of time and money on developing DX but it's all inaccessible to those of us who prefer different editors.
I'd pay a lot for these sorts of features that go above the existing FOSS LSP, while retaining more integration to the FOSS tooling we've come to know and love (like editors or choice).
While I appreciate Repl.it's move to a mobile-friendly editor and the eagerness to push new (yet hurried, apparently from the document) features to provide a better development environment, I question their decision to use CodeMirror 6, a version of the CodeMirror "project (that) is in the beta phase—there's a stable interface, but small breaking changes might still happen".
It's not that bad actually. The refactoring tools are pretty good, and other things like CTRL-Shift-T to open any file by name are nice too. Sometimes it throws a small to medium sized wrench into my spokes, but that's pretty rare.
1. As your question touches on, it was. The codebase has grown organically from its start as xi-win.
2. The xi-editor project had other problems which I've written about extensively in my retrospective.
3. It's hard to compete against MS VS Code. When I started xi, the competitive landscape had a huge gap between performant and feature-rich but bloated editors.
I actually found it kinda slow in terms of showing hints (squiggled highlights) and it doesn't seem to follow symbols across a project the way VScode and IntelliJ do. Guess it's more of an editor than an IDE in that regard.
Interesting that you say that. I had the opposite thought that it doesn’t seem to have improved much over time, but I think my perception might be influenced by my habit of ignoring large suggestions and only looking at the results when it fills the rest of the line I was typing.
I’m also using it with intellij instead of vscode, so for all I know I could be using an old version still.
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.
It seems a bit more mature, at least in terms of package management and available libraries (https://pursuit.purescript.org). I'm not very impressed with the editor/IDE support though.
I have used it a little for modifying an app. Besides the signing/certificate stuff being super annoying and having to clear a cache (on the first build ... ????) I was actually surprised how nice it is in some places. It has issues, it is glitchy, but at least the UX concepts are kind of sound and it mostly works. This is in stark contrast to visual studio, which in my experience has no UX concept and is super glitchy and almost never works.
The only higher quality IDEs I can think of (and maybe this is sad) are the IntelliJ family and (maybe) VSCode.
It used to be really good across the board, but I think modules broke a lot of things and they never fully repaired? I'm not sure, but I get the feeling that the quality of these editor integrations dropped a year or two ago.
Some of the improvements are marginal, but not all, from a developer perspective moving between editors that support everything from syntax highlighting, intellisense, refactoring etc, to then using an editor that has none of that is quite a shock.
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