While I'm not a user of this editor, this seems like great news.
4coder receives significant attention via the Casey Muratori's video streams like Handmade Hero, and opening it up is sure to produce some positive growth for the development/community side of the project.
The combination of popular development livestreams and FOSS tooling utilized in those livestreams seems like it could be an important part of making FOSS development more sustainable without involving big corporate sponsors.
> opening it up is sure to produce some positive growth for the development/community side of the project
This is not a "opening up" of anything but the source code, with a permissive license. You're free to fork and change anything you want, but it won't be upstreamed ever as the author did the open sourcing because they are stopping maintenance of the project.
So this is more of a "closing down" with the gift of leaving us with the source code. And for that Allen Webster, I thank you!
From that page “Anticipated Next Version: 4.1.3 (beta), February 2020” so this release as open source along with the github repo being set to archive/read-only looks like an “I'm done. If a community wants to keep this alive, over to them…”. Nothing wrong with that, it is much better than complete abandonment in such a way as other people can't carry the torch even if they really want to, but it is a less positive situation than the headline suggests.
I love people who think everything has to be aimed for their consumption.
Some things are aimed at a group of people, and written with that in mind. Someone closing a project/stopping maintenance of something, usually write directly to the group of users of the software.
To expect everything to contain information about everything someone could not know, means everything would have to be extremely verbose. We have search engines, typing "4coder" and finding the website took me around 2 seconds, I'm sure you'd be able to do it just as fast.
Ah this is great! Sad that it's not getting any future updates, but on to other projects. I tried using the Mac version of 4ed a couple times, but it never got the TLC that Windows did, plus the emacs-like setup was foreign since I use vim.
The author has a great YouTube playlist[0] as well, bringing you through some basics of their preferred methodology of programming. It's been interesting to follow along and check out how he does things.
From my very brief experience with it, and watching Casey hack on it, it's a _much_ more well-designed program. I've used emacs quite extensively, and while I don't tinker with it that much, every time I do it feels like a maze with a gazillion dead ends. It's a terrible experience most of the times, and an unremarkable one the rest.
Also, I feel like the C configuration opens the door to using other languages too, Lua comes to mind immediately. You can do that in emacs too, but it's not as straightforward.
One last thing. One of my biggest gripes with emacs is the performance (I'm using a rather low-end computer). I'm making the assumption that a moderately-sized pile of C++ will perform better than a huge pile of elisp.
I'm a huge advocate for making everything open source so good for 4coder!
I feel like a couple of posts on HN the past few months have been "X is going open source". It makes me question why projects that aren't open source when they initially release switch over to open source later. I understand keeping a repo private before having a working/stable product, but why release a product as closed source and then open it up later? Why not just keep the product off the market until it is ready to be released and make it open source before or at launch time?
I totally have space that I'm just crazy but as someone who tries to keep my stack as open source as possible I find myself not really interested in products that start closed source and eventually open up. Is it just me?
Just to reiterate: I'd rather a project go open source later vs never.
EDIT: I just realized the context for 4Coder was that it was a "we're ending this product so here's the source for anyone who wants it" -- I am super grateful for closed-source products that do this. But my question is still relevant for other projects that have done what I described above.
An open source text editor that isn’t as “bloated” as VSCode? Sounds like … all of them, really, try Emacs or vim or nano or vi and maybe you’ll find something you like. But if what you want is “VSCode with all the features I use and none of the ones I don’t,” you’ll probably have to make it yourself (or at least be more specific).
I remember Casey Muratori was explaining his emacs key bindings in one of his handmade hero videos and he said something like 'I would use any editor that has these key bindings and split windows', so I guess that is when the 4coder idea came to life.
Readit News
4coder receives significant attention via the Casey Muratori's video streams like Handmade Hero, and opening it up is sure to produce some positive growth for the development/community side of the project.
The combination of popular development livestreams and FOSS tooling utilized in those livestreams seems like it could be an important part of making FOSS development more sustainable without involving big corporate sponsors.
This is not a "opening up" of anything but the source code, with a permissive license. You're free to fork and change anything you want, but it won't be upstreamed ever as the author did the open sourcing because they are stopping maintenance of the project.
So this is more of a "closing down" with the gift of leaving us with the source code. And for that Allen Webster, I thank you!
Dead Comment
4coder, a modern text editor based loosely on Emacs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23444912 - June 2020 (16 comments)
"What the hell is ________?"
Some things are aimed at a group of people, and written with that in mind. Someone closing a project/stopping maintenance of something, usually write directly to the group of users of the software.
To expect everything to contain information about everything someone could not know, means everything would have to be extremely verbose. We have search engines, typing "4coder" and finding the website took me around 2 seconds, I'm sure you'd be able to do it just as fast.
Deleted Comment
The author has a great YouTube playlist[0] as well, bringing you through some basics of their preferred methodology of programming. It's been interesting to follow along and check out how he does things.
https://www.youtube.com/c/Mr4thProgramming/videos
Also, I feel like the C configuration opens the door to using other languages too, Lua comes to mind immediately. You can do that in emacs too, but it's not as straightforward.
One last thing. One of my biggest gripes with emacs is the performance (I'm using a rather low-end computer). I'm making the assumption that a moderately-sized pile of C++ will perform better than a huge pile of elisp.
I feel like a couple of posts on HN the past few months have been "X is going open source". It makes me question why projects that aren't open source when they initially release switch over to open source later. I understand keeping a repo private before having a working/stable product, but why release a product as closed source and then open it up later? Why not just keep the product off the market until it is ready to be released and make it open source before or at launch time?
I totally have space that I'm just crazy but as someone who tries to keep my stack as open source as possible I find myself not really interested in products that start closed source and eventually open up. Is it just me?
Just to reiterate: I'd rather a project go open source later vs never.
EDIT: I just realized the context for 4Coder was that it was a "we're ending this product so here's the source for anyone who wants it" -- I am super grateful for closed-source products that do this. But my question is still relevant for other projects that have done what I described above.
vscode to me is simply to bloated. They should have landed like a year and half ago.