💾 Archived View for not-a-web-developer.srht.site › 2022 › March › Left.gmi captured on 2024-08-31 at 11:45:12. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Left is a distractionless text editor.

And I am LOVING it.

First, some context.

So you see, there's this itch in my heart for a text editor that i can use for more than writing plaintext, but which isn't filled with features that i would never use normally anyway but will get distracted trying to explore (looking at you, Word).

on the other end of this spectrum are text editors like notepad on windows and mousepad on my linux VMs, that certainly are basic, but they look aout of place at best and horrible in the case of notepad.

Enter 100rabbits.

in case you didn't know about them, they're a duo that lives on a boat in the Pacific Ocean, with the purpose of figuring out how to best use technology while isolated because of, i don't know, living in a boat in the middle of the ocean?

anyway, here's their website if you wanna check them out:

100 rabbits

so i really like their software because they write it to run well on low-power devices; and if it can run well on a raspberry pi, it can (hopefully) run well on mine.

they have written a lot of cool stuff like Uxn (an "OS" that can run on an 8-bit microprocessor like the 6502), and Left (the topic of this post).

So, what is Left?

as i described before, it's a distractionless text editor. it's super plain, and is written in electron.

DID I JUST READ THE WORD ELECTRON? I WILL BURN THESE PEOPLE ALIVE!!!1!1

calm down, it's not as bad as you think: it barely takes over 80 megabytes and is usually hanging around in the 60s; it doesn't take up too much CPU, and it passes the "load on a hard drive" test by taking just over 10 seconds to launch (for context, the electron hello world project takes over 30 seconds to do the same thing).

if you wanna see what it looks like, check out the github repo:

https://github.com/hundredrabbits/Left

I have been surprised by how easy it is to work with: you open it up, and then you start writing.

It's keyboard-centric, however the keybinds are really easy to learn and there's not a lot of them; and it does work just fine with the mouse if you're not a keyboard person.

And that doesn't even cover the synonyms feature.

the editor has this feature where it tries to guess waht word you're typing (a sort of autocomplete), and once your word is completed, it recommends a bunch of synonyms you can choose from, if you want to.

I don't know about you, but that's super neat to me.

go back to home