This is a post from my old blog at July 25th, 2024
https://codenested.blogspot.com/2024/07/a-5-day-journey-with-lite-xl.html

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There's an ancient Chinese saying(which is also famous in Korea), 日新又日新, meaning that "renew myself day by day." With the saying in mind, occasionally I try new development environments and tools, as other good developers do.

During the time I was a bit skeptical about "modal editing" scheme, represented by Vim, changing modes-Insert, Normal, Visual- to do certain stuff. Why would I be concerned with the mode? If I can do everything without changing modes, wouldn't it save both time and my mental resources(e.g. being concerned with mode)?

With that in mind, I tried to search for a good substitute for my precious Vim and amid the search activity I found Lite-XL. Though I'm back to Vim, the 5-day journey with the Lua-based coding editor was impressive, so I'd like to leave a record to remember the fun during the journey.

Too small footprint

Literally. Like Vim, it has small footprint. Though memory consumption was a bit higher than Vim for fresh run, but compared with modern "heavyweight" IDE-like code editors, and considering that it's built in Lua, a versatile scripting language, it was impressive.

However, it also means that it barely has anything, like vanilla Vim. To be more productive, you need to install and configure plugins, e.g. LSP, indent guide, or highlighting same words of current selection in the document.

And where there's .vimrc in Vim, there's .config/lite-xl/* in Lite-XL. There are a handful of Lua scripts there, and you can add your own configurations and initializations as needed. Configuration is fully manual and in Lua, but you no worries even though you're not familiar with the language, like I do. Follow the instructions for each plugin and you'll be fine, though I had to be careful to not lose any details when reading them(maybe that's because I'm not an English speaker? ;) ).

Fully responsive, always

Lite-XL was always responsive with nice scrolling animations. Whether it be searching among files or dealing with command palette, it was always like shouting "I'm lightweight enough so that I can fly!".

LSP: some better, some missing

LSP plugin is satisfactory. Though the official github repository for Lite-XL LSP plugin says that it is WIP, but still most major features are already ready to serve, and the overlay was quite informative, and, most of all, non-interrupting. I'm sure you know what I mean if you saw messages in virtual texts when running Vim LSP plugins. Even showing overloads was better with Lite-XL.

However, its symbol search dialogs and commands were a bit confusing, and missed some small utilities I enjoyed(e.g. symbol search with full symbol list and their types). But that's fine - maybe I was just not familiar with new interface, and I didn't invest ,much time or efforts on changing my workflow for the unfamiliar interface.

Weapons hot keys (almost) everywhere

The developers must be concerned with their right hands traveling between keyboard and mouse, and they want to minimize using mouse.

Where there is a frequently used feature, there's a hot key dedicated for it. I'm sure that Lite-XL developers must use Lite-XL themselves on developing stuff and they're also "speed freaks", to NOT allow any time loss regarding your keystrokes.

The only thing I was confused was that window splitting - Lite-XL used <Alt> + ijkl while Vim used Ctrl-W with its famous hjkl combination. :P

Handling too big files is slow (feat. 4GB.txt)

It's rare but sometimes I have to deal with log files with a few GBs in size. Vim 9 handled them really well. It opened the file in a few seconds and the file is already ready to serve.

When I tried to open the same file with Lite-XL, it took a few minutes to open, and sometimes the editor lagged. I don't think that's simply a limit for scripting language, as I saw Visual Studio Code, written in Javascript, could handle the same file really well, except for memory consumption(lol).

Anyway, I think that's not the case for everyone, so I think you can safely ignore if you don't have to handle REALLY BIG text files.

Don't do git checkout on editing (huh?)

While opening some files with Lite-XL, I git checkouted my project, some open files changed, and the editor crashed(oops). I'm not sure whether I was just unfortunate or it was a bug, but anyway it happened.

Small, versatile, but a few oops

There's a joke in Korea that while women are enthusiastic about rating and reviewing restaurants, men write the review in only two occasions: it's so bad that you'd announce "don't go there it's enough only for me to be the scapegoat", or it's really great that you think "man it's damn great I want to spread the words so that the restaurant can sustain more."

For Lite-XL, this is the latter. It's damn great, especially if you're in thirsty for lightweight alternative against Visual Studio Code yet don't want to face the deep valley of learning curve for Vim(one thing: though I'm a Vim user, I don't think everyone needs to learn Vim for their maximum productivity. Rather, I'm against it - there are so many ways to accomplish your goals. Having such in mind, I think VS Code can satisfy and cover quite a lot of use cases and ways to do things, like choosing between Intellisense and clangd for assisting C++ development).

I had to return to Vim because I missed a few things(handling GB-size files was critical), but if you don't have to deal with big files, I strongly recommend to give it a try.