Discord Rich Presence for Textadept.

[M0JXD]

Hi all!

https://github.com/M0JXD/textadept-discord-rpc
Release: https://github.com/M0JXD/textadept-discord-rpc/releases/tag/v0.2-alpha

Thought I would share this that I've been working on. I liked this feature a lot as an extension in other editors so I thought I'd try implementing for Textadept. As Textadept is the choice of those who desire high performing, low resource usage, privacy centric and completely customisable software this might go down like a lead balloon considering how those terms apply to Discord...

However it's no doubt a lot of tech communities are on Discord and it's become one of the most popular places to chat, akin to the old IRC and BBS boards that I'm too young to remember. It's nice to be able to use Textadept to share what you're working on and join in the fun with the other devs using presence in their editors.

It's pretty alpha - expect issues and unimplemented features, but the bones are there. I'll try to keep improving it in the coming weeks. Sadly if you are a macOS user you are on your own. I don't have any Apple devices to build or test on.

Thanks and Merry Christmas! 🎄

Edit: Improved release link.

[Fwirt]

Thanks for this! I use a MacBook as my dev machine so I'll give this a shot when I get the chance.

[M0JXD]

Awesome! Hopefully it'll work. I had to reference the spellcheck module a lot to understand how to build the DLL in a way that's right for Textadept, from what I can tell macOS needs some compiler/linker flags that Xmake might not be passing.

https://github.com/orbitalquark/textadept-spellcheck/blob/53d7945a9a4bc2646bf26dcae5bb9bd018490b14/CMakeLists.txt#L55-L57

It might just be a case of adding something like this to the xmake.lua:

add_cflags('-undefined dynamic_lookup')
or add_ldflags('-undefined dynamic_lookup')
or add_shflags('-undefined dynamic_lookup')

Around here:

https://github.com/M0JXD/textadept-discord-rpc/blob/ff8be5b6173457a4432eb5d4ffcb145fe30c660a/xmake.lua#L57-L60

Also thank you again for the Minimap module! Seeing you adding features was part of the inspiration to make this 🙂

[Fwirt]

No problem! It's good to be part of an active, if small community. Working on Textadept has brought my love of programming for fun back for the first time in probably 15 years.

I'm actually working on my largest module yet at the moment, a full-featured POSIX-compatible vi mode, with remappable keybindings and extensibility. I know there are already a couple other ventures into this domain but they're both years out of date and either too simplistic or over-engineered.

[M0JXD]

I'm glad to hear it's reignited your joy of code! I'm really surprised that Textadept isn't more popular, but I think (in relative terms) it's popularity has increased a lot in the last few years thanks in part to moving to GitHub, and improved support for Windows/macOS. Mitchell has made delightful editor and I hope it gains more traction.

I haven't been programming all that long - I picked up my first book (C++ For Dummies) in 2021. Sadly I didn't realise the damage it was doing being pre C++11 book, but it got me started, and ended up much preferring C anyways. Maybe I haven't done enough to get fed up of code yet! I certainly have a lot to learn still.

I did see your WIP Vi mode yesterday when I updated my .textadept to use git submodules for the likes of your Minimap, Textredux etc.. I'll keep an eye but I never got on with Vi(m) (as you say, esoteric keybindings), but I quite liked Helix though (noun->verb made much more sense for me) - it was nearly the editor I settled on before I discovered their long term plan to switch to Scheme as the config/extension language. I did see that a short while ago someone was working on a Helix/Kakoune mode for Textadept but they never seemed to reach completion.

Like you Lua has rapidly become one of my favourite languages. I first discovered it through Xmake and then Textadept reaffirmed it's wonder for me. Alas JS and Python continue to rule the world but increasingly I'm writing in Lua instead.

[Fwirt]

I've been thinking about why Vim, Emacs, Python, Node.js tend to dominate the ecosystem, and I think it's the "batteries included" mentality. People like to have the software able to do "everything" out of the box, or within a few keystrokes. The downside is, there's always some feature that's missing, and when it comes time for you to implement it, the ecosystem is so large that it's impossible to wrap your head around everything. I've realized that I much prefer extensible systems where it's possible to wrap your head around the entire thing, and then build tools that fit you specifically.

[M0JXD]

I'm not against built in niceties - these days thanks to LSP most editors can provide details that you used to only get from IDEs.
But you are right that it reaches a point of being unmaintainable, and they're so abstracted from the underlying technology that many developers don't fully understand or appreciate what's happening underneath. That lack of understanding is devastating when you want to do something that has not been implemented yet.

The wonderful thing about Textadept from my perspective is that OOTB without scripting it, Textadept really is a notepad for programmers with a carefully selected, focused feature set. And if you use it like that, you have no choice but to understand the technologies you are using it in conjunction with. But when you get into scripting it and adding modules, you realise how insanely powerful the core design is and the wonderful things it allows you to achieve. And unlike other editors, it is within reason for a single person to understand it. Absolute kudos to Mitchell for the work and talent that has gone into Textadept.

[M0JXD]

I've worked on improving this, in the first version I stupidly had a lot of logic in the C side that really belonged in Lua. Now Lua can access the Discord RPC fields directly and obtain the responses it's much more flexible if you want to customise it, and library code won't need recompiled.

Here is the current version: https://github.com/M0JXD/textadept-discord-rpc/releases/tag/v0.3-alpha