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255 points rd07 | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.418s | source
1. teo_zero ◴[] No.41305216[source]
Micro-review after having used it for half a day on Windows.

It seems really lightweight: the UI is spartan but snappy, loading a file is instantaneous, etc. Downloading and installing a plugin is as easy as dropping a Lua file into a directory. And even after installing several plugins, the speed doesn't seem affected.

On the other hand, it comes with hardly any feature out of the box, and everything must be covered by plugins. The plugins are really "atomic". For example, one is to auto-indent, another one to auto-format a block; one is to highlight the matching bracket a second one to jump to the matching bracket, and a third one to automatically insert the closing bracket, while yet another one draws rulers to visualize the block between matching brackets. Do you want to set markers and jump between then? another plugin. Build from within the editor? another plugin. And so on...

The plugin "store" looks good, but accessing it from inside the editor is a poor experience: sometimes it just hungs and you have to restart the editor. Additionally the fact that plugins, themes and fonts are all mixed up doesn't make it easy to find what you're looking for.

Final judgement: if I need to select and install 10 to 15 plugins just to make it on par with a stock Vim, I'll stay with the latter.

replies(1): >>41306234 #
2. rd07 ◴[] No.41306234[source]
IMO, Pragtical (and Lite XL) is closer to Atom ideologically where almost everything is a plugin. But compared to Atom, they ship the bare minimum of plugin in their release and let user install the rest as they need. Pragtical is better in this regards than Lite XL where they ship better UI improvement and default plugin, for example the setting page must be installed as a plugin in Lite XL but already shipped as part of Pragtical release. I agree with you that they should add some plugin as part of their core app to increase user's experience out of the box though.