• Rimu@piefed.social
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    9 months ago

    They wrote their own GUI toolkit (oof) and it’s hardware accelerated (argh), so OS portability is going to be unusually difficult unless they planned for it from the beginning. No mention of that in the article, so I doubt they did.

    • hypertown@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      They already have very experimental Linux support. You have to build whole app yourself though. I’d say that in month or two we’ll get a binary. You can track Linux porting progress in this issue

    • Carighan Maconar@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      I mean on the one hand, the hardware acceleration is awesome. The GUI toolkit is not of course (I assume MacOS has a default one to make everything look like it belongs?), but at least they made it look like a native app instead of the usual electron shit where it’s clearly a web page with a window border and some design 15y old me might think is cool but 16y old me would already have been ashamed of.

      • Ephera@lemmy.ml
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        9 months ago

        As I understand, GUI toolkits will usually support various widget styles or “Look and Feels”.
        So, they can just use a glossy graphic for a button on macOS and a flat graphic on Windows 11, without having to reimplement the whole application in the native toolkit. It will usually not feel entirely native, but at least, it won’t look out of place…

      • abhibeckert@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        Because GTK is designed for GUI software, and this is a text editor. Almost everything is text - it’s got more in common with Vim than Gedit.

      • eveninghere@beehaw.org
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        9 months ago

        Edit: I’m writing this out of my ass, so don’t quote me.

        They wrote that they GPU(I?)-accelerate the font rendering. Well, indeed, fonts are usually rendered with CPUs because it’s slow to use the traditional VRAM (which sits in the GPU) for this task, given that the text itself is stuck in the RAM (sitting right next to the CPU). With integrated chips like the Apple Silicon, it probably makes sense to move the font rendering into the GPU because the memory is unified. GTK is absolutely not designed to do this, AFAIK.

        But that also means that, to get this particular benefit of their dedicated GUI framework, you probably have to buy an Apple Silicon Mac. There are PCs with similar architecture, iirc, but that also means that there’s no way you can upgrade your GPU or RAM individually in the future… My fear is that, on a standard PC, it might be just as responsive as other editors.

      • heyoni@lemm.ee
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        9 months ago

        Didn’t treesitter come from the Atom editor? These guys always take things really far so this isn’t surprising.