amiga-news.de - AmigaOS 4: Port of editor 'Lite XL' announced

20.Dec.2021
George Sokianos (ko-fi) AmigaOS 4: Port of editor 'Lite XL' announced
George Sokianos, author of the AmigaOS 4.1 application MediaVault, has announced that he has started porting the editor Lite XL, which originated in the Linux world. About his motivation and the current development status he wrote the following:

"Recently I started creating a couple of plugins for CubicIDE, trying to make it work the best way for my needs. Although CubicIDE is a 68k application it is working quite well on AmigaOS 4 and it is really fast. But it has some quirks here and there, like, for example, there is no way to show the space characters, and for projects like python sometimes this is crucial. But currently, CubicIDE is my beloved editor for development.

I also started working on porting another editor from the Linux world, called Lite XL. This one is based on lite, which as its name implies, it's a very simple small editor, but it is not maintained anymore. The reason, based on its developer, is that it has all the features he wanted, and it is finished. To be honest I rarely hear about a project being finished. Abandoned yes, but finished?

Lite XL development is quite active, getting more and more features on every release. This editor is based on Lua, SDL and plain C, except for a couple of libraries it uses which are in C++. Which makes it an interesting project to work with. It is quite fast and light and has a lot of the features most people are looking from an editor in modern computing. And for me, it gives me a good opportunity to work with technologies that I didn't have the chance to use before.

Currently, the version I am working on is 1.16, and the reason is that since v2 new libraries were introduced, that are not available on AmigaOS 4. So, before I start working with these libraries, I wanted to know if I am able to port an older version and make it work. If I will not succeed, there is no reason for me to try the newer versions.

I am also developing it in a way that the minimum amount of changes are done in the code, by introducing platform-specific files, where all the necessary methods are going to be stored, like those that have to do with paths and filesystem.

As you read these lines, I have Lite XL running on AmigaOS 4.1 FE. It can load files and save them. The scrolling is quite fast on my X5000 even for big text files, and I want to test it on another system. I am curious how it will work on my μAmigaOne.

But, unfortunately, there are other things that are not working yet, like the keyboard shortcuts. And this is what I need to do the following days.

As soon as this is finished, the code and all the changes will be available on one of my Git repositories, for everyone to have access to, and a release will be done. I hope that this won't take long." (dr)

[News message: 20. Dec. 2021, 18:37] [Comments: 0]
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