from Hacker News

4coder editor is now fully open source

by leoncaet on 5/31/22, 1:10 PM with 99 comments

• by pengaru on 5/31/22, 2:31 PM

  While I'm not a user of this editor, this seems like great news.

  4coder receives significant attention via the Casey Muratori's video streams like Handmade Hero, and opening it up is sure to produce some positive growth for the development/community side of the project.

  The combination of popular development livestreams and FOSS tooling utilized in those livestreams seems like it could be an important part of making FOSS development more sustainable without involving big corporate sponsors.

• by dang on 5/31/22, 4:57 PM

  Related:

  4coder, a modern text editor based loosely on Emacs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23444912 - June 2020 (16 comments)

• by develatio on 5/31/22, 2:08 PM

  For anyone else (like me) who doesn't know what this is, it seems like the website is http://4coder.net

• by jcalabro on 5/31/22, 3:55 PM

  Ah this is great! Sad that it's not getting any future updates, but on to other projects. I tried using the Mac version of 4ed a couple times, but it never got the TLC that Windows did, plus the emacs-like setup was foreign since I use vim.

  The author has a great YouTube playlist[0] as well, bringing you through some basics of their preferred methodology of programming. It's been interesting to follow along and check out how he does things.

  https://www.youtube.com/c/Mr4thProgramming/videos

• by dividedbyzero on 5/31/22, 2:56 PM

  Seems to be an emacs clone using C++ for customization instead of elisp.

• by heywoodlh on 6/2/22, 3:40 AM

  I'm a huge advocate for making everything open source so good for 4coder!

  I feel like a couple of posts on HN the past few months have been "X is going open source". It makes me question why projects that aren't open source when they initially release switch over to open source later. I understand keeping a repo private before having a working/stable product, but why release a product as closed source and then open it up later? Why not just keep the product off the market until it is ready to be released and make it open source before or at launch time?

  I totally have space that I'm just crazy but as someone who tries to keep my stack as open source as possible I find myself not really interested in products that start closed source and eventually open up. Is it just me?

  Just to reiterate: I'd rather a project go open source later vs never.

  EDIT: I just realized the context for 4Coder was that it was a "we're ending this product so here's the source for anyone who wants it" -- I am super grateful for closed-source products that do this. But my question is still relevant for other projects that have done what I described above.

• by null4bl3 on 5/31/22, 8:54 PM

  I would just prefer an open source alternative to vscode (that wasn't vscodium)

  vscode to me is simply to bloated. They should have landed like a year and half ago.

• by behiri on 5/31/22, 3:01 PM

  I remember Casey Muratori was explaining his emacs key bindings in one of his handmade hero videos and he said something like 'I would use any editor that has these key bindings and split windows', so I guess that is when the 4coder idea came to life.

• by eggy on 5/31/22, 4:17 PM

  I purchased it a few years back, and I was having fun, but a bug on the newest version of Windows derailed me from continuing with it. I was looking for a lean, C or C++-based coder to replace my Vim/Emacs habit! I'll have to check it out again.

• by bilekas on 5/31/22, 3:27 PM

  > that there is a totally separate build system for the custom layer which is also a big gigantic mess of its own. It involves several stages of compilation, and a number of metaprograms.

  Sounds like a handful to manage closed source solo!

• by CyMonk on 5/31/22, 3:16 PM

  they are not on github, but there are builds available from itch.io as free downloads.

  https://4coder.itch.io/4coder

• by lazypenguin on 5/31/22, 2:40 PM

  Anyone know why development is being discontinued?

• by erung88 on 6/1/22, 12:26 AM

  Happy to see another code editor goes open-source! Kudos to 4coder team.

• by hollerith on 5/31/22, 2:22 PM

  How well does 4coder support users who like using the mouse?

• by Sakos on 6/1/22, 9:06 AM

  Is there any reason to use this over, say, Sublime Text or VS Code?

• by seanw444 on 5/31/22, 2:08 PM

  I remember an Aussie game developer on YouTube uses this editor. I hadn't heard of it before, but it seemed interesting. I eventually settled on learning Emacs instead, because 4coder was closed-source at the time. No regrets. Now I'm probably with Emacs for life. Too unique. Too powerful. Too customizable.

  Side note: it's funny how formerly closed-source projects always open up to have tons of spaghetti code and bad design planning.

• by obert on 5/31/22, 5:19 PM

  note to future opensourcers: please, please, explain what the project does in your README. People get RTFM so often, maybe it’s time for WTFM too…

• by maccard on 5/31/22, 4:37 PM

  I get that the whole handmade shtick is to avoid existing libraries to allow for better software, but when you see things like [0], you realise what cmake is for...

  [0] https://github.com/Dion-Systems/4coder/tree/master/bin

• by 098799 on 5/31/22, 2:47 PM

  I wonder how do people come to a decision that it's a good idea to start their own text editor when vim and emacs exist. For this one my guess is the author is a c/c++ developer and wanted to have their editor cusomizable in their desired language. Would that be enough?

  It's also not a common thing for projects like that not to start as FOSS.

• by opan on 5/31/22, 6:13 PM

  What is the license? I don't see it at a glance.