A Lua editor thread

[Anonymissimus]

Well, there seems to be no such thread until now. No editor war please, just want to hear what others use and the pros and cons.

There seem to be quite some good editors for windows. I'm usually using the SciTe editor included in the "Lua for windows" package, it is a bit lua-specialized. It provides a bit "intellisense" feature, but only for standard libraries, not for custom functions. That is, when typing e.g. "ipairs(" then some info about that function in the basic package pops up. It also has a debugger but it doesn't seem to work quite well and outputs only little information (table:adress output for tables is almost useless).

However, there seem to be much less good lua editors for Linux. The Linux SciTe version seems not so good and seems to require lots of customization (SciTe is generally almost as hard to customize as emacs).
The emacs lua mode messes up indentation (and it's at least as hard to configure as usual).
The various eclipse plugins did not work at all for me.
silene did use gedit apparently; well, it supports syntax highlight and can send the script to the interpreter after some configuring, that's about the minimum an editor should have.

Most important feature for me would be code-completion such as SciTe-windows can (preferably such completion that knows the syntax, not only words) And I should be able to find out how to do things like displaying line numbers (took days in emacs) or configuring shortcuts within some minutes.

(In case anyone recommends Vi & relatives I'll personally disregard it .)

[melinath]

I use jEdit in linux - has some strange quirks (like in ubuntu 10.10 it would occasionally remove itself from the open windows list though the windows were still open) but it supports most of the features that I want in more or less the way I want them.

[Elvish_Hunter]

There seem to be quite some good editors for windows. I'm usually using the SciTe editor included in the "Lua for windows" package, it is a bit lua-specialized.
...
However, there seem to be much less good lua editors for Linux. The Linux SciTe version seems not so good

If you need it, you can try installing Lua for Windows under Wine. I already tried it, and it seems to work.

silene did use gedit apparently

Usually I tend to use gedit, and occasionally Kate, that has more functions than gedit (yes, I have both Gnome and KDE installed). I'm aware also of another editor, called Geany, that can run scripts directly, supports syntax highlighting and has code completion.

(In case anyone recommends Vi & relatives I'll personally disregard it .)

Never used Vi; and every time that I attempted to use Emacs, I didn't understood much...

[Crendgrim]

I'm also using Kate both for WML and Lua. It has a clear syntax highlighting, although it misses auto completion.
SciTe I used some years ago and didn't really like it.
If anyone knows about a better program (meaning: with auto completion) for Linux, it would be great.

I'm aware also of another editor, called Geany, that can run scripts directly, supports syntax highlighting and has code completion.

I'll give it a try, thanks


Crend

[melinath]

I looked at kate, and it seems nice as an editor, but I really have problems with the KDE design aesthetic... :-p

Incidentally, jEdit has autocompletion with ctl+b. It's language and buffer based, so you can get standard library functions or your own custom functions/vars with it.

Edit:: I don't mean to be pushing this editor overly hard; I just realized that I forgot to mention that feature.

[Anonymissimus]

I'm aware also of another editor, called Geany, that can run scripts directly, supports syntax highlighting and has code completion.

That's actually my current editor on Linux for Lua. But the syntax completion is very "dumb", it displays almost everything that could match, even stuff that doesn't make sense.

If anyone knows about a better program (meaning: with auto completion) for Linux, it would be great.

Yep.

I'll take a look at this jEdit.

EDIT
Well, tried jEdit. The autocompletion you mention is "word completion" so it's no better then Geany's. What's more, it did autocomplete get_ to get_variable_proxy instead of presenting a menu since get_child is also present in the same file...
Also it is very bad that I didn't find a way to "run this buffer" yet. (in gedit you need a plugin but easy to find out, and all others do that usually at once).

[monochromatic]

Us mac users never have place in these kind of discussions. Though I think most mac programmers know that TextMate is god of all text editors.
On linux I use vim occasionally but I mostly use Kate. gedit was decent, but I preferred Kate.

[Anonymissimus]

Us mac users never have place in these kind of discussions.

You are in the unfortunate position to neither be free for download nor be available through tons of piracy copies.

[melinath]

TextMate is awesome, but it's not infallible. A friend of mine is constantly complaining that it doesn't support split views (and I agree with him.) And other annoyances. And TextMate 2 has been in development for a looong time.

@Anonymissimus: what do you mean by syntax autocompletion?

[Anonymissimus]

@Anonymissimus: what do you mean by syntax autocompletion?

Consider me writing e.g. helper.g and then ctrl-space.
Intelligent completion pops up a menu with the functions get_child, get_variable_proxy and so on, everything starting with g but from helper.lua. Dumb completion pops up a menu with every word (including comments) starting with g from the current file.
Eclipse-java is best in that aspect, it calls it "content assist". MSVC calls it "intellisense" (though intellisense is more than that). And I really can't live without that feature and don't get how someone can be confident without it since it means looking up the called function every time you call it, to do that with the right parameters etc (until you finally know it out of the top of your head).