I love the little spinning glider in the lower left, I don't know what it represents or how I got it to appear but, COOL!
I want to like this so badly, but so far I can't justify spending the time to learn to use it just yet.
It might just be a problem with the docs, and maybe I'm just not understanding what light table is on a conceptual level but:
* docs reference tabs that do not exist in my version of the interface ( a trip to the view menu produced no option to show or hide them, so I assume they're from an older version?)
* they expect me to already have created files elsewhere?
* cmd/ctrl-o dialog? what does this do? (seems like nothing, looks like file prompt, but no tab-completion....am I supposed to type out /home/uname/file/x/y/z?)
* cmd-shift-o opens files....but not directories, how do I get a file tree like in the screenshots?
* if the browser tab has focus, cmd-shift-o dialog will not show (as I'm asked to do in the docs)
* control-tab doesn't switch between tabs
* what is the relationship between this browser window and my js file?
after this I gave up.
I guess I am late to the party? Where can I find the real docs?
I have high hopes for this to mature and someday become something that I can say goodbye to vim/sublime, but at this point, I'd need a better onboarding to really give it a go.
Despite their perceived difficulty to use, both emacs and vim provide extensive awesome help without having to resort to a third party.
Sublime may have help somewhere, but since it works just like every other desktop program I've never needed to refer to it.
If this is going to be something that's so wildly different from the text editors I'm used to, I'm going to need more hand-holding to get excited about it.
Sorry, we haven't had a chance to update the docs yet - we didn't want to hold the release any longer. It's at the top of my priority list as soon as I get done moving apartments this weekend.
ctlr-o is the equivalent of ctrl-p in sublime or ctrl-t in textmate. It shows you the files available in your workspace. It used to tell you how to add files to your workspace when it was empty but that seems to have gotten nuked. [1] If you go to view->workspace you have a tree you can then fill in with folders and files. Click the folder button and off you go.
I'll add a menu item for opening a folder. [2]
> if the browser tab has focus, cmd-shift-o dialog will not show (as I'm asked to do in the docs)
Unfortunately this depends on whether the site tries to be clever and capture keys, though, there could just be a regular bug here. Will take a look.
> control-tab doesn't switch between tabs
Ah, I used chrome's default ctrl-shift-[ and ctrl-shift-]. Makes sense to add that one too though. [3]
> what is the relationship between this browser window and my js file?
If you press ctrl-enter or ctrl-shift-enter you have now evaled that file into that browser window. Any time you eval again, you'll be injecting code into that frame.
> Sublime may have help somewhere, but since it works just like every other desktop program I've never needed to refer to it.
Can you tell me more about what's missing here? Are there specific menu items, etc? If you tried to use it just like Sublime (as in none of the other fancy stuff), what is harder/more difficult to wrap your head around?
Hey Chris, you mentioned watching people use Light Table, but have you done any full usability studies? At the startup where I work (also aimed mostly at programmers), we've had great luck with usability studies.
Basic idea: bring in 3 or 4 programmers who've never seen Light Table before, explain that you're testing the app and not them, and ask them to perform a few simple editing tasks without help, narrating their thought process, while you watch and take notes.
It can be painful to watch people struggle the first time you do a study, but you learn a lot about what people find confusing in your app — and how you can make it better.
Then fix the biggest issues you identify and do another study in a month. I've seen this approach yield massive improvements, and I bet it would for you too.
> Ah, I used chrome's default ctrl-shift-[ and ctrl-shift-]
Note that [ and ] are hard to type with modifiers on most non-English keyboards. It's very unadvisable to use a default binding of [+anything for anything, because if you have any international traction, a third of your users will have to rebind it.
Yup, this is the one I'm used to and it weirds me out when it's not supported. Apparently unheard of on OS X though, which is probably why so many web devs make sites that break it by stealing PgUp/PgDn.
I agree with many of the things @canthonytucci said. My biggest thing is that I need Vim keybindings to feel 'normal' inside my editor and, for the life of me, can't find out how to enable them in Light Table. The commands and views I use/see in my LT installation on Fedora 19 do not look like or act like the docs. It's extremely frustrating. I'm willing to muddle through learning a new text editor. I also really want to like this editor but I find it hard to do so when the docs aren't matching what I see.
Great work, and I can't wait for plugins to arrive!
This should be the next great text-editor once it's open-sourced - I'm too young to bother with vim/emacs, and a bit too poor to buy Sublime Text, great though it is!
The fact that it's written in Clojure(script) makes me want to dive into the source, and find out how a modern desktop application is built using a Lisp.
What does this mean? The younger the better, there's quite a bit to learn about using both.
If you mean they're too "Old-school" as in there are a lot of keyboard commands to learn to use them effectively...give them a try, you might find after a while that ctrl-n really is easier than moving all the way over to the down arrow key when you're in the zone and building something.
Huh, hadn't heard of Clooj. Another Clojure IDE written in Clojure is Nightcode: http://nightcode.info/ It's open source under the Unlicense, but very young — even the early releases of Light Table may be more polished at this point.
On the other hand, it has Paredit mode, which is still "coming soon" for Light Table :)
Never too young! Most editors look flashy next to Vim, but switching to a terminal-based editor towards the beginning of my development learning helped my learning gains immensely. Give it a try, you'd be surprised!
I started using it (consistently, all day) with ~22 after learning vi and emacs during my degree (that's 8 years ago). I stuck with emacs for the PhD and now for work, but I'm using evil lately to get text objects. I don't think emacs or vim are that hard, you get used pretty quick to anything you do all day long (I'm now using Acme to write go, as an example of new things)
Why is it not packaged within the Lighttable.app anymore? Unzipping it's a folder with a .app inside and all the NW resources next to it instead of inside. Confused…
The "watches" feature video actually made me say "wow" out loud in the office. Such a simple idea but I can instantly see how amazingly useful it will be.
Thanks for the new release. Is it possible to reopen the open files from the previous session on startup? I find myself frustrated with having to look at the welcome screen instead of getting what I was working on in my previous session. It's also a bit annoying to reopen all the files at the beginning of each session. Am I missing something?
So, I'm a bit confused about how these watches work. I expected them to give me a live view of how a variable changes (like data-binding), but that doesn't seem to be the case. It seems that it puts a hook into whenever the page evaluates that code, it updates the watch.
For instance, I put a watch on this javascript:
window.scrollY;
I expected it to update every time I scrolled. In reality, I had to put an event hook onto the window's scroll event with window.scrollY inside of it. This is a bit confusing.
Also, Chris, anyone you can put an update somewhere when you get the docs finished? This is the first release that is stable enough for me to actually use, so I don't really know how to do anything. Seems like the docs are way out of date (ie: How the heck do I search for files in my workspace?).
Great release though! I'm pumped that LightTable is finally stable enough for me to attempt to replace sublime!
For the record, I now see someone else commented with the Cmd+o hint.. I guess that's how you search for files. Either way, I'd love to know when the docs are updated so I can really dig in!
In the change logs there's notes about an added Emacs mode; has anyone worked out how to enable this? Can't see anything in the command list and nothing in a brief glance through the .behaviours files.
Instead of this, you can write :lt.plugins.emacs/activate-emacs to activate emacs mode.
Note that this page has nice completion-matching--for example, if you delete the interior of the string "default" you can see fuzzy completions, and putting the cursor within a keyword will explain what setting it's bound to.
So far, started it three times, had it silently exit without being asked three times. No Style tab available, no findable way to change that ugly white on black. Such promising, currently unusable. OS X 10.8.4.
It's for hackers. It just dying is not what happens to most of us -- but even if it happened to you, you should be able to short it out. Have you checked the console output for example? Have you installed another version of Java? etc..
1. in 0.4.x, no -- but you can have a buffer (say, scratchpad.py) and evaluate the whole buffer. This is a workflow I find more useful than an ipython session (although it's a little lame not having tab-completion and whatnot for inspecting unknown modules). I've not tried 0.5.x yet :).
This is the first release of LightTable I've experimented with, and I find it to be really promising!
One thing: I fired up the built-in browser and pointed it at a local static server which sits in front of some apps I'm building with Google Polymer[1]. The apps don't work at all in that browser environment -- the console reports lots of errors related to invalid html and css.
I was able to connect LightTable (per the docs) to an external browser, but that seems to lessen the LT experience somewhat.
Would it be possible for the LT team to look into why the Polymer polyfills don't work properly with the built-in browser?
I want to like this so badly, but so far I can't justify spending the time to learn to use it just yet.
It might just be a problem with the docs, and maybe I'm just not understanding what light table is on a conceptual level but:
* docs reference tabs that do not exist in my version of the interface ( a trip to the view menu produced no option to show or hide them, so I assume they're from an older version?)
* they expect me to already have created files elsewhere?
* cmd/ctrl-o dialog? what does this do? (seems like nothing, looks like file prompt, but no tab-completion....am I supposed to type out /home/uname/file/x/y/z?)
* cmd-shift-o opens files....but not directories, how do I get a file tree like in the screenshots?
* if the browser tab has focus, cmd-shift-o dialog will not show (as I'm asked to do in the docs)
* control-tab doesn't switch between tabs
* what is the relationship between this browser window and my js file?
after this I gave up.
I guess I am late to the party? Where can I find the real docs?
I have high hopes for this to mature and someday become something that I can say goodbye to vim/sublime, but at this point, I'd need a better onboarding to really give it a go.
Despite their perceived difficulty to use, both emacs and vim provide extensive awesome help without having to resort to a third party.
Sublime may have help somewhere, but since it works just like every other desktop program I've never needed to refer to it.
If this is going to be something that's so wildly different from the text editors I'm used to, I'm going to need more hand-holding to get excited about it.