I love the concept of LightTable, basically a new Emacs with a redesigned architecture and plugin system.
I don't love that it's written inside a WebView. I don't love that the best cross-platform graphics library we have is the mess we call HTML+CSS+JS. I don't love that I have to compile Clojure to JavaScript and run it inside a WebView in order to do anything to customize it.
On the other hand, I love the simplicity of the UI of emacs. But I don't love how it's decidedly focused on text-only and its GUI is a second-class citizen. (Try scrolling per-pixel rather than per-line, and consider that tabs can only be implemented as a complete hack based on the ruler area.)
I love that Emacs Lisp compiles to bytecode and is interpreted natively. I love the simplicity of the language and its implementation and how it's integrated with Emacs. But I don't love the language itself.
If you're on a mac, the railwaycat port of emacs has pixel scrolling with the trackpad/mouse out-of-the-box. It's not as crystal smooth as you'd hope for, but it's decent.
I'm 100% with you. Feels dirty to write Clojure that becomes Javascript, I rather be writing Lua or Scheme or Python. But LT already exists, and the imaginary editor we want doesn't.
I tried pretty hard to write it, but gave up because I took the wrong approach.
I tried writing it in C and Objective-C. But this isn't cross platform for starters. Plus, C is really hard to extend cleanly using a scripting language.
I've deleted the project since, but there are probably forks floating around[1]. I'll probably give it another shot one day when I learn more.
I don't love that it's written inside a WebView. I don't love that the best cross-platform graphics library we have is the mess we call HTML+CSS+JS. I don't love that I have to compile Clojure to JavaScript and run it inside a WebView in order to do anything to customize it.
On the other hand, I love the simplicity of the UI of emacs. But I don't love how it's decidedly focused on text-only and its GUI is a second-class citizen. (Try scrolling per-pixel rather than per-line, and consider that tabs can only be implemented as a complete hack based on the ruler area.)
I love that Emacs Lisp compiles to bytecode and is interpreted natively. I love the simplicity of the language and its implementation and how it's integrated with Emacs. But I don't love the language itself.