I have an irrational dislike of Lisps... I do know the basics, but I've never been able to get into it even after 23 years of Emacs..
Meanwhile, it took me less than a day to have the basics in place (not entirely from scratch; I borrowed a very basic starting point [1]) in Ruby, and I've spent less than a week getting it to a point where I probably using it about 3/4 of the time (falling back to Emacs on occasion) (my own editor isn't pushed anywhere, but it will appear here [2]).
Of course it's not as feature-full and polished as Emacs, but it has most of the features I need, including sufficiently tolerable auto-indent and syntax highlighting (courtesy of "rouge", a Ruby highlighting library that can output ANSI codes), and with a bunch of custom transformation rules to e.g. add lots of extra stuff to my Markdown files to make my notes look nicer.
One thing I find is that with respect to things like this it's very much a 20% of the time to get 80% there thing, but if you write software mostly for your own use, getting 80% there is often sufficient. E.g. I haven't added a "safe" extension mechanism - my editor will crash if I decide to customize something, because the "extensions" are modifying the core of the editor rather than get treated as an embedded language.
That'd not really be acceptable as a general purpose editor. But as my editor for my personal use, it's quite ok (and loss of any substantial amount of data is easy enough to protect against). It's shortcuts like that which makes it viable. E.g. I also know that trying to open a gigantic file with it would be silly, but I very rarely do that, and can resort to a "grown up" editor when I need to.
Meanwhile, it took me less than a day to have the basics in place (not entirely from scratch; I borrowed a very basic starting point [1]) in Ruby, and I've spent less than a week getting it to a point where I probably using it about 3/4 of the time (falling back to Emacs on occasion) (my own editor isn't pushed anywhere, but it will appear here [2]).
Of course it's not as feature-full and polished as Emacs, but it has most of the features I need, including sufficiently tolerable auto-indent and syntax highlighting (courtesy of "rouge", a Ruby highlighting library that can output ANSI codes), and with a bunch of custom transformation rules to e.g. add lots of extra stuff to my Markdown files to make my notes look nicer.
One thing I find is that with respect to things like this it's very much a 20% of the time to get 80% there thing, but if you write software mostly for your own use, getting 80% there is often sufficient. E.g. I haven't added a "safe" extension mechanism - my editor will crash if I decide to customize something, because the "extensions" are modifying the core of the editor rather than get treated as an embedded language.
That'd not really be acceptable as a general purpose editor. But as my editor for my personal use, it's quite ok (and loss of any substantial amount of data is easy enough to protect against). It's shortcuts like that which makes it viable. E.g. I also know that trying to open a gigantic file with it would be silly, but I very rarely do that, and can resort to a "grown up" editor when I need to.
[1] https://github.com/agorf/femto
[2] https://github.com/vidarh/re