A week ago I read an exciting title on HackerNews - "Light Table is now Open Source".
"Great!" I thought, "what's Light Table?"

After an excruciating search on Google that took over 0.5 seconds,
I've realized we have a contender to the unbeatable Sublime Text editor
(I hate the fact that you can't use Notepad++ on Linux)!

Light Table is a lightweight text editor, that actually started as a Kickstarter project.
It got an overwhelming $316,720, which is a huge amount for a piece of program
(usually successful Kickstarter projects are physical stuff)

So what makes Light Table so great?

• Embedded browser
  you can actually run parts of your code directly on an inline browser!
  I’m still not sure why though, but this is all very exciting!
  By going to View -> Commands and choosing Browser: add browser tab
  this opens up a browser.

• Eval on the fly
  Now you can also push specific content to the browser, by hovering the piece of code and pressing Ctrl+Enter.
  A popup should appear to let you choose a webpage to insert the piece of code into.
  If you're programming in Python it will eval the code and show you the result inline.

• Chameleon
  Light Table has the ability to mimic Vim's and Emacs's shortcuts.
  As of version 0.6, you’re gonna have to install them as plugins.
  go to View -> Commands search for plugin and click Show plugin manager.
  search for Vim or Emacs, and install.
  How to exactly use it, is still a mystery to me,
  I’ve had more success with other plugins though (like Emmet).

• ???
  There are plenty of other features, such as searchable commands under
  View -> Commands (kinda like Sublime Text), but it's just not as documented as Sublime’s features are.

It’s important to know that the current version is still 0.6, the program is very young and so
it might feel a bit on the light side.

But it’s always good hearing about a highly active (from the development standpoint) open source lightweight IDE!
It's interesting to see the counter-eclipse-culture (it's a thing!)
rising against bloated IDE's, let's see where this goes.

Try it, it supports every major platform.

Until next week,