Unable to get basic Lightable features working

Question

I read the following article on lighttable here: http://www.chris-granger.com/2012/04/12/light-table---a-new-ide-concept/. I downloaded light table and the only thing I'm able to get working is code highlighting and the instarepl.

To name one thing that I'm unable to get working: documentation on mouse hover.

Am I missing something?

Answer 1

As far as I understand, in the article you mention, LightTable was at a very conceptual stage. There were lots of ideas and features in there, but it was a long way away from a robust extensible editor.

For the 0.2 release, LightTable was rebuilt on "a completely new foundation". However, this took away (temporarily) some of the features. So you're not missing anything: the basic features you are trying to get working are probably not in the release that you downloaded (including, I think, the hover-for-documentation feature)

I think the developers intend for all the features in the original demo to be part of LightTable eventually.

It may be worth watching a more recent video, for example the 0.4 demo (http://www.chris-granger.com/2013/04/28/light-table-040/) to see the scope of the current release.

To stay updated, or to get more information on the direction of LightTable, it's probably best to consult the google groups - there's one for announcements (https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/light-table) and one for discussion (https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/light-table-discussion).

Update (October 2013)

Documentation at point and documentation search are now back in! They were added in version 0.5.13.

You can bind the documentation command (:editor.doc.toggle) in your user keymap by adding a line like the following to your keymap file.

 "ctrl-c d" [:editor.doc.toggle]

To get to the keymap file, activate the command bar (bound to ctrlspace by default), and search for the entry: Settings: User Keymap. The keymap file contains a big map with a :+ section for keybindings to add in each scopes and a :- section for keybindings to remove. (I added this line in the editor.keys.normal scope).