I use a text-mode editor instead of a GUI editor
I don't see what prevents a text-mode editor from supporting calltips.
About 30 years ago the text-mode editor integrated into Turbo C 2.0 had already implemented handy internal help system: Ctrl-F1 displays information about the function under the cursor.
If you're using a minimalistic text editor lacking useful features don't blame Lua please ;-)
Lua is just an interpreter. It should not solve problems of your text editor.
"Do one thing and do it well" (c)
Unix philosophy
It's generally faster for me to tab over to the REPL and issue a quick command
You can convert Lua manual from html to plain text and open it in your text editor.
It would take less key presses to search for "funcname" in a text than to type "help(funcname)" in REPL
