Pulsar, the best code editor

Submitted ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨otto@programming.dev⁩ to ⁨programming@programming.dev⁩

https://optimizedbyotto.com/post/pulsar-best-text-file-and-code-editor/

Pulsar (former Atom) is still the best code editor in my opinion. It is easiest and fastest to use, has all the nice productivity boosting plugins and is overall great for all the same reasons the Atom was great. 🚀

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Aurenkin@sh.itjust.works ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
The best code editor is the one that you enjoy using, because you’re going to be using it a lot.

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- LucidDaemon@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I agree with this. In my opinion helix is the best code editor.
  
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abhibeckert@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Pulsar is a fork of Atom, which was discontinued because almost everyone jumped ship to VSCode.

What does Pulsar do that is better than VSCode? All the features this article highlights are in VSCode too, and I can think of a bunch of features that Pulsar doesn’t have (dev containers are a big one for me - they allow you to have different versions of the same software installed, depending what project you’re working on right now… and you can run both versions at the same time as well).

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- BatmanAoD@programming.dev ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  The author also makes some incorrect or misleading claims, specifically about emacs. I acknowledge there’s a high bar for entry there and don’t personally like emacs, but it’s not modal, and it does have the ability to display images and markdown previews.
  
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  - sping@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Well, it’s not modal by default. It is if you want it to be.
    
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fubo@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
The best code editor is the one that works well with your other tools, including both your compiler and your keyboard.

Corollary: If you use an unusual compiler or an unusual keyboard, this may change what the best editor for you is.

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BatmanAoD@programming.dev ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

I know several world class programmers, and interestingly, the commonality among them is that they all seem to use Vim as their code editor. Many people I know who think of themselves as world class programmers use Emacs.

What a burn!

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- technom@programming.dev ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  More like a distasteful snark that the author thinks is funny.
  
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  - BatmanAoD@programming.dev ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Yeah, I commented elsewhere on the misinformation regarding emacs in the article.
    
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  - IvarK@lemmygrad.ml ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    You wouldn’t happen to think of yourself as a world-class programmer by any chance?
    
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- varsock@programming.dev ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  As a former Vim user myself, I have to say I really dislike screensharing with coworkers who use Vim. They are walking me through code and shit pops up left and right and I don’t know where it comes from or what it is I’m looking at. Code reviews are painful when they walk me through a large-ish PR.
  
  These days, I tend to bring my vim navigation/key bindings to my IDE instead of IDE funcs to Vim. Hard to beat JetBrains IDEs, especially when you pay them to maintain the IDE functionality.
  
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_dev_null@lemmy.zxcvn.xyz ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

The key to being productive as a programmer is to have a great code editor

True true.

The best code editor came from GitHub

I’m out.

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porgamrer@programming.dev ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Counter-point: Atom is terrible. Its electron competitors are terrible. Big IDEs are terrible. Simple text editors are terrible.

If you are under 50 and chose to learn vim or emacs, there is a 100% chance that you were also forced to learn latin at school and honestly it’s not your fault that you turned out this way.

These are all the options. Sometimes all the options are terrible.

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- PoY@lemmygrad.ml ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I’m under 50 and I know Vi because it was always available on every Linux/BSD system i used from the day i discovered Linux as a up to now
  
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- Sheldan@programming.dev ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  There are actually a lot of people learning latin
  
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varsock@programming.dev ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Had a distinguished collegue (from the Bell Lab days) say to me recently:

“IDEs take up a lot of RAM on my machine. Vim takes up a lot of squishy RAM in my head. I need squishy RAM to hold info relevant to problem solving, not options available in my tool chain.”

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- accidental@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  While I agree with the sentiment, the key bindings have been burned into my less squishy ROM at this point, and I’ve got all banks of squishy RAM available 😄
  
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- SmartmanApps@dotnet.social ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  @varsock @otto
  Oh god yes! Each instance of VS22 takes up more than 1Gb of RAM - what I'm doing right now with this piece of code does NOT need 1Gb of memory! Have they not heard of lazy loading?
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- expr@programming.dev ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Vim doesn’t take any thought for me, it’s all muscle memory.
  
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rammjet@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Zed zed.dev

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- Sanctus@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  That can only run on mac. Hard pass.
  
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  - paperplane@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    It’s open source though and they plan on adding Linux/Windows support in the future
    
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  - Max_P@lemmy.max-p.me ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    It looks like it’ll be really nice when it comes out for the other platforms though, and they do plan on doing that eventually.
    
    It’s probably a good thing to get it right on one platform first before getting into the other ones. If they release it buggy on Linux it’ll leave a bad taste.
    
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  - abhibeckert@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    They’re working on Linux. It’s not ready yet but it is coming. Windows will be next.
    
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- autokludge@programming.dev ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Atom did bring about tree-sitter at least.
  
  From zed.dev/blog/we-have-to-start-over
  
  We got to a certain point with Atom. It was 2017 when we’d shipped Teletype and it felt like, okay, it’s no longer our own ignorance holding us back, it really is like the platform holding us back at this point.
  
  …
  
  the ironic thing is that we created Electron to create Atom, but I can’t imagine a worse application for Electron than a code editor, I don’t know.
  
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ultratiem@lemmy.ca ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

The team also created the Electron Framework

😡

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varsock@programming.dev ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
code is just text, so code editors are text editors.

What sets IDEs apart are their features, like debugger integrations, refactoring assists, etc.

I love command line ± Vim and used solely it for a large portion of my career but that was back when you had a few big enterprise languages (C/C++, Java).

With micro services being language agnostic, I find I use a larger variety of languages. And configuring and remembering an environment for rust, go, c, python etc. is just too much mental overhead. Hard to beat JetBrain’s IDEs; now-a-days I bring my Vim navigation key bindings to my IDE instead of my IDE features to Vim. And I pay a company to work out the IDE features.

for the record, I am in the boat of, use whatever brings you the greatest joy/productivity.

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ggnoredo@lemm.ee ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Clearly you never tried emacs

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linuxPIPEpower@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I think i read that it uses an old version of electron or something? Do i recall correctly?

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