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I’m not a Go user, so I’m not a bit of the target audience, but it’s so refreshing that it has the native UI on macOS. Today deceloper tooling is almost all ele

I’m not a Go user, so I’m not a bit of the target audience, but it’s so refreshing that it has the native UI on macOS. Today deceloper tooling is almost all electron/Qt/custom-framework based cross-platform; I was really disappointed when I tried to find a decent editor with autocomplete (based on LSP), project management with a cocoa-based UI (like native tabs and cocoa textfields) and found... nothing. It was really disappointing to find that nobody developing the developer tools really consider user experience or nativeness... even on the mac where Cocoa is very emphasized by the users. (For more of my arguments about native UI, see my comment against flutter: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20612195 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20612195) This product with some C/Rust/Lisp support would be the product I would have to like to find, and I’m really looking forward to this product with the expectation where this might be more configurable or some other language support is added. Great job for the developer, I really is thankful for showing that a cocoa-oriented editor is possible & feasible. Thanks.

MuffinFlavored 7y ago
> Today deceloper tooling is almost all electron/Qt/custom-framework based cross-platform; Sublime Text comes to mind as an app that is native as well.
- pcr910303 7y ago
  No, Sublime Text was one of the apps in mind when I said a custom-framwork based cross-platform (or homemade might been a better phrase). I evaluated Sublime for my editor, and found that it’s OS integration was too bad; for one it’s tabs is custom-based and it’s text fields aren’t Cocoa (or at least it doesn’t feel like one). It’s primarily built as a cross-platform, so it really doesn’t consider OS integrations IMO.
  - pixelrevision 7y ago
    Have you tried textmate? I used that for a lot of years and it was 100% cocoa focused.
    - pcr910303 7y ago
      Yeah, actually I did, and it was pretty decent; I really considered it seriously back then. I think I found the completion a bit limiting; I would like LSP running with it's context-based completion. It's non-cocoa based tabs were also not my preference; though that wasn't a dealbreaker for TextMate though.
  - mattiemass 7y ago
    You know, even TextMate appears to use a custom tab implementation. And, it was a huge amount of work to get the AppKit tabs to work in Chime, even though they are supplied by the framework. All the NSWindod tabbing stuff just wasn't built to be flexible for apps that need consistent UI across tabs, like our file navigator widget.
moooo99 7y ago
The majority of users leverage these technologies for a reason. If you use cross-platform technology you can simply reach a broader audience and in the case of a commercial product, generate more revenue with only minimal additional effort. From my personal experience users don't care at all if the app has a native look or not, as long as the app looks decent and works. I assume having the native UI components of an OS is a very specific requirement, that does not apply to the vast majority of users. In fact, the majority of users likely prefer having the same, highly customized UI of an application, rather than having a completely different looking app when switching platforms. Take Visual Studio Code as an example. Within a few years, this editor became one of the most popular code editors. The app uses mainly web technology and a browser window and does not look like a native application at all, yet for the majority of users, it feels like a very fast native application.
- ridiculous_fish 7y ago
  Why do you say that "VSCode does not look like a native app at all?" It has a Mac menu bar, context menus, drag and drop, familiar key equivalents. It's not a completely foreign experience like (say) vim. Achieving these things has required heroics on Microsoft's part. Very few other electron apps go to those lengths. Users switch between applications far more often than they switch OSes. Native behavior allows users to bring expertise from one app to another. I'd be productive more quickly with Chime, because I already speak its UI vocabulary.
  - jchw 7y ago
    Native menu bar and context menus are very much built into Electron, even Hello World will have a proper menu on macOS. Some of the stuff like integrated title bar is also pretty recent, and likely wasn’t a contributing factor to its adoption. Not to say VSCode doesn’t put any effort in or anything but I think Electron apps are about on par with Qt apps in terms of native look and feel, albeit they have their own strengths and weaknesses and are not easy to directly compare.
- newscracker 7y ago
  > From my personal experience users don't care at all if the app has a native look or not, as long as the app looks decent and works. The same can be said of Windows (that users don’t care about the user experience). But the users may just not be aware of choices or may have things foisted on them for various reasons. That doesn’t necessarily mean they don’t care for a good experience. This also depends on the platform and the age group of users. It’s possible that younger users and/or those on Windows don’t care much about annoyances or just give up thinking that this is what a computing experience will be. Users on the Mac, especially those who’ve used it extensively (and learned) are more likely to realize and talk about non-native apps. It’s the same reason why hardcore Mac users have panned the newer “Catalyst” apps from Apple in macOS.
mappu 7y ago
Is Qt sufficient? I think it does a great job of native behaviours on macOS (certainly better than Electron). LiteIDE is a fast, native, FOSS IDE for Go: https://github.com/visualfc/liteide/releases/tag/x36.2 https://github.com/visualfc/liteide/releases/tag/x36.2 It supports highlighting, autocompletion, jump to definition, refactoring, cgo, vet, etc for both module and non-module projects. I use this on Windows and Linux and prefer it over vscode - the tooling integration always seem to work more reliably for me,
- pcr910303 7y ago
  Nah, Qt isn't; It's much better than electron (where nothing is consistent) but it's still distinguishable with it's non cocoa-text fields. I remember being annoyed that my custom keybindings in textfields don't work for some Qt based app.
  - mappu 7y ago
    (This seems to be https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-393 https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-393 ).
kick 7y ago
Not defending Electron, but Cocoa is an OS-specific, proprietary framework. It makes sense why most text editors (which are mostly libre software) wouldn't use it. I do have to ask, though: why not just use TextMate, at that point?
- chii 7y ago
  i dont know if textmate has this deep level of support, akin to an IDE (with autocompletion, parameter checking etc).
  - mattiemass 7y ago
    Chime team member here. That's one reason exactly. TextMate is a phenomenal piece of software, and I've used it for years. Will continue to use it probably. In many ways, it was an inspiration for Chime. It can do many things Chime cannot. But, TextMate does not offer the same language-level support, syntax highlighting accuracy and speed. And, I like to think Chime has a more refined UI, but that's a personal thing :)
rvz 7y ago
> It was really disappointing to find that nobody developing the developer tools really consider user experience or nativeness I understand the perspective around several editors that look alien and feel less native and don't use the Cocoa UI for its GUI. TextMate, CodeRunner and Coda-like apps which are still around are probably the great examples for great macOS apps for developers. UI consistency matters but matters less to a 'developer' as they usually have access to powerful machines and the Electron-cost wouldn't hit them that much and just want to get the work done. But for normal users, both consistency and user experience matter, which you have highlighted in your flutter arguments, but depending on the platform flutter targets, it varies. Mac and Windows provide a consistent UX which is why it is straightforward for developers to look at one native GUI toolkit to write apps like Chime that look native on their platforms. I find it hard to see why Linux also could not have some native apps on their platform too. Perhaps its the multiple choices of alternative GUI stacks or the lack of a consistent desktop environment which makes it difficult for users to expect a predictable experience with their apps. I don't know. I'd rather have more native apps altogether cross-platform or not and less of Electron-based apps on my MacBook. Or even better: An open-source OS that has a consistent GUI and SDK that benefits users and developers.
qwerty456127 7y ago
I share what you feel as I (as a user) love native apps too but the situation is easy to explain: I wouldn't want to invest time in developing a non-cross-platform app either.
mintplant 7y ago
Sounds like you're the target market for Panic's upcoming macOS-exclusive Nova Editor. https://panic.com/nova/ https://panic.com/nova/
- pcr910303 7y ago
  Actually I'm already a Nova beta-tester... Surprise! :-)
  - michaelsbradley 7y ago
    Have you ever tried BBEdit[+]? I primarily use Emacs (preferring to run it in iTerm2) and VS Code, but BBedit is rarely not open in my dock and for some tasks I find it indispensable, e.g. complex search/replace in big plain text files. BBEdit's interface is definitely native and ultra responsive. Even though I use it only about 5% of the time I spend on programming-related tasks, I have been very happy over the years to pay for upgrades to the latest major version of BBEdit. [+] https://www.barebones.com/products/bbedit/ https://www.barebones.com/products/bbedit/
    - alwillis 7y ago
      BBEdit was my editor of choice back in the day before I went on the search where I ended up using Vim.
    - mattiemass 7y ago
      Chime team member here. BBEdit is an incredible text editor. If you are working with text on macOS, it's hard to beat. But, I've struggled to use it for even basic programming work. It's just not built for that specific use case so much as general text manipulation.
      - michaelsbradley 7y ago
        That's fair, and I generally agree. For core programming work I found Vim/Emacs superior to BBEdit, and ultimately settled on Emacs because of Magit[+] and my proclivity for Lisp/Scheme. I switch to VS Code when I need/want to use its JS debugger combined with its "cadillac experience" re: TypeScript and JavaScript. Even so, depending on the use case, giving BBEdit a shot is probably worth the download and time spent — it's a great dev tool and I've never regretted paying for the license and upgrades. For example, BBEdit has been invaluable to me in recent years when trying to sort out broken webpack builds and I needed to efficiently hunt through multi-MB .js output files. [+] https://magit.vc/ https://magit.vc/
mattiemass 7y ago
Matt here - developer and member of the team of two that works on Chime. Thanks for your kind words. There actually are a lot of Cocoa-based editors out there, but to my knowledge, Chime is the only one that puts such a large emphasis on language-level support. We intend to continue to focus on that going forward. To be honest, I think the multi-platform products available today are super-compelling. One of the reasons they are so immensely popular. But, I'm glad you're into what we're doing :)
- pcr910303 7y ago
  > but to my knowledge, Chime is the only one that puts such a large emphasis on language-level support. We intend to continue to focus on that going forward. Thanks for developing this great product! I'm so thankful for your efforts for integrating your app with AppKit (like - being basically the only editor that supports AppKit tabs which... AFAIK even Safari doesn't). I mean -- I'm compelled to learn Go trying to justify buying this :-) By all means please continue this effort; and if possible, consider add support for other languages. By looking at your blogposts it seems it's running LSP under-the-hood for completion; by leveraging LSP, I hope Chime can gain multi-language support. That would basically justify a hundred dollars at least for me. Thanks.
  - mattiemass 7y ago
    I'm just really happy that you're excited! I've covered this elsewhere, but other languages aren't going to be an immediate focus for us. Possible, but even with LSP it's a lot of work to do something well. And, we still have tons of room for improvement just with Go.
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    Safari uses a custom implementation because its tabs predate AppKit's, but I'd like to think that the AppKit one is heavily inspired by Safari's. By the way, Sublime Text supports these (though it's a bit strange how they've implemented it).
- ksec 7y ago
  Will Chime always be an Editor specially for Go only? Also wondering on what motivate you to write an Editor in the first place? Even though I dont use Go I will keep an eye on it. Simply because it looks brilliant.

MuffinFlavored 7y ago

> Today deceloper tooling is almost all electron/Qt/custom-framework based cross-platform; Sublime Text comes to mind as an app that is native as well.

pcr910303 7y ago
No, Sublime Text was one of the apps in mind when I said a custom-framwork based cross-platform (or homemade might been a better phrase). I evaluated Sublime for my editor, and found that it’s OS integration was too bad; for one it’s tabs is custom-based and it’s text fields aren’t Cocoa (or at least it doesn’t feel like one). It’s primarily built as a cross-platform, so it really doesn’t consider OS integrations IMO.
- pixelrevision 7y ago
  Have you tried textmate? I used that for a lot of years and it was 100% cocoa focused.
  - pcr910303 7y ago
    Yeah, actually I did, and it was pretty decent; I really considered it seriously back then. I think I found the completion a bit limiting; I would like LSP running with it's context-based completion. It's non-cocoa based tabs were also not my preference; though that wasn't a dealbreaker for TextMate though.
- mattiemass 7y ago
  You know, even TextMate appears to use a custom tab implementation. And, it was a huge amount of work to get the AppKit tabs to work in Chime, even though they are supplied by the framework. All the NSWindod tabbing stuff just wasn't built to be flexible for apps that need consistent UI across tabs, like our file navigator widget.

moooo99 7y ago

The majority of users leverage these technologies for a reason. If you use cross-platform technology you can simply reach a broader audience and in the case of a commercial product, generate more revenue with only minimal additional effort. From my personal experience users don't care at all if the app has a native look or not, as long as the app looks decent and works. I assume having the native UI components of an OS is a very specific requirement, that does not apply to the vast majority of users. In fact, the majority of users likely prefer having the same, highly customized UI of an application, rather than having a completely different looking app when switching platforms. Take Visual Studio Code as an example. Within a few years, this editor became one of the most popular code editors. The app uses mainly web technology and a browser window and does not look like a native application at all, yet for the majority of users, it feels like a very fast native application.

ridiculous_fish 7y ago
Why do you say that "VSCode does not look like a native app at all?" It has a Mac menu bar, context menus, drag and drop, familiar key equivalents. It's not a completely foreign experience like (say) vim. Achieving these things has required heroics on Microsoft's part. Very few other electron apps go to those lengths. Users switch between applications far more often than they switch OSes. Native behavior allows users to bring expertise from one app to another. I'd be productive more quickly with Chime, because I already speak its UI vocabulary.
- jchw 7y ago
  Native menu bar and context menus are very much built into Electron, even Hello World will have a proper menu on macOS. Some of the stuff like integrated title bar is also pretty recent, and likely wasn’t a contributing factor to its adoption. Not to say VSCode doesn’t put any effort in or anything but I think Electron apps are about on par with Qt apps in terms of native look and feel, albeit they have their own strengths and weaknesses and are not easy to directly compare.
newscracker 7y ago
> From my personal experience users don't care at all if the app has a native look or not, as long as the app looks decent and works. The same can be said of Windows (that users don’t care about the user experience). But the users may just not be aware of choices or may have things foisted on them for various reasons. That doesn’t necessarily mean they don’t care for a good experience. This also depends on the platform and the age group of users. It’s possible that younger users and/or those on Windows don’t care much about annoyances or just give up thinking that this is what a computing experience will be. Users on the Mac, especially those who’ve used it extensively (and learned) are more likely to realize and talk about non-native apps. It’s the same reason why hardcore Mac users have panned the newer “Catalyst” apps from Apple in macOS.

mappu 7y ago

Is Qt sufficient? I think it does a great job of native behaviours on macOS (certainly better than Electron). LiteIDE is a fast, native, FOSS IDE for Go: https://github.com/visualfc/liteide/releases/tag/x36.2 https://github.com/visualfc/liteide/releases/tag/x36.2 It supports highlighting, autocompletion, jump to definition, refactoring, cgo, vet, etc for both module and non-module projects. I use this on Windows and Linux and prefer it over vscode - the tooling integration always seem to work more reliably for me,

pcr910303 7y ago
Nah, Qt isn't; It's much better than electron (where nothing is consistent) but it's still distinguishable with it's non cocoa-text fields. I remember being annoyed that my custom keybindings in textfields don't work for some Qt based app.
- mappu 7y ago
  (This seems to be https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-393 https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-393 ).

kick 7y ago

Not defending Electron, but Cocoa is an OS-specific, proprietary framework. It makes sense why most text editors (which are mostly libre software) wouldn't use it. I do have to ask, though: why not just use TextMate, at that point?

chii 7y ago
i dont know if textmate has this deep level of support, akin to an IDE (with autocompletion, parameter checking etc).
- mattiemass 7y ago
  Chime team member here. That's one reason exactly. TextMate is a phenomenal piece of software, and I've used it for years. Will continue to use it probably. In many ways, it was an inspiration for Chime. It can do many things Chime cannot. But, TextMate does not offer the same language-level support, syntax highlighting accuracy and speed. And, I like to think Chime has a more refined UI, but that's a personal thing :)

rvz 7y ago

> It was really disappointing to find that nobody developing the developer tools really consider user experience or nativeness I understand the perspective around several editors that look alien and feel less native and don't use the Cocoa UI for its GUI. TextMate, CodeRunner and Coda-like apps which are still around are probably the great examples for great macOS apps for developers. UI consistency matters but matters less to a 'developer' as they usually have access to powerful machines and the Electron-cost wouldn't hit them that much and just want to get the work done. But for normal users, both consistency and user experience matter, which you have highlighted in your flutter arguments, but depending on the platform flutter targets, it varies. Mac and Windows provide a consistent UX which is why it is straightforward for developers to look at one native GUI toolkit to write apps like Chime that look native on their platforms. I find it hard to see why Linux also could not have some native apps on their platform too. Perhaps its the multiple choices of alternative GUI stacks or the lack of a consistent desktop environment which makes it difficult for users to expect a predictable experience with their apps. I don't know. I'd rather have more native apps altogether cross-platform or not and less of Electron-based apps on my MacBook. Or even better: An open-source OS that has a consistent GUI and SDK that benefits users and developers.

qwerty456127 7y ago

I share what you feel as I (as a user) love native apps too but the situation is easy to explain: I wouldn't want to invest time in developing a non-cross-platform app either.

mintplant 7y ago

Sounds like you're the target market for Panic's upcoming macOS-exclusive Nova Editor. https://panic.com/nova/ https://panic.com/nova/

pcr910303 7y ago
Actually I'm already a Nova beta-tester... Surprise! :-)
- michaelsbradley 7y ago
  Have you ever tried BBEdit[+]? I primarily use Emacs (preferring to run it in iTerm2) and VS Code, but BBedit is rarely not open in my dock and for some tasks I find it indispensable, e.g. complex search/replace in big plain text files. BBEdit's interface is definitely native and ultra responsive. Even though I use it only about 5% of the time I spend on programming-related tasks, I have been very happy over the years to pay for upgrades to the latest major version of BBEdit. [+] https://www.barebones.com/products/bbedit/ https://www.barebones.com/products/bbedit/
  - alwillis 7y ago
    BBEdit was my editor of choice back in the day before I went on the search where I ended up using Vim.
  - mattiemass 7y ago
    Chime team member here. BBEdit is an incredible text editor. If you are working with text on macOS, it's hard to beat. But, I've struggled to use it for even basic programming work. It's just not built for that specific use case so much as general text manipulation.
    - michaelsbradley 7y ago
      That's fair, and I generally agree. For core programming work I found Vim/Emacs superior to BBEdit, and ultimately settled on Emacs because of Magit[+] and my proclivity for Lisp/Scheme. I switch to VS Code when I need/want to use its JS debugger combined with its "cadillac experience" re: TypeScript and JavaScript. Even so, depending on the use case, giving BBEdit a shot is probably worth the download and time spent — it's a great dev tool and I've never regretted paying for the license and upgrades. For example, BBEdit has been invaluable to me in recent years when trying to sort out broken webpack builds and I needed to efficiently hunt through multi-MB .js output files. [+] https://magit.vc/ https://magit.vc/

mattiemass 7y ago

Matt here - developer and member of the team of two that works on Chime. Thanks for your kind words. There actually are a lot of Cocoa-based editors out there, but to my knowledge, Chime is the only one that puts such a large emphasis on language-level support. We intend to continue to focus on that going forward. To be honest, I think the multi-platform products available today are super-compelling. One of the reasons they are so immensely popular. But, I'm glad you're into what we're doing :)

pcr910303 7y ago
> but to my knowledge, Chime is the only one that puts such a large emphasis on language-level support. We intend to continue to focus on that going forward. Thanks for developing this great product! I'm so thankful for your efforts for integrating your app with AppKit (like - being basically the only editor that supports AppKit tabs which... AFAIK even Safari doesn't). I mean -- I'm compelled to learn Go trying to justify buying this :-) By all means please continue this effort; and if possible, consider add support for other languages. By looking at your blogposts it seems it's running LSP under-the-hood for completion; by leveraging LSP, I hope Chime can gain multi-language support. That would basically justify a hundred dollars at least for me. Thanks.
- mattiemass 7y ago
  I'm just really happy that you're excited! I've covered this elsewhere, but other languages aren't going to be an immediate focus for us. Possible, but even with LSP it's a lot of work to do something well. And, we still have tons of room for improvement just with Go.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  Safari uses a custom implementation because its tabs predate AppKit's, but I'd like to think that the AppKit one is heavily inspired by Safari's. By the way, Sublime Text supports these (though it's a bit strange how they've implemented it).
ksec 7y ago
Will Chime always be an Editor specially for Go only? Also wondering on what motivate you to write an Editor in the first place? Even though I dont use Go I will keep an eye on it. Simply because it looks brilliant.