11 ms·

Pulsar – A Community-Led Hyper-Hackable Text Editor

117 points by philonoist 4y ago

animuchan 4y ago
This is a fork of Atom, right? It's funny the README doesn't mention it.
- leapon 4y ago
  It is mentioned in the About Us page. The team behind Pulsar is a community that came about naturally after the announcement of Atom's Sunset and decided that they needed to do something about it to keep their favorite editor alive.
  - rwalle 4y ago
    Your comment is almost irrelevant to the original post. It's not in README which is what most people look at. I never look at "about us" unless I am really interested in what's going on. And this is just very strange when the entire foundation of the code is based on another project but they don't mention it in a visible way.
    - Daeraxa 4y ago
      Honestly we thought we had covered it enough without flying too close to any trademark misuse claims from GitHub but it appears not so we are going to look at seeing what we can do to make it more obvious. Edit - Have another look, we edited the readme to make it more obvious. The readme is due a massive branding overhaul but hopefully this addresses the immediate concern.
untech 4y ago
It’s a rebranded Atom, which was sunsetted recently.
benrutter 4y ago
This is the community attempt to continue / revive atom right? Interesting that atom doesn't really get mentioned in the docs anymore- hopefully a sign that it's finding its feet and direction as a project in its own right.
- capableweb 4y ago
  I don't know, seems a bit weird not to mention Atom at all. At least "This project was forked from Atom" or whatever. Besides it being nice, it's also a requirement of the Atom license, that the copyright and license notices are preserved. Seems the only mention of their heritage is "Original work copyright (c) 2011-2022 GitHub Inc." in the LICENSE file but again, no mention of Atom.
  - xpe 4y ago
    Just a guess: perhaps GitHub prefers the credit? It depends who controls the Atom name I'd think.
    - capableweb 4y ago
      Shouldn't matter "who" prefers the credit, the project is a fork from Atom and should be mentioned as such. Right now, going to the website or the repository makes it seem like a brand new editor, which it is clearly not, but not so clear based on what information they willingly provide you with.
      - xpe 4y ago
        I mostly agree. Still, project / owner names (as written in licenses) can change. So the entity in control makes the call, I would think.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
  - codetrotter 4y ago
    The license in the original Atom repository https://github.com/atom/atom/blob/master/LICENSE.md https://github.com/atom/atom/blob/master/LICENSE.md has the following copyright notice: > Copyright (c) 2011-2022 GitHub Inc. IANAL but the terms of the MIT license says: > […] > The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. > […] And they did preserve it all. https://github.com/pulsar-edit/pulsar/blob/master/LICENSE.md https://github.com/pulsar-edit/pulsar/blob/master/LICENSE.md So IMO, they are pretty much fulfilling the requirements of the MIT license it looks like. Depends on whether the copyright notice and license is also presented somewhere (such as under the About menu) in distributed copies of the modified program as well. But I have no interest in installing Pulsar just to see if they do that or not.
ZitchDog 4y ago
I haven’t read the docs lately but when I was hacking on Atom years ago, the plugin model was TOO freeform, and with plugins all running on the main thread, it was easy for a plugin to kill performance and slow down the editor. The vscode model strikes a better tradeoff between extensibility and performance. Extensions have less power but my editing experience is never ruined by a rogue extension.
- neurobashing 4y ago
  One of the last things I remember about Atom was that by the time they’d figured out all the stuff they needed to fix, VSCode had come in and stolen all the eyeballs, so to speak. So they have a good roadmap, they just need to do the implementation.
coldblues 4y ago
Atom was unbelievably slow. How will the performance be improved? Visual Studio Code somehow managed to surpass the awful Electron performance just enough to make it usable, and it's pretty unbelievable this project will come close to that.
- qbasic_forever 4y ago
  Why couldn't they take the optimizations from vs code and integrate them? VS code is open source, it's only their proprietary extensions like remote dev that aren't open. I remember Atom in its later releases had significantly improved performance to the point I never noticed problems.
  - bobajeff 4y ago
    Looking at both projects vscode uses typescript heavily while this project mainly uses coffeescript. So that might be a hindrance. So I guess that might be part of it.
    - Daeraxa 4y ago
      We are actually looking to "decaffeinate" back to vanilla JavaScript. Unfortunately there is rather a lot of it still even after the Atom team's attempt to remove some of it.
- swatcoder 4y ago
  For those who want fast and lightweight without falling all the way back to emacs/vim, I’m really digging Lite-XL. Lua for customization, thin accelerated rendering layer in SDL2+freetype, zero nonsense. Binary packages are like 2MB. The code itself is clean and readable. The plugin collection is still young and won’t have everything you’d find in the Electron-family of editors, but that’s also a plus when it comes to it staying lightweight and streamlined like some might want in these tools.
  - jorvi 4y ago
    No need to fall back to Vim, Sublime has stellar performance already.
heliostatic 4y ago
It's interesting to see this coming out of the atom community. I've been really impressed with Zed (https://zed.dev/ https://zed.dev/) which is from the original atom folks and focused on speed and collaboration. Rapid improvements since initial launch.
- capableweb 4y ago
  Care to share a binary or some other project that is actually beyond a closed alpha? Otherwise not a lot of point in sharing it as an alternative, it's not available to the public. Edit: signed up for the waiting list and received "Zed currently only targets macOS" so sounds like they only target ~10% of the actual market. Interesting strategy.
  - odo1242 4y ago
    The strategy is that native macOS UIs are generally easier to develop than native Windows UIs, so they're trying to iterate on that platform first.
    - capableweb 4y ago
      If they're building a native macOS UI, how is it ever possible it'll be worthwhile to port that into native Windows UI or "native" Linux UI? If you wanna go cross-platform, you usually consider that from the start, not once you're 50% done, as you're gonna have to redo a lot of work you could have gotten "for free".
      - EthicalSimilar 4y ago
        The “engine” itself is likely cross-platform, with vendor-specific UIs. It’s likely quicker to develop for a single OS and then build the additional UIs with a more feature-complete app.
      - imbnwa 4y ago
        Arc browser is also doing this, and they're planning on debuting the Windows UI in Fall.
29athrowaway 4y ago
> "Built on Electron" No, thanks. This one on the other hand, looks very promising https://lapce.dev/ https://lapce.dev/
- rwalle 4y ago
  I am willing to bet $100 this thing never becomes mainstream based on my 2 decade software dev experience.
  - 29athrowaway 4y ago
    Like Atom after VS Code
    - IncRnd 4y ago
      Atom was introduced prior to VS Code. VS Code reuses electron as a framework, which was written for Atom (originally called electron shell).
  - capableweb 4y ago
    Bah, that's too easy. You can say that about 100% of all projects that hit HN and you'll be right 90% (or more) of the time. Save your comment for when you believe the opposite (that something for sure will become mainstream), that's when it gets interesting.
- xrayarx 4y ago
  Lapce, which is written in rust, is using Druid, which is discontinued.
  - b1ue64 4y ago
    They're using their own fork: https://github.com/lapce/lapce/issues/2177 https://github.com/lapce/lapce/issues/2177
  - imbnwa 4y ago
    No wonder my Rust GUIs have long-standing display bugs, e.g. Neovide (neovim GUI frontend), Psst (Spotify GUI client)
JaggerJo 4y ago
pass, because it’s electron.
asah 4y ago
Does Pulsar support terminals over SSH? The reason I (only) use emacs and vi, is that they're available *everywhere* and work in literally every environment.
hyperhopper 4y ago
Why is everybody building on top of electron (slow and bloated) instead of emacs or even vim? We don't need a new editor. Just make a spacemacs layer or doom plug-in.
ericyd 4y ago
32% CoffeeScript is a very interesting choice in 2023
- Daeraxa 4y ago
  Working on bringing it down via the process of "decaffeination". Unfortunately this is Atom's legacy and not our doing.
  - ericyd 4y ago
    I didn't realize this was a fork until reading our comments. Makes sense in that context. Your page says this is a new project which is what threw me.
moremetadata 4y ago
Hasnt got a "scrollbar map" (known as MapMode[1] in Visual Studio), making it harder to navigate large chunks of code. [1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/ide/how-to-track-your-code-by-customizing-the-scrollbar?view=vs-2022#map-mode https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/ide/how-to-tr...
- Daeraxa 4y ago
  There is the Minimap community package which is one of the most installed ones. https://web.pulsar-edit.dev/packages/minimap https://web.pulsar-edit.dev/packages/minimap
meanmrmustard92 4y ago
Folks who know Pulsar and Zed internals: which one of them is more likely to gain support for Atom packages? I find Hydrogen[1] invaluable as a data science scratchpad since it supports python/r/julia/etc under a common interface via jupyter, and have been unable to construct a comparable workflow in vscode or any other editor [using scripts as opposed to notebooks, which i find far too bloated]. [1]: https://github.com/nteract/hydrogen https://github.com/nteract/hydrogen
- Daeraxa 4y ago
  Pulsar already supports (nearly) all the Atom packages and has a brand new backend reverse engineered from the closed source Atom.io packages backend. I think it is unlikely you will get any Atom support in Zed any time soon. Some packages had to be removed due to incompatible licenses
bstar77 4y ago
I'm done with these JS/Electron editors. They are Ok (for the most part), but using Neovim in 2023 is such a huge step above everything else if you have the inclination to learn it. I'm integrating my workflow into Nixos and it's pretty incredible what is possible if you constrain your development to the terminal.
m348e912 4y ago
700MB+ installed. It's a big boi for a text editing app.
NoraCodes 4y ago
I'm enjoying the explosion in editor software going on right now. Even if most of them don't survive or gain a large audience, I'm sure the cross-pollination of ideas will lead to some great improvements in those that do.
- hackrnusr 4y ago
  It would be nice to know what this offers that emacs doesn't already ... other than it being built on a more modern GUI framework (Electron).
  - 0thgen 4y ago
    I think it'll be a long time before something replaces emacs given that emacs is extremely niche and most text editors don't seem to be after the vim/emacs market
  - pasquinelli 4y ago
    your comment makes me think: emacs already does everything-- no tool is ever going to do more than emacs (before you say it, i know this isn't literally true.) so when i already have a tool that does everything (actually multiple tools), what might i want in a different tool? to extend the metaphor of a tool: i'd want a tool that feels better in my hand, or a tool that does a specific job very well, or a tool that can fit better into tight and awkward spaces, or a tool that works by a different principle, or just a more beautiful specimen of the same tool that does everything. or maybe i'd want a different tool for one of the many reasons i'm sure i haven't thought of. just some stray thoughts, nothing original, but it makes me realize that i'm always looking for tools that work on a different principle to the ones i've got, and that's never occurred to me before now.
    - imiric 4y ago
      A new tool can certainly do things better. Emacs has many quirks, that are partly because of its age, and partly because it needs to remain compatible with its extensive ecosystem. A new editor that, for example, prioritizes performance, while not sacrificing extensibility, and maybe does it in a more mainstream language, could always start small and eventually gain traction.

117 points by philonoist 4y ago

animuchan 4y ago

This is a fork of Atom, right? It's funny the README doesn't mention it.

leapon 4y ago
It is mentioned in the About Us page. The team behind Pulsar is a community that came about naturally after the announcement of Atom's Sunset and decided that they needed to do something about it to keep their favorite editor alive.
- rwalle 4y ago
  Your comment is almost irrelevant to the original post. It's not in README which is what most people look at. I never look at "about us" unless I am really interested in what's going on. And this is just very strange when the entire foundation of the code is based on another project but they don't mention it in a visible way.
  - Daeraxa 4y ago
    Honestly we thought we had covered it enough without flying too close to any trademark misuse claims from GitHub but it appears not so we are going to look at seeing what we can do to make it more obvious. Edit - Have another look, we edited the readme to make it more obvious. The readme is due a massive branding overhaul but hopefully this addresses the immediate concern.

untech 4y ago

It’s a rebranded Atom, which was sunsetted recently.

benrutter 4y ago

This is the community attempt to continue / revive atom right? Interesting that atom doesn't really get mentioned in the docs anymore- hopefully a sign that it's finding its feet and direction as a project in its own right.

capableweb 4y ago
I don't know, seems a bit weird not to mention Atom at all. At least "This project was forked from Atom" or whatever. Besides it being nice, it's also a requirement of the Atom license, that the copyright and license notices are preserved. Seems the only mention of their heritage is "Original work copyright (c) 2011-2022 GitHub Inc." in the LICENSE file but again, no mention of Atom.
- xpe 4y ago
  Just a guess: perhaps GitHub prefers the credit? It depends who controls the Atom name I'd think.
  - capableweb 4y ago
    Shouldn't matter "who" prefers the credit, the project is a fork from Atom and should be mentioned as such. Right now, going to the website or the repository makes it seem like a brand new editor, which it is clearly not, but not so clear based on what information they willingly provide you with.
    - xpe 4y ago
      I mostly agree. Still, project / owner names (as written in licenses) can change. So the entity in control makes the call, I would think.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
- codetrotter 4y ago
  The license in the original Atom repository https://github.com/atom/atom/blob/master/LICENSE.md https://github.com/atom/atom/blob/master/LICENSE.md has the following copyright notice: > Copyright (c) 2011-2022 GitHub Inc. IANAL but the terms of the MIT license says: > […] > The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. > […] And they did preserve it all. https://github.com/pulsar-edit/pulsar/blob/master/LICENSE.md https://github.com/pulsar-edit/pulsar/blob/master/LICENSE.md So IMO, they are pretty much fulfilling the requirements of the MIT license it looks like. Depends on whether the copyright notice and license is also presented somewhere (such as under the About menu) in distributed copies of the modified program as well. But I have no interest in installing Pulsar just to see if they do that or not.

ZitchDog 4y ago

I haven’t read the docs lately but when I was hacking on Atom years ago, the plugin model was TOO freeform, and with plugins all running on the main thread, it was easy for a plugin to kill performance and slow down the editor. The vscode model strikes a better tradeoff between extensibility and performance. Extensions have less power but my editing experience is never ruined by a rogue extension.

neurobashing 4y ago
One of the last things I remember about Atom was that by the time they’d figured out all the stuff they needed to fix, VSCode had come in and stolen all the eyeballs, so to speak. So they have a good roadmap, they just need to do the implementation.

coldblues 4y ago

Atom was unbelievably slow. How will the performance be improved? Visual Studio Code somehow managed to surpass the awful Electron performance just enough to make it usable, and it's pretty unbelievable this project will come close to that.

qbasic_forever 4y ago
Why couldn't they take the optimizations from vs code and integrate them? VS code is open source, it's only their proprietary extensions like remote dev that aren't open. I remember Atom in its later releases had significantly improved performance to the point I never noticed problems.
- bobajeff 4y ago
  Looking at both projects vscode uses typescript heavily while this project mainly uses coffeescript. So that might be a hindrance. So I guess that might be part of it.
  - Daeraxa 4y ago
    We are actually looking to "decaffeinate" back to vanilla JavaScript. Unfortunately there is rather a lot of it still even after the Atom team's attempt to remove some of it.
swatcoder 4y ago
For those who want fast and lightweight without falling all the way back to emacs/vim, I’m really digging Lite-XL. Lua for customization, thin accelerated rendering layer in SDL2+freetype, zero nonsense. Binary packages are like 2MB. The code itself is clean and readable. The plugin collection is still young and won’t have everything you’d find in the Electron-family of editors, but that’s also a plus when it comes to it staying lightweight and streamlined like some might want in these tools.
- jorvi 4y ago
  No need to fall back to Vim, Sublime has stellar performance already.

heliostatic 4y ago

It's interesting to see this coming out of the atom community. I've been really impressed with Zed (https://zed.dev/ https://zed.dev/) which is from the original atom folks and focused on speed and collaboration. Rapid improvements since initial launch.

capableweb 4y ago
Care to share a binary or some other project that is actually beyond a closed alpha? Otherwise not a lot of point in sharing it as an alternative, it's not available to the public. Edit: signed up for the waiting list and received "Zed currently only targets macOS" so sounds like they only target ~10% of the actual market. Interesting strategy.
- odo1242 4y ago
  The strategy is that native macOS UIs are generally easier to develop than native Windows UIs, so they're trying to iterate on that platform first.
  - capableweb 4y ago
    If they're building a native macOS UI, how is it ever possible it'll be worthwhile to port that into native Windows UI or "native" Linux UI? If you wanna go cross-platform, you usually consider that from the start, not once you're 50% done, as you're gonna have to redo a lot of work you could have gotten "for free".
    - EthicalSimilar 4y ago
      The “engine” itself is likely cross-platform, with vendor-specific UIs. It’s likely quicker to develop for a single OS and then build the additional UIs with a more feature-complete app.
    - imbnwa 4y ago
      Arc browser is also doing this, and they're planning on debuting the Windows UI in Fall.

29athrowaway 4y ago

> "Built on Electron" No, thanks. This one on the other hand, looks very promising https://lapce.dev/ https://lapce.dev/

rwalle 4y ago
I am willing to bet $100 this thing never becomes mainstream based on my 2 decade software dev experience.
- 29athrowaway 4y ago
  Like Atom after VS Code
  - IncRnd 4y ago
    Atom was introduced prior to VS Code. VS Code reuses electron as a framework, which was written for Atom (originally called electron shell).
- capableweb 4y ago
  Bah, that's too easy. You can say that about 100% of all projects that hit HN and you'll be right 90% (or more) of the time. Save your comment for when you believe the opposite (that something for sure will become mainstream), that's when it gets interesting.
xrayarx 4y ago
Lapce, which is written in rust, is using Druid, which is discontinued.
- b1ue64 4y ago
  They're using their own fork: https://github.com/lapce/lapce/issues/2177 https://github.com/lapce/lapce/issues/2177
- imbnwa 4y ago
  No wonder my Rust GUIs have long-standing display bugs, e.g. Neovide (neovim GUI frontend), Psst (Spotify GUI client)

JaggerJo 4y ago

pass, because it’s electron.

asah 4y ago

Does Pulsar support terminals over SSH? The reason I (only) use emacs and vi, is that they're available *everywhere* and work in literally every environment.

hyperhopper 4y ago

Why is everybody building on top of electron (slow and bloated) instead of emacs or even vim? We don't need a new editor. Just make a spacemacs layer or doom plug-in.

ericyd 4y ago

32% CoffeeScript is a very interesting choice in 2023

Daeraxa 4y ago
Working on bringing it down via the process of "decaffeination". Unfortunately this is Atom's legacy and not our doing.
- ericyd 4y ago
  I didn't realize this was a fork until reading our comments. Makes sense in that context. Your page says this is a new project which is what threw me.

moremetadata 4y ago

Hasnt got a "scrollbar map" (known as MapMode[1] in Visual Studio), making it harder to navigate large chunks of code. [1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/ide/how-to-track-your-code-by-customizing-the-scrollbar?view=vs-2022#map-mode https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/ide/how-to-tr...

Daeraxa 4y ago
There is the Minimap community package which is one of the most installed ones. https://web.pulsar-edit.dev/packages/minimap https://web.pulsar-edit.dev/packages/minimap

meanmrmustard92 4y ago

Folks who know Pulsar and Zed internals: which one of them is more likely to gain support for Atom packages? I find Hydrogen[1] invaluable as a data science scratchpad since it supports python/r/julia/etc under a common interface via jupyter, and have been unable to construct a comparable workflow in vscode or any other editor [using scripts as opposed to notebooks, which i find far too bloated]. [1]: https://github.com/nteract/hydrogen https://github.com/nteract/hydrogen

Daeraxa 4y ago
Pulsar already supports (nearly) all the Atom packages and has a brand new backend reverse engineered from the closed source Atom.io packages backend. I think it is unlikely you will get any Atom support in Zed any time soon. Some packages had to be removed due to incompatible licenses

bstar77 4y ago

I'm done with these JS/Electron editors. They are Ok (for the most part), but using Neovim in 2023 is such a huge step above everything else if you have the inclination to learn it. I'm integrating my workflow into Nixos and it's pretty incredible what is possible if you constrain your development to the terminal.

m348e912 4y ago

700MB+ installed. It's a big boi for a text editing app.

NoraCodes 4y ago

I'm enjoying the explosion in editor software going on right now. Even if most of them don't survive or gain a large audience, I'm sure the cross-pollination of ideas will lead to some great improvements in those that do.

hackrnusr 4y ago
It would be nice to know what this offers that emacs doesn't already ... other than it being built on a more modern GUI framework (Electron).
- 0thgen 4y ago
  I think it'll be a long time before something replaces emacs given that emacs is extremely niche and most text editors don't seem to be after the vim/emacs market
- pasquinelli 4y ago
  your comment makes me think: emacs already does everything-- no tool is ever going to do more than emacs (before you say it, i know this isn't literally true.) so when i already have a tool that does everything (actually multiple tools), what might i want in a different tool? to extend the metaphor of a tool: i'd want a tool that feels better in my hand, or a tool that does a specific job very well, or a tool that can fit better into tight and awkward spaces, or a tool that works by a different principle, or just a more beautiful specimen of the same tool that does everything. or maybe i'd want a different tool for one of the many reasons i'm sure i haven't thought of. just some stray thoughts, nothing original, but it makes me realize that i'm always looking for tools that work on a different principle to the ones i've got, and that's never occurred to me before now.
  - imiric 4y ago
    A new tool can certainly do things better. Emacs has many quirks, that are partly because of its age, and partly because it needs to remain compatible with its extensive ecosystem. A new editor that, for example, prioritizes performance, while not sacrificing extensibility, and maybe does it in a more mainstream language, could always start small and eventually gain traction.