7 ms·

Pulsar, the best code editor since Atom

54 points by ottoke 3y ago

siproprio 3y ago
> neither of them [vim, emacs] have a graphical user interface, and they are completely incapable of doing things like showing images or, for example, a Markdown preview (which by the way you can open in Pulsar by pressing Ctrl+Shift+M). You can: - See images in neovim: https://github.com/edluffy/hologram.nvim https://github.com/edluffy/hologram.nvim - preview markdown: https://github.com/iamcco/markdown-preview.nvim https://github.com/iamcco/markdown-preview.nvim - have a “graphical” user interface: https://github.com/neovide/neovide https://github.com/neovide/neovide - have a GUI written in JavaScript: https://github.com/smolck/uivonim https://github.com/smolck/uivonim You can’t put electron in the terminal, though, so it seems that pulsar lacks features that neovim has, while neovim does not lack any feature that pulsar has.
jobstealer 3y ago
"Pulsar, the best fork of Atom" - there I fixed it for you
pepa65 3y ago
So the point is just: Pulsar is the resurrected/continued Atom code base.
solarkraft 3y ago
TL;DR: It's the continuation of Atom. Personally I don't see how it does a significant number of things better than VS Code, which has much more market share already. Not being controlled by Microsoft is a plus for sure (everyone using VSCode should be aware that the official builds are actually proprietary).
jemmyw 3y ago
> It takes maybe 6–8 seconds for it to fully load from scratch, but once it is open, using it feels pretty snappy. The slowness is due to being an Electron app, which is basically a web browser. VSCode: 3s. Firefox: 2s. Chrome: 2s. Safari: 1s. > Also, Vim and Emacs use modes to allow users to either write the text in the file itself or to enter commands for the editor. Modes are terrible to use Fuck you
ottoke 3y ago
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.
- the__alchemist 3y ago
  Faster than Sublime? Unlikely.
- PKop 3y ago
  How is it better than VSCode?
chj 3y 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. Curious who and who?
- bitwize 3y ago
  I've known many world-class programmers who use Emacs, among them Kalman Reti and Steve Summit. Most of the diehard Vim users I encountered were kind of in the DUVASWUV camp (DHH Uses Vim And So We Use Vim), i.e., they came to it as part of the whole Rails memeplex. That said, vi(m) and Emacs used to share the throne as the canonical Unix wizard editors because they were nearly ubiquitously available, consistent in UI across the decades, and they rewarded proficiency (each in their own way). It was a reliable assumption that a halfway decent programmer in the open-source tradition would be quite familiar with one or the other, if not both.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - copperx 3y ago
    Vim? I remember DHH was the premier TextMate evangelist. All his videos were TextMate only.
    - ossusermivami 3y ago
      he still uses textmate afaik
    - bitwize 3y ago
      Being a Rubyist and using vim is definitely a thing. Looks like I was off about DHH being the origin. It certainly wasn't Matz, he uses (and contributed to) Emacs.
idle_zealot 3y ago
The author asserts that Emacs uses modes (it doesn't by default), does not have a GUI (it does), and cannot display images (it can). Not that this detracts from the point they should have made, which is that it has a steeper learning curve than Pulsar.
- Ferret7446 3y ago
  I hate to defend the author since it's clear the author has some significant knowledge gaps, but Emacs very much uses modes by default. What is a mode? It is when key presses do different things depending on the mode (e.g., normal vs insert mode in vi). Emacs very much has modes, by default, and many more of them than Vim (or vi), including multiple vi-like modes. Emacs is so much more modal that it is trivial to implement vi/Vim modes in Emacs (and notably the reverse is not true). Just because Emacs does not enable the exact three or four mode key binding sets that vi/Vim does on an out-of-the-box startup does not make Emacs "not modal". vi/Vim does not own the concept of "modes" by implementing three or four very specific mode key binding sets; lots of software implement modes and to put it somewhat confrontationally, Vim users tend to be a bit full of themselves thinking that their modes are super special (and I say that as a former Vim user; I still occasionally use vi, but not as a primary editor).
- nanny 3y ago
  Clearly the author has never used Emacs, because they have confused Emacs "modes" (which are more like features that get turned on and off) with modal editing (like vim). There are also plenty of markdown preview packages available for both Vim and Emacs (even live preview). Emacs has had preview-latex since before Atom even existed.
- bwhaley 3y ago
  Also, as a vim user, modes are completely fine and I do not believe that modes slow me down. I’m not sure why the author is so insistent on this point.
  - idle_zealot 3y ago
    Intuitively having to press more keys in order to accomplish an action sounds like it would be slower than a single key combo. Of course this fails to account for the fact that pressing something like Option+Fn+Backspace to forward-delete a word is far more awkward than f-d and therefore takes longer.
thewakalix 3y ago
> Zed, however, is not open source This was true when the article was written, but it is no longer true. https://zed.dev/blog/zed-is-now-open-source https://zed.dev/blog/zed-is-now-open-source
notnmeyer 3y 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. haha, shots fired!
- doctor_eval 3y ago
  Right? The greats all used ed.
  - gkhartman 3y ago
    Nah, programmers of that caliber will use a magnetized needle directly on the hard disk platters.
    - antiframe 3y ago
      I see where you're going with this, so let's just shortcut ourselves to the end: the Emacs command `M-x butterfly`.
  - overtomanu 3y ago
    for those who don't know -> https://xkcd.com/378/ https://xkcd.com/378/
- rtpg 3y ago
  Evil mode giving you Vim macros, combined with Elisp as a real programming language.... ooh now that's some fun IDE a la carte-ing
- umvi 3y ago
  And then you have Linus Torvalds who uses nano
  - I_like_pigeons 3y ago
    I thought he used his own fork of a micro emacs?
wk_end 3y ago
The question this leaves unanswered is: why not VS Code? I don't know if MS built VS Code deliberately to compete with Atom, and I don't know if they bought GH to kill Atom. But once they had Atom in their hands, it only made sense to kill off Atom - they're extremely similar. They're both: (1) free Electron-based text editors that (2) are highly extendable in JS, are (3) powerful enough to use as IDEs, but (4) more lightweight than Visual Studio or the JetBrains stuff, and (5) use now-standard UI conventions unlike Vim or Emacs. And using VS Code opens up the ecosystem of the most popular code editor in the world. There's more plugins, more eyes to catch bugs, and one of the richest companies in tech funding improvements on it. With nothing distinguishing it, Pulsar faces an enormous uphill battle if it wants to compete with that. Maybe I'm missing something and Atom/Pulsar have some killer features that VS Code doesn't and won't ever have. Or maybe you just prefer using Pulsar, which...fair enough.
- wink 3y ago
  Sometimes you simply can't describe how a thing feels subtly wrong. Atom was that for me, I tried it several times and it did nothing like I wanted it. VS Code was somehow different. I'm not the biggest fan but it's my go to editor now for whenever I need to edit 5 lines in some language where I don't have an IDE set up for, and it just works. So I can totally understand why people would feel strongly with Atom vs VSCode. (I've not tried Pulsar, maybe I should)
- weikju 3y ago
  > Maybe I'm missing something and Atom/Pulsar have some killer features that VS Code doesn't and won't ever have. For one, it's not controlled by Microsoft which has its own plans and designs (lock you into GitHub, their proprietary extensions, telemetry, AI, etc)
  - v3ss0n 3y ago
    We have vscodium
    - weikju 3y ago
jerbear4328 3y ago
I used to use and love Atom, but it was pretty slow, to be honest. I switched to VSCode after it was unsupported by Microsoft for a while, and I've been happy with the switch. I wasn't aware of this fork at the time. Curious if improvements have been made since then, but I'm very happy with VSCode at the moment.
- coffeebeqn 3y ago
  I don’t love VSCode but it’s what I mostly use. It’s good enough for most users and having everyone on my team have the same setup helps debug local issues. It also never seems to have any major performance issues which I’ll give MS kudos for. Maybe because the core editor is still pretty light and most things are plugins ?
resonious 3y ago
> VS Code is actually the reason why Atom eventually died. In 2018, Microsoft acquired GitHub, the world’s largest open source hosting platform, to get premier mind share of developers, and as part of that plan, Microsoft also wanted as many developers as possible to do all their coding using an editor controlled by Microsoft. I was nodding my head for the first half of this but then it went full conspiracy. Is VSCode really all that "controlled by Microsoft"? It's also open source. Maybe I'm naive, but I'm pretty sure VSCode killed Atom by being way faster and easier to develop plugins for.
- esclerofilo 3y ago
  > Is VSCode really all that "controlled by Microsoft"? Yep. VSCode "core" is open source, but many of the official extensions aren't (Python, C#, Live Share, Dev Containers IIRC). Besides, accessing the extension marketplace from a non-official vscode build is against their terms of service, meaning forks like vscodium don't have easy access to most extensions.
  - bluish29 3y ago
    VScode official build is not open source. They take the open source code and apply some stuff related to their proprietary extensions and product and then release it. And as you said you can't use their proprietary extensions or their extension marketplace endpoint (legally at least) outside their official build
- factormeta 3y ago
  VSCode extension store are controlled by MS, think it has being mentioned here on HN as on the control point. I don't totally avoid VSCode, but would ONLY use it as VSCodium and extensions that works in that. It is not that hard to believe that "Microsoft also wanted as many developers as possible to do all their coding using an editor controlled by Microsoft" Seems like pretty standard MS practice.
ssivark 3y ago
So many words, and no answers to the obvious question — how does it compare with VS Code?
pech0rin 3y ago
I don’t get the point of talking about how much you love something by shitting on what other people use. Ha ha emacs users are idiots. Maybe I’m being overly sensitive but whats the point of saying this? Can’t you just talk about whats great about your thing and not take pot shots at other tech.
- latexr 3y ago
  I know of a few tech circles which basically define themselves by not being something else. Every time they talk about themselves they must take a jab at their “competitor”, who likely doesn’t think of them at all. It’s a major turn off. I have no desire to be part of a community founded on hate and who can only define their values in contrast to someone else’s. I have no idea if this author is representative of the Pulsar community, but I sure hope not.
- ossusermivami 3y 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. the author doesn't know much about Emacs (and i assume vim) but that last point about emacs is very unnecessary and clickbaity... oh well, i don't mind pulsar being good and it probably a better fit for some people but pulsar doesn't deserves this guy
- bloopernova 3y ago
  It did read as kind of rage-bait-ish. You're not being overly sensitive at all.
ohlanre 3y ago
Atom was hot garbage, what the hell are you on. Vim is cool but also not an IDE, NeoVim is what you could compare to. Why not VSCode?
- Tomis02 3y ago
  Because VSCode is also not an IDE.
hnthrowaway0328 3y ago
VS Code is good enough. I'll stick to it till I start to make my own and start dogfooding.
getpokedagain 3y ago
I don't really use Pulsar as its heavy weight. But I'm glad for every legit open source project that pushes editing forward be it NeoVim, Emacs etc. The mono culture of do everything in vsCode under MS's thumb is not a great idea. Microsoft has proven itself untrustworthy time and time again.
ergonaught 3y ago
I cannot imagine ever abandoning Emacs (or vim for that matter), but I also can't imagine why anyone would want to continue Atom. If its environment worked for you, it seems like VSCode is clearly the right tool for that job.
antiframe 3y ago
> While both of these [Emacs and vim] can probably compete with Pulsar in number of extensions available and the amount of customizations and keyboard shortcuts, neither of them have a graphical user interface, and they are completely incapable of doing things like showing images or, for example, a Markdown preview (which by the way you can open in Pulsar by pressing Ctrl+Shift+M). Claiming that Emacs has limited customization, no GUi, and can't display images tells me they've not used Emacs and probably shouldn't be making any claims without fact checking them. Really colors how I read the rest of their pitch.
- quasarj 3y ago
  Thank you. I just got around to reading the article and was horrified to find him disparaging vim, and emacs, while being completely wrong about both. Very soured.
- GalaxyNova 3y ago
  Also nowadays there's a few GUI frontends for Neovim such as Neovide.
  - antiframe 3y ago
    See, I didn't know that. But, I wouldn't go around claiming it either. Especially if I was making that claim to disparage a competor to my product.
  - linuxftw 3y ago
    Eh, not really. Last I tried these, the mouse was able to move the cursor, and that was about it.
    - 000ooo000 3y ago
      Neovim in the terminal has a basic right click menu (select, copy, paste), scrolling, and buffer select. That's just what I've come across.
      - 3y ago
arthur_sav 3y ago
VSCode is a good successor imo. I liked Atom for it's simplicity and not getting in your way - which i think vscode does well.
riwsky 3y ago
> nearly all of humanity is blissfully unaware of what modes even are Including, apparently, the author.
shubhamjain 3y ago
I don't understand what the author bases his claim on. Pulsar is based on Electron, so it isn't going to be faster than VS Code. And taking a quick look, it's way behind VS Code in terms of features. It doesn't even have a built-in terminal. If you want to use anything other than VS Code as an editor, why not pick something based on native technologies? What's the point of picking an editor that takes 6-8 seconds to start and still is way behind VS Code in terms of development?
ivanjermakov 3y ago
Best code editor from the two author have tried?
doix 3y ago
This article can be summarized as "I use Pulsar because that's what I'm used too" combined with incorrect "facts" about other editors and some shit slinging at them. Nothing they describe about Pulsar is unique at all, apart from the slow loading time I guess. If you wanted time to load up HN while your editor loads, maybe Pulsar is right for you! Everything they describe there is fairly basic functionality that is available in pretty much every popular(and niche) editor at this point. The "How to code 10x faster than an average programmer" article linked also describes basic things; hot reloading and real time linting. Use whatever editor you want, write about whatever editor you want, but at least do some research about other editors before confidently stating your favorite one is the best along with incorrect facts about others. This reminds me of the blub paradox[0] except for editors instead of programming languages. [0] https://paulgraham.com/avg.html https://paulgraham.com/avg.html
syndicatedjelly 3y ago
Also, Vim and Emacs use modes to allow users to either write the text in the file itself or to enter commands for the editor. Modes are terrible to use, and thanks to people like Larry Tesler, we haven’t had modes in any new software since the 1980’s, and nearly all of humanity is blissfully unaware of what modes even are and will never be exposed to them. Instead of using keyboard shortcuts via modes, we today have keyboard shortcuts like Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V which are easy to use. TIL that modes are obviously terrible and I should feel bad for learning how to use Vim’s modes effectively
riwsky 3y ago
I don’t consider VSCode the best code editor, but I will say: it is the best thing to happen to code editing for quite some time. LSP has made it much easier to create an editor, or add support for niche languages. Even for big names like vim, which have always had a deep bench of plugins, it’s amazing to see this stuff “just work” now which used to require constant fussing (and the occasional blood sacrifice to tim pope). Ditto for the Atom folks with Tree-Sitter. You see both these technologies show up in neovim, emacs, hip new kids like helix…like: yes, input latency or memory usage are important for a text editor—but it’s a bummer when people’s takeaways from these two are “lol electron, trash corporate engineering”, when the teams behind them were out-implementing the even-more-open-source world on important things like this. As for the closed-source world…Jetbrains has been basically unchallenged in the general-purpose IDE game for ages. It’s exciting to see what they’ll do now with a fire lit under their butts.
eviks 3y ago
Besides many other ignorant mistakes in the article, the link to how modes are terrible doesn't explain how they are terrible
hwbunny 3y ago
It's the same old thing again and again. People can't think outside the box. It's the same look I can do this too thing.

54 points by ottoke 3y ago

> neither of them [vim, emacs] have a graphical user interface, and they are completely incapable of doing things like showing images or, for example, a Markdown preview (which by the way you can open in Pulsar by pressing Ctrl+Shift+M). You can: - See images in neovim: https://github.com/edluffy/hologram.nvim https://github.com/edluffy/hologram.nvim - preview markdown: https://github.com/iamcco/markdown-preview.nvim https://github.com/iamcco/markdown-preview.nvim - have a “graphical” user interface: https://github.com/neovide/neovide https://github.com/neovide/neovide - have a GUI written in JavaScript: https://github.com/smolck/uivonim https://github.com/smolck/uivonim You can’t put electron in the terminal, though, so it seems that pulsar lacks features that neovim has, while neovim does not lack any feature that pulsar has.

jobstealer 3y ago

"Pulsar, the best fork of Atom" - there I fixed it for you

pepa65 3y ago

So the point is just: Pulsar is the resurrected/continued Atom code base.

solarkraft 3y ago

TL;DR: It's the continuation of Atom. Personally I don't see how it does a significant number of things better than VS Code, which has much more market share already. Not being controlled by Microsoft is a plus for sure (everyone using VSCode should be aware that the official builds are actually proprietary).

jemmyw 3y ago

> It takes maybe 6–8 seconds for it to fully load from scratch, but once it is open, using it feels pretty snappy. The slowness is due to being an Electron app, which is basically a web browser. VSCode: 3s. Firefox: 2s. Chrome: 2s. Safari: 1s. > Also, Vim and Emacs use modes to allow users to either write the text in the file itself or to enter commands for the editor. Modes are terrible to use Fuck you

ottoke 3y ago

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.

the__alchemist 3y ago
Faster than Sublime? Unlikely.
PKop 3y ago
How is it better than VSCode?

chj 3y 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. Curious who and who?

bitwize 3y ago
I've known many world-class programmers who use Emacs, among them Kalman Reti and Steve Summit. Most of the diehard Vim users I encountered were kind of in the DUVASWUV camp (DHH Uses Vim And So We Use Vim), i.e., they came to it as part of the whole Rails memeplex. That said, vi(m) and Emacs used to share the throne as the canonical Unix wizard editors because they were nearly ubiquitously available, consistent in UI across the decades, and they rewarded proficiency (each in their own way). It was a reliable assumption that a halfway decent programmer in the open-source tradition would be quite familiar with one or the other, if not both.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- copperx 3y ago
  Vim? I remember DHH was the premier TextMate evangelist. All his videos were TextMate only.
  - ossusermivami 3y ago
    he still uses textmate afaik
  - bitwize 3y ago
    Being a Rubyist and using vim is definitely a thing. Looks like I was off about DHH being the origin. It certainly wasn't Matz, he uses (and contributed to) Emacs.

idle_zealot 3y ago

The author asserts that Emacs uses modes (it doesn't by default), does not have a GUI (it does), and cannot display images (it can). Not that this detracts from the point they should have made, which is that it has a steeper learning curve than Pulsar.

Ferret7446 3y ago
I hate to defend the author since it's clear the author has some significant knowledge gaps, but Emacs very much uses modes by default. What is a mode? It is when key presses do different things depending on the mode (e.g., normal vs insert mode in vi). Emacs very much has modes, by default, and many more of them than Vim (or vi), including multiple vi-like modes. Emacs is so much more modal that it is trivial to implement vi/Vim modes in Emacs (and notably the reverse is not true). Just because Emacs does not enable the exact three or four mode key binding sets that vi/Vim does on an out-of-the-box startup does not make Emacs "not modal". vi/Vim does not own the concept of "modes" by implementing three or four very specific mode key binding sets; lots of software implement modes and to put it somewhat confrontationally, Vim users tend to be a bit full of themselves thinking that their modes are super special (and I say that as a former Vim user; I still occasionally use vi, but not as a primary editor).
nanny 3y ago
Clearly the author has never used Emacs, because they have confused Emacs "modes" (which are more like features that get turned on and off) with modal editing (like vim). There are also plenty of markdown preview packages available for both Vim and Emacs (even live preview). Emacs has had preview-latex since before Atom even existed.
bwhaley 3y ago
Also, as a vim user, modes are completely fine and I do not believe that modes slow me down. I’m not sure why the author is so insistent on this point.
- idle_zealot 3y ago
  Intuitively having to press more keys in order to accomplish an action sounds like it would be slower than a single key combo. Of course this fails to account for the fact that pressing something like Option+Fn+Backspace to forward-delete a word is far more awkward than f-d and therefore takes longer.

thewakalix 3y ago

> Zed, however, is not open source This was true when the article was written, but it is no longer true. https://zed.dev/blog/zed-is-now-open-source https://zed.dev/blog/zed-is-now-open-source

notnmeyer 3y ago

doctor_eval 3y ago
Right? The greats all used ed.
- gkhartman 3y ago
  Nah, programmers of that caliber will use a magnetized needle directly on the hard disk platters.
  - antiframe 3y ago
    I see where you're going with this, so let's just shortcut ourselves to the end: the Emacs command `M-x butterfly`.
- overtomanu 3y ago
  for those who don't know -> https://xkcd.com/378/ https://xkcd.com/378/
rtpg 3y ago
Evil mode giving you Vim macros, combined with Elisp as a real programming language.... ooh now that's some fun IDE a la carte-ing
umvi 3y ago
And then you have Linus Torvalds who uses nano
- I_like_pigeons 3y ago
  I thought he used his own fork of a micro emacs?

wk_end 3y ago

The question this leaves unanswered is: why not VS Code? I don't know if MS built VS Code deliberately to compete with Atom, and I don't know if they bought GH to kill Atom. But once they had Atom in their hands, it only made sense to kill off Atom - they're extremely similar. They're both: (1) free Electron-based text editors that (2) are highly extendable in JS, are (3) powerful enough to use as IDEs, but (4) more lightweight than Visual Studio or the JetBrains stuff, and (5) use now-standard UI conventions unlike Vim or Emacs. And using VS Code opens up the ecosystem of the most popular code editor in the world. There's more plugins, more eyes to catch bugs, and one of the richest companies in tech funding improvements on it. With nothing distinguishing it, Pulsar faces an enormous uphill battle if it wants to compete with that. Maybe I'm missing something and Atom/Pulsar have some killer features that VS Code doesn't and won't ever have. Or maybe you just prefer using Pulsar, which...fair enough.

wink 3y ago
Sometimes you simply can't describe how a thing feels subtly wrong. Atom was that for me, I tried it several times and it did nothing like I wanted it. VS Code was somehow different. I'm not the biggest fan but it's my go to editor now for whenever I need to edit 5 lines in some language where I don't have an IDE set up for, and it just works. So I can totally understand why people would feel strongly with Atom vs VSCode. (I've not tried Pulsar, maybe I should)
weikju 3y ago
> Maybe I'm missing something and Atom/Pulsar have some killer features that VS Code doesn't and won't ever have. For one, it's not controlled by Microsoft which has its own plans and designs (lock you into GitHub, their proprietary extensions, telemetry, AI, etc)
- v3ss0n 3y ago
  We have vscodium
  - weikju 3y ago

jerbear4328 3y ago

I used to use and love Atom, but it was pretty slow, to be honest. I switched to VSCode after it was unsupported by Microsoft for a while, and I've been happy with the switch. I wasn't aware of this fork at the time. Curious if improvements have been made since then, but I'm very happy with VSCode at the moment.

coffeebeqn 3y ago
I don’t love VSCode but it’s what I mostly use. It’s good enough for most users and having everyone on my team have the same setup helps debug local issues. It also never seems to have any major performance issues which I’ll give MS kudos for. Maybe because the core editor is still pretty light and most things are plugins ?

resonious 3y ago

> VS Code is actually the reason why Atom eventually died. In 2018, Microsoft acquired GitHub, the world’s largest open source hosting platform, to get premier mind share of developers, and as part of that plan, Microsoft also wanted as many developers as possible to do all their coding using an editor controlled by Microsoft. I was nodding my head for the first half of this but then it went full conspiracy. Is VSCode really all that "controlled by Microsoft"? It's also open source. Maybe I'm naive, but I'm pretty sure VSCode killed Atom by being way faster and easier to develop plugins for.

esclerofilo 3y ago
> Is VSCode really all that "controlled by Microsoft"? Yep. VSCode "core" is open source, but many of the official extensions aren't (Python, C#, Live Share, Dev Containers IIRC). Besides, accessing the extension marketplace from a non-official vscode build is against their terms of service, meaning forks like vscodium don't have easy access to most extensions.
- bluish29 3y ago
  VScode official build is not open source. They take the open source code and apply some stuff related to their proprietary extensions and product and then release it. And as you said you can't use their proprietary extensions or their extension marketplace endpoint (legally at least) outside their official build
factormeta 3y ago
VSCode extension store are controlled by MS, think it has being mentioned here on HN as on the control point. I don't totally avoid VSCode, but would ONLY use it as VSCodium and extensions that works in that. It is not that hard to believe that "Microsoft also wanted as many developers as possible to do all their coding using an editor controlled by Microsoft" Seems like pretty standard MS practice.

ssivark 3y ago

So many words, and no answers to the obvious question — how does it compare with VS Code?

pech0rin 3y ago

I don’t get the point of talking about how much you love something by shitting on what other people use. Ha ha emacs users are idiots. Maybe I’m being overly sensitive but whats the point of saying this? Can’t you just talk about whats great about your thing and not take pot shots at other tech.

latexr 3y ago
I know of a few tech circles which basically define themselves by not being something else. Every time they talk about themselves they must take a jab at their “competitor”, who likely doesn’t think of them at all. It’s a major turn off. I have no desire to be part of a community founded on hate and who can only define their values in contrast to someone else’s. I have no idea if this author is representative of the Pulsar community, but I sure hope not.
ossusermivami 3y 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. the author doesn't know much about Emacs (and i assume vim) but that last point about emacs is very unnecessary and clickbaity... oh well, i don't mind pulsar being good and it probably a better fit for some people but pulsar doesn't deserves this guy
bloopernova 3y ago
It did read as kind of rage-bait-ish. You're not being overly sensitive at all.

ohlanre 3y ago

Atom was hot garbage, what the hell are you on. Vim is cool but also not an IDE, NeoVim is what you could compare to. Why not VSCode?

Tomis02 3y ago
Because VSCode is also not an IDE.

hnthrowaway0328 3y ago

VS Code is good enough. I'll stick to it till I start to make my own and start dogfooding.

getpokedagain 3y ago

I don't really use Pulsar as its heavy weight. But I'm glad for every legit open source project that pushes editing forward be it NeoVim, Emacs etc. The mono culture of do everything in vsCode under MS's thumb is not a great idea. Microsoft has proven itself untrustworthy time and time again.

ergonaught 3y ago

I cannot imagine ever abandoning Emacs (or vim for that matter), but I also can't imagine why anyone would want to continue Atom. If its environment worked for you, it seems like VSCode is clearly the right tool for that job.

antiframe 3y ago

> While both of these [Emacs and vim] can probably compete with Pulsar in number of extensions available and the amount of customizations and keyboard shortcuts, neither of them have a graphical user interface, and they are completely incapable of doing things like showing images or, for example, a Markdown preview (which by the way you can open in Pulsar by pressing Ctrl+Shift+M). Claiming that Emacs has limited customization, no GUi, and can't display images tells me they've not used Emacs and probably shouldn't be making any claims without fact checking them. Really colors how I read the rest of their pitch.

quasarj 3y ago
Thank you. I just got around to reading the article and was horrified to find him disparaging vim, and emacs, while being completely wrong about both. Very soured.
GalaxyNova 3y ago
Also nowadays there's a few GUI frontends for Neovim such as Neovide.
- antiframe 3y ago
  See, I didn't know that. But, I wouldn't go around claiming it either. Especially if I was making that claim to disparage a competor to my product.
- linuxftw 3y ago
  Eh, not really. Last I tried these, the mouse was able to move the cursor, and that was about it.
  - 000ooo000 3y ago
    Neovim in the terminal has a basic right click menu (select, copy, paste), scrolling, and buffer select. That's just what I've come across.
    - 3y ago

arthur_sav 3y ago

VSCode is a good successor imo. I liked Atom for it's simplicity and not getting in your way - which i think vscode does well.

riwsky 3y ago

> nearly all of humanity is blissfully unaware of what modes even are Including, apparently, the author.

shubhamjain 3y ago

I don't understand what the author bases his claim on. Pulsar is based on Electron, so it isn't going to be faster than VS Code. And taking a quick look, it's way behind VS Code in terms of features. It doesn't even have a built-in terminal. If you want to use anything other than VS Code as an editor, why not pick something based on native technologies? What's the point of picking an editor that takes 6-8 seconds to start and still is way behind VS Code in terms of development?

ivanjermakov 3y ago

Best code editor from the two author have tried?

doix 3y ago

This article can be summarized as "I use Pulsar because that's what I'm used too" combined with incorrect "facts" about other editors and some shit slinging at them. Nothing they describe about Pulsar is unique at all, apart from the slow loading time I guess. If you wanted time to load up HN while your editor loads, maybe Pulsar is right for you! Everything they describe there is fairly basic functionality that is available in pretty much every popular(and niche) editor at this point. The "How to code 10x faster than an average programmer" article linked also describes basic things; hot reloading and real time linting. Use whatever editor you want, write about whatever editor you want, but at least do some research about other editors before confidently stating your favorite one is the best along with incorrect facts about others. This reminds me of the blub paradox[0] except for editors instead of programming languages. [0] https://paulgraham.com/avg.html https://paulgraham.com/avg.html

syndicatedjelly 3y ago

Also, Vim and Emacs use modes to allow users to either write the text in the file itself or to enter commands for the editor. Modes are terrible to use, and thanks to people like Larry Tesler, we haven’t had modes in any new software since the 1980’s, and nearly all of humanity is blissfully unaware of what modes even are and will never be exposed to them. Instead of using keyboard shortcuts via modes, we today have keyboard shortcuts like Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V which are easy to use. TIL that modes are obviously terrible and I should feel bad for learning how to use Vim’s modes effectively

riwsky 3y ago

I don’t consider VSCode the best code editor, but I will say: it is the best thing to happen to code editing for quite some time. LSP has made it much easier to create an editor, or add support for niche languages. Even for big names like vim, which have always had a deep bench of plugins, it’s amazing to see this stuff “just work” now which used to require constant fussing (and the occasional blood sacrifice to tim pope). Ditto for the Atom folks with Tree-Sitter. You see both these technologies show up in neovim, emacs, hip new kids like helix…like: yes, input latency or memory usage are important for a text editor—but it’s a bummer when people’s takeaways from these two are “lol electron, trash corporate engineering”, when the teams behind them were out-implementing the even-more-open-source world on important things like this. As for the closed-source world…Jetbrains has been basically unchallenged in the general-purpose IDE game for ages. It’s exciting to see what they’ll do now with a fire lit under their butts.

eviks 3y ago

Besides many other ignorant mistakes in the article, the link to how modes are terrible doesn't explain how they are terrible

hwbunny 3y ago

It's the same old thing again and again. People can't think outside the box. It's the same look I can do this too thing.