While I understand the lack of proper open source alternatives for some software like AutoCAD and After Effects, it always felt weird that the best IDEs/Text Editors are made by big corporations, because you know, these are the tools programmers use.
I tried vim/neovim, which I enjoy using, but I’ve come to prefer visual editors instead of text based. Kate looks promising, and I’m willing to contribute to it in my free time, but it just has that “amateurish” feel to it that I can’t explain.
Anyone aware of other alternatives?
I’ve been keeping a list of alternatives for a while now that I really like:
- Pulsar - An actively developed fork of Atom once Microsoft killed it off. Disclosure: I’m on the Pulsar team so I’m more than a little biased here but if you want to get involved we are always after people who want to contribute and we have a very friendly and active Discord server. First thing we did was re-implement the package backend and migrate it so we were able to keep the thousands and thousands of community packages for download.
- Lite-XL - A really lightweight and fast editor written in C and Lua that is very actively developed. I use this on some less powerful systems.
- Lapce - Another lightweight and very fast editor written in Rust and is in the middle of moving to their own UI framework. Not that extensible at the moment but supports LSP plugins.
Then for terminal based editors I really like Helix which is vim-like but uses a selection -> action model (like Kakoune). I really like it because it requires almost no configuration.
I see a lot of potential in Lapce, but sadly the extensions (which are necessary, since it has basically no ootb language support) are very poorly maintained and outdated. Last I used it the Javascript/Typescript support was simply not sufficient for active use. I am very hopeful for Lapce’s future though!
Edit: Just checked and the TS/JS extension is still on version 2022.11.0. The code formatting still doesn’t work (for me) :(
