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. ๐
See also !pulsaredit@lemmy.ml
The best code editor is the one that you enjoy using, because youโre going to be using it a lot.
@LucidDaemon @Aurenkin out of curiosity, how long have you been using Helix and what do you like about it? I tried it awhile back and liked it, but it wasnโt able to break VS Codeโs iron grip on my dev workflow.
About 6 months since Iโve switched away from vscode. To make Helix worth it you also need to use software that compliments it.
I work in DevOps, so I donโt do a ton of programming but everything I do is via terminal. I use Kitty Terminal, ZSH with oh-my-zsh for the shell, Zellij for an emulation layer (think tiling and tab manager in kitty), nnn for in terminal file manager, and helix for editor.
I almost never leave the terminal now, except when web browsing.
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 doesnโt have (dev containers are a big one for me - they allow you to have different versions of the same software installed, depending what project youโre working on right nowโฆ and you can work on/run both versions of the same software at the same time, on the same hardwareโฆ you can also emulate other CPU architectures in a dev container, some of the software I work with every day canโt actually run natively on my hardware).
The author also makes some incorrect or misleading claims, specifically about emacs. I acknowledge thereโs a high bar for entry there and donโt personally like emacs, but itโs not modal, and it does have the ability to display images and markdown previews.
I used Atom for markdown editing for my blog and I loved it. After the death of Atom I felt forced to switch over to VS Code and I hate it.
Hate, Hate. Hate.
I canโt tell you why, I just hate it.
I found Pulsar last week and my blood pressure is down where it belongs now.
For programming in Java & Kotlin I use Intellij Idea CE. I cannot image why anyone would bother with VS Code for this purpose either.
I recently started learning Java and Intellij Idea was recommended to me by the course. This is the second time in a week Iโve heard about this. In your opinion, what makes it good?
It just works. I spent years with Eclipse (but quite some time ago now), and it was always a pain getting particular things to work properly. The last time I messed with it was doing research for an article I was writing. I was try to get Gradle support enabled. I wasnโt able to do it, but I admit I gave up pretty quickly because I donโt have the patience for messing with tools that donโt work any more.
In truth, I really liked the Open aspect of Eclipse and I wish it work better than Intellij. Maybe it does now - I donโt know. For Java Intellij is awesome, and does everything you could ever dream for. For Kotlin - well Kotlin is an Intellij product and the support for it is awesome.
Had a distinguished collegue (from the Bell Lab days) say to me recently:
โIDEs 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.โ
While I agree with the sentiment, the key bindings have been burned into my less squishy ROM at this point, and Iโve got all banks of squishy RAM available ๐
hahaha good point.
That colleague, keep in mind is a bit older, also has Vim navigation burned into his head. I think where he was coming from, all these new technologies and syntax for them, he much rather prefers right clicking in the IDE and itโll show him options instead of doing it all from command line. For example docker container management, Goโs devle debugger syntax, GDB. He has a hybrid workflow tho.
After having spent countless hours on my Vim config only to restart everything using Lua with nvim, I can relate to time sink that is vim.
The best code editor is the one that works well with your other tools, including 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.
The team also created the Electron Framework
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