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?
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Vscodium
You don’t need that when you use NixOS 😋
Any idea how well vscodium runs on macos? Is the performance worde than normal vscode?
It’s the same code as VScode, just without telemetry, so probably the same or marginally better
As one of the Pulsar team, thanks for the support! Always nice to see it being recommended on these kinds of threads.
I would suggest adding some screenshots to your website
We are going through a bit of a rework for the website and docs site as a whole but yeah, I agree that we should have some.
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.
Thanks for your work on Pulsar. Atom was my go to simple editor before MS killed it off. I’m still fuming now. I really need to try Pulsar :). Been using Kate for now.
lite-xl looks promising
the main missing feature imho : being able to search/filter settings, keybindings in particular
Playing around with lite-xl, thanks for the recommendation. Lacks many features for now, but seems to have a huge potential.
Neovim + LunarVim is most of what I need for software engineering out of the box. It even has debugger support. Plus it’s way faster than VSCode and terminal friendly.
Yea, I also use neovim with NvChad config. Even use NVim in my termux.
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I wouldn’t exchange my neovim config for anything. After getting used to how vim works and installing all the plugins I need, I feel like this is my favourite editor. It looks nice and I enjoy using keyboard shortcuts over using a mouse.
That said, the day I lose my neovim config is the day I die. If it disappears I’m doomed
People are writing different opinions, but you are right, best IDEs are comercial software.
I think it is just because it takes a lot of time and effort on boring stuff to make this tools smooth. Generally in open source we work on fun parts and leave those boring last 20% unfinished, which is ok with me.l
You could try VSCodium. VS code but less spyware-y
Lapce is an alternative that you can try, though it’s self-described as “pre-alpha”.
I am on the path VSCodium --> Lapce under NixOS for visual editors and to decorporate my workflow. i.e. away from VSCode which is [otherwise] exceptional.
However, Helix looks incredible.
If you need something specific for Python, there is Eric
Lunarvim
Astrovim too.
If you program in Python check out Spyder, some other languages also have specialized IDEs that can be really good.
If you like Kate you can try Kdevelop. It’s the same editor base but a bit more IDE like
I heard good things about Geany.
I love geany but it’s basically done. The little development that happens is maintenance only. It’s great at what it does now, but don’t expect any new feature (rip LSP)
