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Pulsar: A Community Effort to Revive the Atom Text Editor

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Re: Pulsar: A Community Effort to Revive the Atom Text Editor

#41

Post by zelphirkalt »

satvikpendem wrote: post #4
onionisafruit wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s open source.

VSCodium works fine for me too.

Unfortunately many VS Code users are uninformed and instead of using VS Codium by default (reproducible build, getting rid of telemetry), they put the cart before the horse and only know about VS Code, using it as the default choice. I have a hunch, that this is as intended or at least, that MS enjoys it being like that.

Fair move would be to put a well visible message into VS Code or their download pages, which informs the user: "If you need to check the build, you probably want VS Codium instead." -- Of course they are not obliged to do that, but meanwhile they are collecting telemetry to no end, from users, who are not informed about their main workhorse of their job. It does not seem right to me.

In general we need more awareness of telemetry, especially from companies like MS. Maybe at some point they will ship some telemetry update which the user "only needs to quickly confirm", before they can hack away and which opts into sharing code with their Copilot thingy. Before you know it, your solutions to problems are shared with other people, who will get a copy of your copy inserted. Lots of scenarios how this could go wrong, even if accidentally.

Re: Pulsar: A Community Effort to Revive the Atom Text Editor

#42

Post by jackcviers3 »

nsonha wrote: post #30

Why should Atom be kept alive? It's literally VSCode but with abandoned extensions and worst performance, being written in coffeescript. If the project owner actually articulated some reason such as they are rewriting in a better language (but in which case it's no longer Atom), then I might bite.

What does coffeescript have to do with performance? It compiles down to JS just like every other js front-end lang.

Re: Pulsar: A Community Effort to Revive the Atom Text Editor

#45

Post by rch »

bobajeff wrote: post #43
adjusted wrote: post #36

There is a new editor called zed from atom developers featuring native performance and CRDT collaboration.

That's still in closed alpha stage. https://zed.dev/releases

Looks interesting, and they have a fork of Alacritty in their repos. I was just wondering about embedding that in an Elixir/Rust desktop application myself.

Re: Pulsar: A Community Effort to Revive the Atom Text Editor

#47

Post by rd07 »

MatthiasPortzel wrote: post #14
lalaland1125 wrote: post #2

What does Atom offer over alternatives, in particular Visual Studio Code?

I really miss Atom. I'll enumerate some items here, since you asked, but all of them really just boil down to personal preference: * Atom was hackable from the ground-up. I use a VS Code extension called Customize UI that allows me to write custom CSS, but Atom supported custom CSS as a first-class feature. * Nostalgia: Atom was the first text editor I used, and so it has a certain friendliness than other editors can…

I think we have the same preference regarding text editor. I also prefer Atom UI compared to VSCode UI. And even if I can customize it to look the same as Atom, it will never feel the same.

My only complaint with Atom is about performance. A fresh install of Atom feels normal fast at first, but as I add more plugins, it gradually feels slower. VSCode is better in this regard. Nowadays I mainly use Sublime Text, which is faster than VSCode. I also keep an eye on Lite-XL, which has the potential to be as fast as Sublime Text with a smaller memory footprint.

Re: Pulsar: A Community Effort to Revive the Atom Text Editor

#48

Post by thatxliner »

_hao wrote: post #46

How about we actually create more performant native tools? I'm sick of the trend where we have this beastly hardware and things are actually getting slower and slower with each generation.

In my opinion, Electron wasn’t designed to be like this. It was originally created for Atom, to be customizable. The choice of using and bundling Chromium is for ease of customizability.

Web technology for desktop apps will be prominent because we are lazy. A lot of people know JavaScript/HTML/CSS or just web technology in general, so why not just use it rather than learning a new language like Swift or C++ (for some)?

Tauri looks promising. My personal thoughts is that it’s much easier to create apps via Tauri than Electron. At least, so far. The template used for using Svelte to create Tauri apps is much shorter than the one for Electron.

Re: Pulsar: A Community Effort to Revive the Atom Text Editor

#49

Post by nsonha »

jackcviers3 wrote: post #42
nsonha wrote: post #30

Why should Atom be kept alive? It's literally VSCode but with abandoned extensions and worst performance, being written in coffeescript. If the project owner actually articulated some reason such as they are rewriting in a better language (but in which case it's no longer Atom), then I might bite.

What does coffeescript have to do with performance? It compiles down to JS just like every other js front-end lang.

are the plugins transpiled or they will be transpiled on load? My memory is rusty

Re: Pulsar: A Community Effort to Revive the Atom Text Editor

#50

Post by hokumguru »

_hao wrote: post #46

How about we actually create more performant native tools? I'm sick of the trend where we have this beastly hardware and things are actually getting slower and slower with each generation.

Nova by Panic is in this vein of bringing back great native software but the community remains small
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