Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Pulsar: A Community Effort to Revive the Atom Text Editor

pulsar-edit.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–89 of 89 posts

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

#81

Post by satvikpendem »

IshKebab wrote: post #76
satvikpendem wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tauri, Flutter, and some Rust based GUI frameworks all come to mind.

Tauri doesn't solve any of the problems of Electron except download size, and it trades that off for a more annoying developer experience.

It does solve them, albeit impartially. Downloaded bundle size, RAM usage, CPU usage all decrease, plus it uses your native webview so you're not downloading a browser every time.

However, it doesn't solve them fully, so yes I do still think natively compiled apps like those of Flutter or Rust based GUI frameworks like Iced are better.

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

#82

Post by satvikpendem »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #41
satvikpendem wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 info…

Companies generally do use telemetry, and for good reason. If something breaks or crashes, it's useful to know where and what happened. I use telemetry too with my products because it really does help me figure out where the user is getting stuck. That some people, usually a very small minority, don't like it is of no concern to me, they can decide to block it or strip it away like with VSCodium.

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

#83

Post by bmitc »

pedro2 wrote: post #33
bmitc wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does that offer to it as an editor? And Visual Studio Code is open source as well. https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/wiki/How-to-Contribute

VSCode is like Chrome: based on opensource code -- not opensource in its entirety.

Even if one feels that way, in what way does that matter or serve as an advantage?

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

#84

Post by nsonha »

CharlesW wrote: post #56
stephc_int13 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because they cornered themselves into a niche by using an Apple-only stack. Sublime Text is available on all three desktop OSes, built with C++/OpenGL for the performance intensive parts, and it works beautifully.

> Because they cornered themselves into a niche by using an Apple-only stack. HN: We demand native IDEs. Panic: Here's a native IDE that uses platform APIs for the most native look and feel possible. HN: That's too native, idiots.

who says you have to pick between native and cross-platform? The term "native" is confusing because some people use it to mean native performance (QT), and some people use it to mean native UI.

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

#85

Post by ogoffart »

stephc_int13 wrote: post #54
_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.

This is a problem directly related to the quality/ease of use of frameworks. In practice, all the facilities provided by Electron could be provided by a mix of standard libraries and system calls. Electron solves a bunch of tedious problems in a nice cross-platform package. The performance cost is OK for most people, especially with high quality projects such as VSCode. Unfortunately, I don't see any big player inves…

> Unfortunately, I don't see any big player investing time and money in a nice cross-platform native framework that could offer the same capabilities as Electron.

I'm working on Slint: https://slint-ui.com

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

#86

Post by nsonha »

thatxliner wrote: post #48
_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…

react native is like that (has a css engine), but the name react is so tainted these days.

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

#87

Post by PurpleRamen »

r24y wrote: post #19

It’s ironic that VS Code has become the premier Electron-based IDE, since Electron (originally called Atom Shell) came from the original Atom project. I loved using Atom, and I like that there’s a community trying to keep it going. However, I think there’s value in trying to push the platform forward, too; maybe rethinking the extension model to maximize stability/performance would allow Pulsar to start stealing mark…

Actually, it's not that ironic, considering that the first projects are usually not the one dominating a space later. The first ones are often still exploring the new space, and thus enabling later projects to learn from their failures and optimizing faster on this experience.

And AFAIK VS Code demonstrated this pretty well. Atom was all in on JavaScript (or CoffeeScript AFAIK) for gaining the benefits coming with it, leading to performance-penaltys and other problems. While VS Code was also heavily optimizing on performance, sidestepping JavaScript and minimizing the customizability for the sake of stability. Atom only later focused more on this, but was killed along the way when they started their research-project for better performance. But good enough, at least we got treesitter coming out of it, so it wasn't wasted at the end.

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

#89

Post by elashri »

Pufferbo wrote: post #15
satvikpendem wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VSCodium works fine for me too.

I want to try VSCodium so much but the fact they use self signed certs leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I know it’s probably a whole lot of nothing, but if I install it on my work computer and something happens because of it I would be in a massive pickle.

Is there a problem with git clone the repo and then build it locally? It doesn't take much time.
Post reply on HN