Also, Vim and Emacs use modes to allow users to either write the text in the file itself or to enter commands for the editor. Modes are terrible to use, and thanks to people like Larry Tesler, we haven’t had modes in any new software since the 1980’s, and nearly all of humanity is blissfully unaware of what modes even are and will never be exposed to them. Instead of using keyboard shortcuts via modes, we today have keyboard shortcuts like Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V which are easy to use.
Pulsar, the best code editor since Atom
51–60 of 75 posts
Re: Pulsar, the best code editor since Atom
#52> I know several world class programmers, and interestingly, the commonality among them is that they all seem to use Vim as their code editor. Many people I know who think of themselves as world class programmers use Emacs. haha, shots fired!
Right? The greats all used ed.
for those who don't know -> https://xkcd.com/378/
Re: Pulsar, the best code editor since Atom
#53I don’t consider VSCode the best code editor, but I will say: it is the best thing to happen to code editing for quite some time. LSP has made it much easier to create an editor, or add support for niche languages. Even for big names like vim, which have always had a deep bench of plugins, it’s amazing to see this stuff “just work” now which used to require constant fussing (and the occasional blood sacrifice to tim pope).
Ditto for the Atom folks with Tree-Sitter. You see both these technologies show up in neovim, emacs, hip new kids like helix…like: yes, input latency or memory usage are important for a text editor—but it’s a bummer when people’s takeaways from these two are “lol electron, trash corporate engineering”, when the teams behind them were out-implementing the even-more-open-source world on important things like this.
As for the closed-source world…Jetbrains has been basically unchallenged in the general-purpose IDE game for ages. It’s exciting to see what they’ll do now with a fire lit under their butts.
Re: Pulsar, the best code editor since Atom
#54Besides many other ignorant mistakes in the article, the link to how modes are terrible doesn't explain how they are terrible
Re: Pulsar, the best code editor since Atom
#55It's the same old thing again and again. People can't think outside the box. It's the same look I can do this too thing.
Re: Pulsar, the best code editor since Atom
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also nowadays there's a few GUI frontends for Neovim such as Neovide.
Eh, not really. Last I tried these, the mouse was able to move the cursor, and that was about it.
Neovim in the terminal has a basic right click menu (select, copy, paste), scrolling, and buffer select. That's just what I've come across.
Re: Pulsar, the best code editor since Atom
#57Atom was hot garbage, what the hell are you on. Vim is cool but also not an IDE, NeoVim is what you could compare to. Why not VSCode?
Because VSCode is also not an IDE.
Re: Pulsar, the best code editor since Atom
#58The author asserts that Emacs uses modes (it doesn't by default), does not have a GUI (it does), and cannot display images (it can). Not that this detracts from the point they should have made, which is that it has a steeper learning curve than Pulsar.
I hate to defend the author since it's clear the author has some significant knowledge gaps, but Emacs very much uses modes by default.
What is a mode? It is when key presses do different things depending on the mode (e.g., normal vs insert mode in vi). Emacs very much has modes, by default, and many more of them than Vim (or vi), including multiple vi-like modes. Emacs is so much more modal that it is trivial to implement vi/Vim modes in Emacs (and notably the reverse is not true).
Just because Emacs does not enable the exact three or four mode key binding sets that vi/Vim does on an out-of-the-box startup does not make Emacs "not modal". vi/Vim does not own the concept of "modes" by implementing three or four very specific mode key binding sets; lots of software implement modes and to put it somewhat confrontationally, Vim users tend to be a bit full of themselves thinking that their modes are super special (and I say that as a former Vim user; I still occasionally use vi, but not as a primary editor).
Re: Pulsar, the best code editor since Atom
#59The question this leaves unanswered is: why not VS Code? I don't know if MS built VS Code deliberately to compete with Atom, and I don't know if they bought GH to kill Atom. But once they had Atom in their hands, it only made sense to kill off Atom - they're extremely similar. They're both: (1) free Electron-based text editors that (2) are highly extendable in JS, are (3) powerful enough to use as IDEs, but (4) more…
Sometimes you simply can't describe how a thing feels subtly wrong.
Atom was that for me, I tried it several times and it did nothing like I wanted it.
VS Code was somehow different. I'm not the biggest fan but it's my go to editor now for whenever I need to edit 5 lines in some language where I don't have an IDE set up for, and it just works.
So I can totally understand why people would feel strongly with Atom vs VSCode. (I've not tried Pulsar, maybe I should)
Re: Pulsar, the best code editor since Atom
#60> neither of them [vim, emacs] have a graphical user interface, and they are completely incapable of doing things like showing images or, for example, a Markdown preview (which by the way you can open in Pulsar by pressing Ctrl+Shift+M).
You can:
- See images in neovim: https://github.com/edluffy/hologram.nvim
- preview markdown: https://github.com/iamcco/markdown-preview.nvim
- have a “graphical” user interface: https://github.com/neovide/neovide
- have a GUI written in JavaScript: https://github.com/smolck/uivonim
You can’t put electron in the terminal, though, so it seems that pulsar lacks features that neovim has, while neovim does not lack any feature that pulsar has.