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Building Nuclide, a unified developer experience

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Re: Building Nuclide, a unified developer experience

#51

Post by mhd »

Heh, they had "pico" in their list of editors. If one is really hellbent on using that for Hack/Obj-C in 2015, I'm not sure whether any argument is convincing enough ;)

Generally I wasn't really that impressed by the demo. Sure, the integration is nice, but I don't see how that's different from most other IDEs. But what struck me as a bit odd was the presenter stating a preference for vim, and then starting to edit Objective-C like all you've got is your cursor keys plus tab.

So, yes, another IDE, yay. And if you work at FB, sure, mindshare alone is probably worth it. But why would one give up normal mode/macros/elisp/abbrevs etc. for that?

Now don't get me wrong, I totally understand different preferences, and if your current editor is e.g. TextMate/Sublime or an IDE like PhpStorm/Eclipse/Xcode, I can see it. But if you start with the premise that vim is the One True Editor, why would this be the switch reason, whereas IDEs before didn't get you there?

No problem with another flower in the garden of editing, I just thought the sales pitch was a bit weird.

Re: Building Nuclide, a unified developer experience

#52

Post by Blackthorn »

xienze wrote: post #33
magicmu wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree; with vim as well, gVim isn't much help to those who still want to use a mouse / don't know the keybindings. Atom is really the most versatile open-source GUI text editor right now IMO.

Well, I think the OP's point is that it would be easier to bring Emacs/VIM up to acceptable GUI editor standards rather than build the whole thing from scratch, as a webapp no less. But they didn't, my guess is because NIH.

> Well, I think the OP's point is that it would be easier to bring Emacs/VIM up to acceptable GUI editor standards

I've been waiting for this for literally a decade with emacs. It hasn't happened and I don't have the expertise to do it, so nowadays I exclusively use IntelliJ for the languages I can. I'm probably going to start using CLion with it as well.

There are lots of aspects of Emacs that I miss but I hope that IntelliJ can take them over with future iterations of the vestigial "IDE scripting console". They just need to put a lispy language in there like Clojure and bindings into the editor like Emacs Lisp has.

Re: Building Nuclide, a unified developer experience

#54

Post by oblio »

coldtea wrote: post #46
xienze wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I think the OP's point is that it would be easier to bring Emacs/VIM up to acceptable GUI editor standards rather than build the whole thing from scratch, as a webapp no less. But they didn't, my guess is because NIH.

> is that it would be easier to bring Emacs/VIM up to acceptable GUI editor standards Perhaps but nobody has done it yet.

And it's not for lack of trying. The last major attempt was Sun Studio on the 90's/early 00's.

Emacs and Vim are like Lisp at this point: unicorns. Perfect, mythical creatures everybody loves to talk about. Meanwhile oxen like Eclipse, Visual Studio, Sublime, etc. keep chugging 90% of the world's code :)

Re: Building Nuclide, a unified developer experience

#55

Post by techpeace »

gamesbrainiac wrote: post #2

Why are so many companies hacking on atom recently? First it was MS, and now FB? Anything special about Atom that you don't get in something like Vim or Emacs? They're both open source, and very hackable.

Atom is a graphical editor, unlike either Vim or Emacs. It's much easier for web developers specifically to work on, since it's built with web technologies, rather than vimscript. If I want to change the background color of the file browser pane, I can pop open an inspector, identify the element, and change my custom editor CSS, all within about 2 minutes. Its plugin distribution system also integrates directly into the editor - meaning I can browse for and install plugins from within the Atom itself.

Re: Building Nuclide, a unified developer experience

#56

Post by JonathonW »

derefr wrote: post #43
emehrkay wrote: post #40

Strange/random observation: it is surprising that Chrome-style tabs seem to be the default tab representation given the pushback over the past few years over skeuomorphism in digital design. This editor looks cool though. I haven't really looked at Atom, so I assume that it has good PHP/Python/Ruby support. I will try this out when it is released, I love the autocomplete

I would go further—I'm confused by the proliferation of "tabs" as a UX metaphor. Do people really think they're the best thing they can get, compared to, say, ZUI zoomable groups? They're great for browsers because the affordance fits: you have one active "browsing session", and then a bunch of inactive ones, and the inactive ones don't matter, and when you switch, you're asserting that the active one now doesn't mat…

Atom (and most other "tabbed" applications) isn't limited to just tabs-- it supports both multiple windows and arbitrary splitting inside a window. Tabs can be dragged and dropped freely between any pane. So, you can have tabs when it works well (IME, for the type of text editing one is doing while writing code, you're usually only actively using one file at a time, much like in a web browser), and you can have more than one file visible when you need that too.

(File management, on the other hand, is completely different; there, you're almost always going to want to have more than one thing visible and a windowed interface is better. That's why no mainstream file manager supports tabs OOTB.)

Re: Building Nuclide, a unified developer experience

#57

Post by codeshaman »

mhd wrote: post #51

Heh, they had "pico" in their list of editors. If one is really hellbent on using that for Hack/Obj-C in 2015, I'm not sure whether any argument is convincing enough ;) Generally I wasn't really that impressed by the demo. Sure, the integration is nice, but I don't see how that's different from most other IDEs. But what struck me as a bit odd was the presenter stating a preference for vim, and then starting to edit O…

I guess that was intended as a vi-emacs joke/pun ...

Re: Building Nuclide, a unified developer experience

#58

Post by supster »

bolinfest wrote: post #13
applecore wrote: post #12

ES7 expertise? I thought ES6 was just finalized a few days ago.

Why gate your progress on standards committees?

Not sure, but I think it's unique to JS b/c it's built into web browsers. Therefore, all major browsers vendors need to ok major changes to the language so that there isn't a severe fragmentation in version support. I think this is achieved via the standards committee.

Re: Building Nuclide, a unified developer experience

#59

Post by girvo »

I'm an alpha tester for Nuclide, and it's quite nice. There are a tonne of bugs that are getting ironed out, but it's brilliant to have an editor that is built for the stack I use: Hack, React and Flow. I use Atom as my daily editor along with Komodo, and I'm looking forward to Nuclide replacing both!

Re: Building Nuclide, a unified developer experience

#60

Post by asantos3 »

emehrkay wrote: post #40

Strange/random observation: it is surprising that Chrome-style tabs seem to be the default tab representation given the pushback over the past few years over skeuomorphism in digital design. This editor looks cool though. I haven't really looked at Atom, so I assume that it has good PHP/Python/Ruby support. I will try this out when it is released, I love the autocomplete

That theme isn't the default anymore, now it's this https://github.com/atom/one-dark-ui.
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