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Pulsar: A Community Effort to Revive the Atom Text Editor

pulsar-edit.dev

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

#31

Post by nsonha »

sporedro wrote: post #16
WorldMaker wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Atom used a very different extension model than Visual Studio Code. Atom was designed more in the "everything is an extension" mold and even "core" functionality could be replaced or extended in ways that VS Code likely will never allow. On the one hand greater potential power, on the other hand more potential responsibility (Atom did have some notorious performance issues with comparison to VS Code and "everything i…

I don’t know how to phrase this and it might be a bit of a ramble, but your reply is something I’ve been thinking about with atom. I personally hated eclipse, due to it feeling constantly like everything was it’s own package and not really working together, but recently was trying out emacs, and was quite impressed. Atoms philosophy sorta reminds me of the two where it’s “everything is an extension”. I guess my quest…

it's technically true that VSCode is less customizable but honestly who cares? Both of these editors are so minimal in their design that UI customization doesn't mean much.

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

#32

Post by kristopolous »

piskerpan wrote: post #27
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…

Ironic and fantastic. So many good ideas are born and die with short-lived projects because no one bothered to extract and polish them as standalone solutions while the project was still alive. Atom will continue living through Electron (regardless of Pulsar)

Reminded me how Webkit is from Khtml by Kde and Gtk was made as part of Gimp.

There's probably lots of other big ones like this

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

#33

Post by pedro2 »

bmitc wrote: post #10
onionisafruit wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s open source.

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.

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

#34

Post by lexicality »

ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #11

This is great news. Looking forward to this and lapse.dev since VS Code is really slow and ugly.

If you think VSCode is slow and ugly then my friend you are going to be amazed at the amount of performance, responsiveness and design coherence that Atom has to offer you. It's on a whole new level!

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

#35

Post by fathyb »

rzzzt wrote: post #26
dehrmann wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nostalgia: Atom was the first text editor I used, and so it has a certain friendliness than other editors can't match. Can't say I felt this way about qbasic.

Maybe QB64 will change your mind: https://qb64.com/

The QBjs demo is great, looks like a retro ShaderToy.

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

#37

Post by WorldMaker »

sporedro wrote: post #16
WorldMaker wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Atom used a very different extension model than Visual Studio Code. Atom was designed more in the "everything is an extension" mold and even "core" functionality could be replaced or extended in ways that VS Code likely will never allow. On the one hand greater potential power, on the other hand more potential responsibility (Atom did have some notorious performance issues with comparison to VS Code and "everything i…

I don’t know how to phrase this and it might be a bit of a ramble, but your reply is something I’ve been thinking about with atom. I personally hated eclipse, due to it feeling constantly like everything was it’s own package and not really working together, but recently was trying out emacs, and was quite impressed. Atoms philosophy sorta reminds me of the two where it’s “everything is an extension”. I guess my quest…

> I guess my question is, is how did this work out for it? I never gave atom a try, but did it feel like everything sorta worked together? Or was it more of a eclipse feeling where every package feels like it’s own separate object?

The obvious short answer here is: it obviously didn't work out for Atom. It wasn't able to compete with VS Code in the general marketplace, many people who tried to use Atom thought it was slow and buggy (there are examples in other comments near here, such as dueling tooltips plugins), and then eventually GitHub and Microsoft decided to pool all their official resources into VS Code and sunset Atom.

Pulsar linked here is an attempt to preserve what's left of Atom's open source community and I wish them luck, but they are maybe going to need a lot of it with competition like VS Code. Though admittedly Eclipse is an interesting comparison here because Eclipse still lives on, after several times where people assumed Eclipse was over with and the competition clearly winning. Some big companies still use Eclipse for all sorts of reasons.

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

#39

Post by cardanome »

piskerpan wrote: post #28
WorldMaker wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Atom used a very different extension model than Visual Studio Code. Atom was designed more in the "everything is an extension" mold and even "core" functionality could be replaced or extended in ways that VS Code likely will never allow. On the one hand greater potential power, on the other hand more potential responsibility (Atom did have some notorious performance issues with comparison to VS Code and "everything i…

Knowing the history of Firefox, XUL extensions and their demise, this feels more of a limitation. For those who don't know, Firefox couldn't innovate because any change to the UI broke half the extension ecosystem. This is what happens when you give carte blanche to third party developers on your UI: It's great for the short them.

I mean it works for both emacs and vim which are even more extensible.

You shouldn't make any UI changes to text editors anyway if you don't plan on pissing off your power users. Never break compatibility.

As for Firefox, well if I could go back to the XUL based UI, I would do so. I don't think the new UI has improved for power users at all it just looks more "modern" which is fashion not progress.

What did Firefox gain from trying to copy Chrome? They are at a negligible market share and are only kept alive by Google money as alibi competition.

So no, that is not a good example. Moving away from XUL extension was not progress for Firefox, it was the beginning of it's decline becoming the rotting corpse of former ideals that it is now.

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

#40

Post by piskerpan »

cardanome wrote: post #39
piskerpan wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Knowing the history of Firefox, XUL extensions and their demise, this feels more of a limitation. For those who don't know, Firefox couldn't innovate because any change to the UI broke half the extension ecosystem. This is what happens when you give carte blanche to third party developers on your UI: It's great for the short them.

I mean it works for both emacs and vim which are even more extensible. You shouldn't make any UI changes to text editors anyway if you don't plan on pissing off your power users. Never break compatibility. As for Firefox, well if I could go back to the XUL based UI, I would do so. I don't think the new UI has improved for power users at all it just looks more "modern" which is fashion not progress. What did Firefox g…

Sorry I don’t think Firefox lost because of extensions. Nobody cared except us. They lost because on Google advertised the living * out of Chrome. Firefox couldn’t compete regardless, it offered an inferior product out of the box.

Again, HN users are not the majority of internet users, which are counted in the billions.

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