The key to being productive as a programmer is to have a great code editor. I have been an avid user of Atom since 2014, and its successor Pulsar since now in 2023.
Pulsar (former Atom) is still the best code editor in my opinion. It is easiest and fastest to use, has all the nice productivity boosting plugins and is overall great for all the same reasons the Atom was great. 🚀
Pulsar is a fork of Atom, which was discontinued because almost everyone jumped ship to VSCode.
What does Pulsar do that is better than VSCode? All the features this article highlights are in VSCode too, and I can think of a bunch of features that Pulsar doesn’t have (dev containers are a big one for me - they allow you to have different versions of the same software installed, depending what project you’re working on right now… and you can work on/run both versions of the same software at the same time, on the same hardware… you can also emulate other CPU architectures in a dev container, some of the software I work with every day can’t actually run natively on my hardware).
The author also makes some incorrect or misleading claims, specifically about emacs. I acknowledge there’s a high bar for entry there and don’t personally like emacs, but it’s not modal, and it does have the ability to display images and markdown previews.
I recently started learning Java and Intellij Idea was recommended to me by the course. This is the second time in a week I’ve heard about this. In your opinion, what makes it good?
It just works. I spent years with Eclipse (but quite some time ago now), and it was always a pain getting particular things to work properly. The last time I messed with it was doing research for an article I was writing. I was try to get Gradle support enabled. I wasn’t able to do it, but I admit I gave up pretty quickly because I don’t have the patience for messing with tools that don’t work any more.
In truth, I really liked the Open aspect of Eclipse and I wish it work better than Intellij. Maybe it does now - I don’t know. For Java Intellij is awesome, and does everything you could ever dream for. For Kotlin - well Kotlin is an Intellij product and the support for it is awesome.
@LucidDaemon@Aurenkin out of curiosity, how long have you been using Helix and what do you like about it? I tried it awhile back and liked it, but it wasn’t able to break VS Code’s iron grip on my dev workflow.
About 6 months since I’ve switched away from vscode. To make Helix worth it you also need to use software that compliments it.
I work in DevOps, so I don’t do a ton of programming but everything I do is via terminal. I use Kitty Terminal, ZSH with oh-my-zsh for the shell, Zellij for an emulation layer (think tiling and tab manager in kitty), nnn for in terminal file manager, and helix for editor.
I almost never leave the terminal now, except when web browsing.
Space-f lets you open a file in the current workspace, and :open /path always let’s you open any file on the computer
Plugin support not yet I think. Not gonna lie, I chose helix over nvim for it’s good out of the box experience, so I didn’t actually have a need for plugins yet.
Fair enough. That would be a use case for a plugin (or simply a setting!)
Space-f lets you open a file in the current workspace, and :open /path always let’s you open any file on the computer
Is this a file tree, or just a fuzzy finder?
Fuzzy finders aren’t a substitute for a file tree picker. They’re only great, until you don’t know the name of a file, or until you need to know of a file’s existence in the first place.
File tree not a file tree like in a file explorer, more like the output of find, but with filtering. The letters you type to restrict your search only need to present in that order in the file path, not as a string.
So “abc” would match “./assets/others/abort/cancel.png”, not just “./assets/abc.png”
Additionally, lower case letters match case insensitive, upper case letters match case sensitive. This is surprisingly helpful if you don’t use exclusively lowercase file names.
I’m interested in moving to DevOPS from it engineering/support roles but somehow I can’t seem to get anyone to take me seriously. How did you get into DevOPS?
code is just text, so code editors are text editors.
What sets IDEs apart are their features, like debugger integrations, refactoring assists, etc.
I love command line ± Vim and used solely it for a large portion of my career but that was back when you had a few big enterprise languages (C/C++, Java).
With micro services being language agnostic, I find I use a larger variety of languages. And configuring and remembering an environment for rust, go, c, python etc. is just too much mental overhead. Hard to beat JetBrain’s IDEs; now-a-days I bring my Vim navigation key bindings to my IDE instead of my IDE features to Vim. And I pay a company to work out the IDE features.
for the record, I am in the boat of, use whatever brings you the greatest joy/productivity.
Yes, I use MS Word then print as image to pdf. Outlook works too, but it’s less secure, and Power Point is too fancy for my taste (I don’t like animated transitions when my code wraps between columns). It’s amazing how far we’ve come from punched cards, and how fast, I can barely keep up.
… oh, you are right, now I fell dumb, I should use that more often, it would have worked perfectly in so many situations.
I am trying something similar irl, basically announcing my intentions (not just sarcasm) & trying not to feel weird in the sort of way like when somebody tells a joke & then starts to explain it immediately afterwards.
Eg: I’m genuinely happy you pointed that do directly, I’m not being sarcastic.
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.
As a former Vim user myself, I have to say I really dislike screensharing with coworkers who use Vim. They are walking me through code and shit pops up left and right and I don’t know where it comes from or what it is I’m looking at. Code reviews are painful when they walk me through a large-ish PR.
These days, I tend to bring my vim navigation/key bindings to my IDE instead of IDE funcs to Vim. Hard to beat JetBrains IDEs, especially when you pay them to maintain the IDE functionality.
Pair coding with vim is a skill in itself (for the vim user). You can make things a bit easier to follow by making liberal use of visual mode for example. I have a CoworkerMode command that turns on smooth scrolling via vim-smoothie and cursorline, and I’ve also added some stuff to the neovim right-click menu so that I can explicitly right click go to definition for example. It can be worth switching editor sometimes, but it’s not always worth it if you’re in the middle of something.
More like a personal bias in the form of a distasteful snark that the author thinks is funny. Their demonstrated knowledge about Emacs in the article indicates the worth of such remarks.
Had a distinguished collegue (from the Bell Lab days) say to me recently:
“IDEs take up a lot of RAM on my machine. Vim takes up a lot of squishy RAM in my head. I need squishy RAM to hold info relevant to problem solving, not options available in my tool chain.”
@varsock@otto
Oh god yes! Each instance of VS22 takes up more than 1Gb of RAM - what I’m doing right now with this piece of code does NOT need 1Gb of memory! Have they not heard of lazy loading?
While I agree with the sentiment, the key bindings have been burned into my less squishy ROM at this point, and I’ve got all banks of squishy RAM available 😄
That colleague, keep in mind is a bit older, also has Vim navigation burned into his head. I think where he was coming from, all these new technologies and syntax for them, he much rather prefers right clicking in the IDE and it’ll show him options instead of doing it all from command line. For example docker container management, Go’s devle debugger syntax, GDB. He has a hybrid workflow tho.
After having spent countless hours on my Vim config only to restart everything using Lua with nvim, I can relate to time sink that is vim.
When I write code in the terminal, the editor I use the most is nano. I know vim and emacs are more powerful, but I don’t really feel that nano is incompetent. I run nano in byobu
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Clearly you never tried emacs
Why should I install a second operating system?
Pulsar is a fork of Atom, which was discontinued because almost everyone jumped ship to VSCode.
What does Pulsar do that is better than VSCode? All the features this article highlights are in VSCode too, and I can think of a bunch of features that Pulsar doesn’t have (dev containers are a big one for me - they allow you to have different versions of the same software installed, depending what project you’re working on right now… and you can work on/run both versions of the same software at the same time, on the same hardware… you can also emulate other CPU architectures in a dev container, some of the software I work with every day can’t actually run natively on my hardware).
The author also makes some incorrect or misleading claims, specifically about emacs. I acknowledge there’s a high bar for entry there and don’t personally like emacs, but it’s not modal, and it does have the ability to display images and markdown previews.
Well, it’s not modal by default. It is if you want it to be.
Sure. But the author cites that as a disadvantage of emacs and links to an article about the person who invented
ctrl-candctrl-vfor copy and paste.I used Atom for markdown editing for my blog and I loved it. After the death of Atom I felt forced to switch over to VS Code and I hate it.
Hate, Hate. Hate.
I can’t tell you why, I just hate it.
I found Pulsar last week and my blood pressure is down where it belongs now.
For programming in Java & Kotlin I use Intellij Idea CE. I cannot image why anyone would bother with VS Code for this purpose either.
I recently started learning Java and Intellij Idea was recommended to me by the course. This is the second time in a week I’ve heard about this. In your opinion, what makes it good?
It just works. I spent years with Eclipse (but quite some time ago now), and it was always a pain getting particular things to work properly. The last time I messed with it was doing research for an article I was writing. I was try to get Gradle support enabled. I wasn’t able to do it, but I admit I gave up pretty quickly because I don’t have the patience for messing with tools that don’t work any more.
In truth, I really liked the Open aspect of Eclipse and I wish it work better than Intellij. Maybe it does now - I don’t know. For Java Intellij is awesome, and does everything you could ever dream for. For Kotlin - well Kotlin is an Intellij product and the support for it is awesome.
Sweet thank you!
The best code editor is the one that you enjoy using, because you’re going to be using it a lot.
I agree with this. In my opinion helix is the best code editor.
@LucidDaemon @Aurenkin out of curiosity, how long have you been using Helix and what do you like about it? I tried it awhile back and liked it, but it wasn’t able to break VS Code’s iron grip on my dev workflow.
About 6 months since I’ve switched away from vscode. To make Helix worth it you also need to use software that compliments it.
I work in DevOps, so I don’t do a ton of programming but everything I do is via terminal. I use Kitty Terminal, ZSH with oh-my-zsh for the shell, Zellij for an emulation layer (think tiling and tab manager in kitty), nnn for in terminal file manager, and helix for editor.
I almost never leave the terminal now, except when web browsing.
I remember being really interested in Helix when it came out, but it didn’t have a built-in file picker.
Is this still an issue for users? Is there a built-in solution, or a usermade solution to this?
Also, is there plugin support?
I can’t use an editor without rainbow indent/brackets, without them code just takes too long to read that it becomes frustrating.
Space-flets you open a file in the current workspace, and:open /pathalways let’s you open any file on the computerPlugin support not yet I think. Not gonna lie, I chose helix over nvim for it’s good out of the box experience, so I didn’t actually have a need for plugins yet.
Fair enough. That would be a use case for a plugin (or simply a setting!)
Is this a file tree, or just a fuzzy finder?
Fuzzy finders aren’t a substitute for a file tree picker. They’re only great, until you don’t know the name of a file, or until you need to know of a file’s existence in the first place.
File treenot a file tree like in a file explorer, more like the output offind, but with filtering. The letters you type to restrict your search only need to present in that order in the file path, not as a string.So “abc” would match “./assets/others/abort/cancel.png”, not just “./assets/abc.png”
Additionally, lower case letters match case insensitive, upper case letters match case sensitive. This is surprisingly helpful if you don’t use exclusively lowercase file names.
I’m interested in moving to DevOPS from it engineering/support roles but somehow I can’t seem to get anyone to take me seriously. How did you get into DevOPS?
True true.
I’m out.
code is just text, so code editors are text editors.
What sets IDEs apart are their features, like debugger integrations, refactoring assists, etc.
I love command line ± Vim and used solely it for a large portion of my career but that was back when you had a few big enterprise languages (C/C++, Java).
With micro services being language agnostic, I find I use a larger variety of languages. And configuring and remembering an environment for rust, go, c, python etc. is just too much mental overhead. Hard to beat JetBrain’s IDEs; now-a-days I bring my Vim navigation key bindings to my IDE instead of my IDE features to Vim. And I pay a company to work out the IDE features.
for the record, I am in the boat of, use whatever brings you the greatest joy/productivity.
Yes, I use MS Word then print as image to pdf. Outlook works too, but it’s less secure, and Power Point is too fancy for my taste (I don’t like animated transitions when my code wraps between columns). It’s amazing how far we’ve come from punched cards, and how fast, I can barely keep up.
you sound like a Microsoft engineer ;)
I was trying to be a bit funny but I forgot that I’m not funny, (I’m) just a joke.
for the dummies (like me) that can’t read the room, especially online, a sarcasm tag /s goes a long way 🙃
… oh, you are right, now I fell dumb, I should use that more often, it would have worked perfectly in so many situations.
I am trying something similar irl, basically announcing my intentions (not just sarcasm) & trying not to feel weird in the sort of way like when somebody tells a joke & then starts to explain it immediately afterwards.
Eg: I’m genuinely happy you pointed that do directly, I’m not being sarcastic.
hey, that’s what the internet is for; information sharing :)
Ah, yes, when humans build & use something for good. I forget sometimes about that. That reminds me, I should donate some moneys to Wikipedia again.
VS Code gang
I think i read that it uses an old version of electron or something? Do i recall correctly?
It’s definitely not the fastest…
What a burn!
As a former Vim user myself, I have to say I really dislike screensharing with coworkers who use Vim. They are walking me through code and shit pops up left and right and I don’t know where it comes from or what it is I’m looking at. Code reviews are painful when they walk me through a large-ish PR.
These days, I tend to bring my vim navigation/key bindings to my IDE instead of IDE funcs to Vim. Hard to beat JetBrains IDEs, especially when you pay them to maintain the IDE functionality.
Pair coding with vim is a skill in itself (for the vim user). You can make things a bit easier to follow by making liberal use of visual mode for example. I have a CoworkerMode command that turns on smooth scrolling via vim-smoothie and cursorline, and I’ve also added some stuff to the neovim right-click menu so that I can explicitly right click go to definition for example. It can be worth switching editor sometimes, but it’s not always worth it if you’re in the middle of something.
More like a personal bias in the form of a distasteful snark that the author thinks is funny. Their demonstrated knowledge about Emacs in the article indicates the worth of such remarks.
Yeah, I commented elsewhere on the misinformation regarding emacs in the article.
You wouldn’t happen to think of yourself as a world-class programmer by any chance?
If I were, I wouldn’t be hanging out here, would I? BTW, I use both Vim and Emacs.
Yeah it was just an open goal of a joke, didn’t mean to be an ass 🙈
Had a distinguished collegue (from the Bell Lab days) say to me recently:
“IDEs take up a lot of RAM on my machine. Vim takes up a lot of squishy RAM in my head. I need squishy RAM to hold info relevant to problem solving, not options available in my tool chain.”
@varsock @otto
Oh god yes! Each instance of VS22 takes up more than 1Gb of RAM - what I’m doing right now with this piece of code does NOT need 1Gb of memory! Have they not heard of lazy loading?
Vim doesn’t take any thought for me, it’s all muscle memory.
While I agree with the sentiment, the key bindings have been burned into my less squishy ROM at this point, and I’ve got all banks of squishy RAM available 😄
hahaha good point.
That colleague, keep in mind is a bit older, also has Vim navigation burned into his head. I think where he was coming from, all these new technologies and syntax for them, he much rather prefers right clicking in the IDE and it’ll show him options instead of doing it all from command line. For example docker container management, Go’s devle debugger syntax, GDB. He has a hybrid workflow tho.
After having spent countless hours on my Vim config only to restart everything using Lua with nvim, I can relate to time sink that is vim.
just keeps on keeping on with neovim, vimium, a tiling window manager, and an ortholinear keyboard.
Yep, I will stick to nvim.
Lapce is the most promising tool I’ve seen in the editor space for some time now.
When I write code in the terminal, the editor I use the most is
nano. I know vim and emacs are more powerful, but I don’t really feel that nano is incompetent. I run nano inbyobuYou spelled vim wrong.
😡