Pulsar: A Community Effort to Revive the Atom Text Editor

https://pulsar-edit.dev/

by d_tr • 4 years ago

115 86 4 years ago

pulsar-edit.dev

lalaland1125• 4 years ago

What does Atom offer over alternatives, in particular Visual Studio Code?

onionisafruit• 4 years ago

It’s open source.

satvikpendem5• 4 years ago

VSCodium works fine for me too.

bmitc2• 4 years ago

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

WorldMaker2• 4 years ago

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 is an extension" can be hard to performance adjust at scale).

Given this Pulsar page makes a big deal about trying to preserve the package source (list of extensions), the different extension model and history/long-tail of community extensions was probably important to them.

brundolf• 4 years ago

Yeah- its open extensions model was a neat idea, but in practice it made it slow, buggy, and complicated to configure (extensions would have dependencies on other extensions, etc). I really tried to stick with it, but as soon as I tried VSCode I sighed a breath of relief and knew I couldn't go back

I think the most egregious example was having two competing IDE hints extensions (not the content, just the GUI). They could both be enabled and they could fight each other or overlay each other if they were. Some language extensions then depended on one, and some depended on the other. It was kind of a mess.

sporedro• 4 years ago

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 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?

Vscode is a decent out of box experience but it’s custom ability is rather limited imo. Would love to give atom a try if this community version succeeds at all.

piskerpan3• 4 years ago

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.

MatthiasPortzel• 4 years ago

I really miss Atom. I'll enumerate some items here, since you asked, but all of them really just boil down to personal preference:

* Atom was hackable from the ground-up. I use a VS Code extension called Customize UI that allows me to write custom CSS, but Atom supported custom CSS as a first-class feature.

* Nostalgia: Atom was the first text editor I used, and so it has a certain friendliness than other editors can't match.

* Atom One Dark and Atom One Light are the best pair of dark and light code themes I've ever used. I use ports of these themes in other editors, but you can't beat them in their original context.

* I don't love VS Code's whole design language (straight-thin lines and sharp angles, except for some corners, which are curved). But that's probably very much tinged by my other points.

* Atom, of course, matched VS Code on language support and plugin support at one point. You could find extensions for just about any language. (Something that wasn't ever true for Sublime or Textmate, for example.)

* Being truly open source (I would describe VS Code as more open-core).

* Not being the most popular editor. I love supporting the underdog in my software choices as a way of encouraging innovation and variety in the ecosystem. So if Microsoft makes VS Code so good that no editor can complete with it, I would use VS Code (VSCodium), but I would not be happy about it.

All that said; Atom's dead. Since the Microsoft acquisition, development has stalled. Atom's gotten increasingly buggy and many many packages were abandoned. As I understand it, there are architectural issues that make it very difficult to fork or maintain. Atom is upstream of Electron (not downstream of it), for example, since Electron was originally extracted from Atom's code, so that makes integrating Electron updates difficult. CoffeeScript (which a lot of Atom is written in) never really caught on. You have a bunch of existing packages, but as mentioned, most of them are unmaintained, so you'd have to rewrite them and it's not clear which ones. Tree-sitter was originally developed for use with Atom, but after most popular programming languages had packages, and they never got rewritten with tree-sitter.

I've been following Lapce. I think they're doing interesting work. Right now the editor is too buggy for me to consider as a daily driver. I've been using Emacs for the past couple of weeks. It exceeds Atom's hackability, but there are still a lot of rough edges in the UI, for someone used to GUI editors.

I didn't mean to write this much. Atom is obviously something that I care about and that I've been thinking about ever since the acquisition.

TL;DR: Some people don't like VS Code, as a personal preference, and other options for GUI text editors are good.

dehrmann• 4 years ago

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.

rd07• 4 years ago

I think we have the same preference regarding text editor. I also prefer Atom UI compared to VSCode UI. And even if I can customize it to look the same as Atom, it will never feel the same.

My only complaint with Atom is about performance. A fresh install of Atom feels normal fast at first, but as I add more plugins, it gradually feels slower. VSCode is better in this regard. Nowadays I mainly use Sublime Text, which is faster than VSCode. I also keep an eye on Lite-XL, which has the potential to be as fast as Sublime Text with a smaller memory footprint.

satvikpendem5• 4 years ago

If you like Lapce, try Helix.

renaissance_tea• 4 years ago

Post photos of it

EugeneOZ• 4 years ago

You could borrow some good ideas from Monaco Editor. If some application can run on a web page, then it's a completely different level for a “cross-platform” badge.

rascul• 4 years ago

For some context, it was announced some months ago that atom would be sunsetted.

https://github.blog/2022-06-08-sunsetting-atom/

ilrwbwrkhv• 4 years ago

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

pjmlp• 4 years ago

VSCode is probably the only Electron app worth using.

lexicality• 4 years ago

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!

homero• 4 years ago

Are there screenshots

redrobein• 4 years ago

It's just a fork of atom so it pretty much looks like atom. Seems like all they've done is update dependencies and move to a new db, but they have some interesting changes in the works https://github.com/orgs/pulsar-edit/projects/2

pdntspa• 4 years ago

Just what we need, a resurrected browser-pretending-its-a-text-editor...

How much money has MS spent on optimizing electron in VS Code again?

r24y• 4 years ago

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 market share back from VS Code.

piskerpan3• 4 years ago

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)

kristopolous• 4 years ago

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

PurpleRamen• 4 years ago

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.

vijaybritto• 4 years ago

Wishing good luck with the efforts. This shouldn't be looked at as a competitor to VScode cause it would decimate Pulsar. I hope they have unique features that actually matter to the end user

maegul• 4 years ago

I never used Atom, but I suspect all of us not within the orbit of VS Code that use any of the other not quite IDE text editors can appreciate that sometimes with text editors it's not the one you use but how you use it.

Getting to know it well and how to customise, configure and extend it to your liking, without it becoming too onerous, can be a valuable relationship to have with such a fundamental tool in our trade ... valuable enough that sometimes it's worth retaining over the better features the new tool might have to offer. So good on Atom users and I wish them luck!

On VS Code, I can appreciate moving on to the better tool, but something about bringing a platform war dynamic to the text editor feels a bit too off for my liking. It's apparently open, but I'm really not clear on how much and what the consequences of that are. For instance, the python LSP pyright is the open version of the proprietary pylance ... what's the difference? I find it bothersome that I'd have to work that out.

nsonha5• 4 years ago

Why should Atom be kept alive? It's literally VSCode but with abandoned extensions and worst performance, being written in coffeescript. If the project owner actually articulated some reason such as they are rewriting in a better language (but in which case it's no longer Atom), then I might bite.

jackcviers3• 4 years ago

What does coffeescript have to do with performance? It compiles down to JS just like every other js front-end lang.

nsonha5• 4 years ago

are the plugins transpiled or they will be transpiled on load? My memory is rusty

adjusted• 4 years ago

There is a new editor called zed from atom developers featuring native performance and CRDT collaboration.

bobajeff• 4 years ago

That's still in closed alpha stage.

https://zed.dev/releases

rch• 4 years ago

Looks interesting, and they have a fork of Alacritty in their repos. I was just wondering about embedding that in an Elixir/Rust desktop application myself.

packetlost3• 4 years ago

It's MacOS only, sadly

d_tr• 4 years ago

According to their FAQ, there will be Windows, Linux, and web builds before version 1.0 though.

bowejg• 4 years ago

Anyone here got experience building collaborative text editors that support plugins? Trying to find a contractor for something I’m working on and not having much luck

_hao• 4 years ago

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.

thatxliner• 4 years ago

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)?

Tauri looks promising. My personal thoughts is that it’s much easier to create apps via Tauri than Electron. At least, so far. The template used for using Svelte to create Tauri apps is much shorter than the one for Electron.

nsonha5• 4 years ago

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

hokumguru• 4 years ago

Nova by Panic is in this vein of bringing back great native software but the community remains small

stephc_int134• 4 years ago

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.

smoldesu8• 4 years ago

Maybe you should ask your OS author to do that instead of begging the community to make a product for you. This isn't even based around the concept of making the greatest text editor, just reviving an old one that people like.

stephc_int134• 4 years ago

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 investing time and money in a nice cross-platform native framework that could offer the same capabilities as Electron.

satvikpendem5• 4 years ago

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

j16sdiz• 4 years ago

Qt was the de facto standard before electron

ogoffart• 4 years ago

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

hackrnusr• 4 years ago

Anyone using Emacs NG yet?

Pulsar: A Community Effort to Revive the Atom Text Editor

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