While I understand the lack of proper open source alternatives for some software like AutoCAD and After Effects, it always felt weird that the best IDEs/Text Editors are made by big corporations, because you know, these are the tools programmers use.

I tried vim/neovim, which I enjoy using, but I’ve come to prefer visual editors instead of text based. Kate looks promising, and I’m willing to contribute to it in my free time, but it just has that “amateurish” feel to it that I can’t explain.

Anyone aware of other alternatives?

  • nrbray@lemmy.mlEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    I am on the path VSCodium --> Lapce under NixOS for visual editors and to decorporate my workflow. i.e. away from VSCode which is [otherwise] exceptional.

    However, Helix looks incredible.

    • sprl@lemm.eeEnglish
      0·
      2 years ago

      Any idea how well vscodium runs on macos? Is the performance worde than normal vscode?

      • lenathaw@lemmy.mlEnglish
        0·
        2 years ago

        I use Codium on both PopOS and MacOSi, it’s a bit slow to start, but performance is good, but I don’t know how it compares to stock VSCode since I never tested it. But overall I’m very happy with it.

    • Simon Weiss@lemmy.mlEnglish
      0·
      2 years ago

      This + package to enable VSCode marketplace. The only VSCode features it lacks afaik are out of the box settings sync and remote container development, which colud be substituted with plugins.

      EDIT: also be sure to check out Lapce suggested by Yote.zip - it’s a banger.

  • Rikudou_Sage@lemmings.worldEnglish
    0·
    2 years ago

    What about JetBrains Fleet? I’m not sure it’s open source, but it’s free and I think it’s a direct competitor to VS Code.

    • 133arc585@lemmy.mlEnglish
      0·
      2 years ago

      Quoting JetBrains,

      Fleet is free to use during the public preview

      (emphasis mine)

      So it is only temporarily free. Once it’s polished it will no longer be free. Better to not get tied in to something that will be taken away from you before long.

      • corytheboyd@kbin.social
        0·
        2 years ago

        You can also just… pay for it? I give money to JetBrains in exchange for incredibly useful tools. It’s okay to pay for things.

        • pjhenry1216@kbin.social
          0·
          2 years ago

          Considering the context of the thread, this isn’t really a useful take. They were talking about free software (open source at that). They were warning them it won’t be free forever and, seeing as how that is a requirement, then yeah, it would be taken away.

          There’s no need to be condescending when you’re in the wrong conversation with your opinion. No one said you can’t pay for things or that it’s not ok.

          So your high horse isn’t needed here.

    • Daeraxa@lemmy.mlEnglish
      0·
      2 years ago

      As one of the Pulsar team, thanks for the support! Always nice to see it being recommended on these kinds of threads.

      • maynarkh@feddit.nlEnglish
        0·
        2 years ago

        Is there support for serving it out to a browser similar to vscode.dev? I’ve been looking into having something like that, and I didn’t find anything that was similar.

        • Daeraxa@lemmy.mlEnglish
          0·
          2 years ago

          No, it would require an awful lot of development, there are quite a few native modules. For a browser ide i would check out phcode.dev which is a development of Adobe’s brackets editor.

        • Daeraxa@lemmy.mlEnglish
          0·
          2 years ago

          We are going through a bit of a rework for the website and docs site as a whole but yeah, I agree that we should have some.

      • kool_newt@lemm.eeEnglish
        0·
        2 years ago

        Oh nice! I was super excited to find your project, was not about to let MS drive me into their arms and couldn’t find anything else that met my needs.

        Thanks for your work!

    • NaoPb@beehaw.orgEnglish
      0·
      2 years ago

      Thanks. I remember a while ago I was looking at Atom and Brackets. But I see both of those have been put down. At least the linux version has as far as the latter is concerned.

      • kool_newt@lemm.eeEnglish
        0·
        2 years ago

        I’ve used Atom for years and rarely had issues. Maybe a specific plugin was causing you a problem? Either way, I’d say give Pulsar a try if you like that type of interface.

  • Marxine@lemmy.mlEnglish
    0·
    2 years ago

    I alternate between VCCodium and Kate, both are fine to me, but Kate feels snappier since I’m on KDE. It’s also less of a resource drain.

    • Mot@beehaw.orgEnglish
      0·
      2 years ago

      I frequently use Kate as a backup as well. Do you configure it in anyway?

      • Marxine@lemmy.mlEnglish
        0·
        2 years ago

        I like to remove the top menu and have the icons to the sidebar. Other than that, I activate a few plugins and keep it pretty vanilla. Most of the default configs are fine to me, and the command bar helps a lot.

    • MarcellusDrum@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
      0·
      2 years ago

      I can’t manage to make Kate look half descent on Mint (Cinnamon). It does look great on Plasma

      • linuxisfun@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        2 years ago

        That’s actually an issue with most Debian-/Ubuntu-based distributions, as Debian/Ubuntu still does not package QGnomePlatform. This is preinstalled on Fedora and makes Qt apps, like Kate, look nice on GNOME.

        If I remember correctly, Flatpak apps from Flathub are unaffected by this Debian/Ubuntu issue, as Flathub includes QGnomePlatform in their runtimes.

  • ed_cock@kbin.social
    0·
    2 years ago

    If you program in Python check out Spyder, some other languages also have specialized IDEs that can be really good.

  • PrivateOnions@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    2 years ago

    As others have said, VS Codium. However I only ever really need to write in C++ so I use Code::Blocks and it works great.

    • MarcellusDrum@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
      0·
      2 years ago

      I am aware of this one, but it still leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I think I’ll start using Kate, and contribute whatever features I’m missing if I can.

    • Marxine@lemmy.mlEnglish
      0·
      2 years ago

      How does it compare to similar stuff like AstroNvim, SpaceVim, NVChad, etc? I’m trying to choose one but having difficulties 😥

      • nickwitha_k (he/him)@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
        0·
        2 years ago

        I find it significantly better than SpaceVim as they’re not relying on EOL’d packages and customization is a bit easier. Defaults are pretty sane and most needed plugins are quick to setup.

        • Marxine@lemmy.mlEnglish
          0·
          2 years ago

          Thank you, gonna give it a try! Since I’m new to nvim it would feel good to still have that “semi IDE” feeling, but the ammount of options felt overwhelming 😅

  • Daeraxa@lemmy.mlEnglish
    0·
    2 years ago

    I’ve been keeping a list of alternatives for a while now that I really like:

    • Pulsar - An actively developed fork of Atom once Microsoft killed it off. Disclosure: I’m on the Pulsar team so I’m more than a little biased here but if you want to get involved we are always after people who want to contribute and we have a very friendly and active Discord server. First thing we did was re-implement the package backend and migrate it so we were able to keep the thousands and thousands of community packages for download.
    • Lite-XL - A really lightweight and fast editor written in C and Lua that is very actively developed. I use this on some less powerful systems.
    • Lapce - Another lightweight and very fast editor written in Rust and is in the middle of moving to their own UI framework. Not that extensible at the moment but supports LSP plugins.

    Then for terminal based editors I really like Helix which is vim-like but uses a selection -> action model (like Kakoune). I really like it because it requires almost no configuration.

    • chimay@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      1 year ago

      lite-xl looks promising

      the main missing feature imho : being able to search/filter settings, keybindings in particular

    • CrypticCoffee@lemmy.mlMEnglish
      0·
      2 years ago

      Thanks for your work on Pulsar. Atom was my go to simple editor before MS killed it off. I’m still fuming now. I really need to try Pulsar :). Been using Kate for now.

    • DebianGuy@lemmy.mlEnglish
      0·
      2 years ago

      Playing around with lite-xl, thanks for the recommendation. Lacks many features for now, but seems to have a huge potential.

    • crystal@feddit.deEnglish
      0·
      2 years ago

      I see a lot of potential in Lapce, but sadly the extensions (which are necessary, since it has basically no ootb language support) are very poorly maintained and outdated. Last I used it the Javascript/Typescript support was simply not sufficient for active use. I am very hopeful for Lapce’s future though!

      Edit: Just checked and the TS/JS extension is still on version 2022.11.0. The code formatting still doesn’t work (for me) :(

    • Simon Weiss@lemmy.mlEnglish
      0·
      2 years ago

      Why on Earth did I read this comment? 🥲 This app is so painfully fast and crisp! And it has Vim and SSH out of the box. And its own plugin marketplace… Now I have no choice but to suffer every time I open VSCode(ium) in hope that development continues and soon I will have the thing to ditch it for and finally get rid of my allergies to Electron.

  • NeryK@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    0·
    2 years ago

    I use VSCode myself nowadays, but I have some colleagues who prefer Qt Creator for C++ development (our builds are based on CMake and GCC/CLang). It is open source and not tied to developing with the Qt framework.

  • Treeniks@lemmy.mlEnglish
    0·
    2 years ago

    Now it absolutely isn’t open source or even free, so if that is a must feel free to ignore me, but I personally do still really like using Sublime. Once you install SublimeLSP I find it genuinely really clean to work with. And even though it’s technically not free, you can use its free trial version for as long as you want (with the only drawback being an annoying popup), if you do buy it it’s a one-time payment, not a subscription, and the package eco system is mostly open source (SublimeLSP e.g. is open source).

    Again, not free, but much faster, more light weight and imo cleaner than VSCode, and definitely not very corpo given the rather small size of Sublime HQ.

    • andrew@radiation.partyEnglish
      0·
      2 years ago

      I’ve used sublime for over a decade and simply cannot stand how slow other editors are in comparison. Searching, jumping between files, etc is all just as fast one our huge production codebase as they are on my tiny personal projects. It’s insane

      • 𝒍𝒆𝒎𝒂𝒏𝒏@lemmy.oneEnglish
        0·
        2 years ago

        I use Atom for personal projects and Sublime for work - it’s shocking how fast Sublime loads up in comparison.

        Hopefully Atom’s successor can address the performance issues, by the other comment threads here it looks like Pulsar is a contender