haha, shots fired!
There are also plenty of markdown preview packages available for both Vim and Emacs (even live preview). Emacs has had preview-latex since before Atom even existed.
What is a mode? It is when key presses do different things depending on the mode (e.g., normal vs insert mode in vi). Emacs very much has modes, by default, and many more of them than Vim (or vi), including multiple vi-like modes. Emacs is so much more modal that it is trivial to implement vi/Vim modes in Emacs (and notably the reverse is not true).
Just because Emacs does not enable the exact three or four mode key binding sets that vi/Vim does on an out-of-the-box startup does not make Emacs "not modal". vi/Vim does not own the concept of "modes" by implementing three or four very specific mode key binding sets; lots of software implement modes and to put it somewhat confrontationally, Vim users tend to be a bit full of themselves thinking that their modes are super special (and I say that as a former Vim user; I still occasionally use vi, but not as a primary editor).
I don't know if MS built VS Code deliberately to compete with Atom, and I don't know if they bought GH to kill Atom. But once they had Atom in their hands, it only made sense to kill off Atom - they're extremely similar.
They're both: (1) free Electron-based text editors that (2) are highly extendable in JS, are (3) powerful enough to use as IDEs, but (4) more lightweight than Visual Studio or the JetBrains stuff, and (5) use now-standard UI conventions unlike Vim or Emacs.
And using VS Code opens up the ecosystem of the most popular code editor in the world. There's more plugins, more eyes to catch bugs, and one of the richest companies in tech funding improvements on it. With nothing distinguishing it, Pulsar faces an enormous uphill battle if it wants to compete with that.
Maybe I'm missing something and Atom/Pulsar have some killer features that VS Code doesn't and won't ever have. Or maybe you just prefer using Pulsar, which...fair enough.
For one, it's not controlled by Microsoft which has its own plans and designs (lock you into GitHub, their proprietary extensions, telemetry, AI, etc)
I should probably just get over it and use vim or emacs because they're probably better suited. I use sublime text now. I didn't switch to Pulsar because I wanted something a bit more established or organised for my work computer.
Atom was that for me, I tried it several times and it did nothing like I wanted it.
VS Code was somehow different. I'm not the biggest fan but it's my go to editor now for whenever I need to edit 5 lines in some language where I don't have an IDE set up for, and it just works.
So I can totally understand why people would feel strongly with Atom vs VSCode. (I've not tried Pulsar, maybe I should)
Claiming that Emacs has limited customization, no GUi, and can't display images tells me they've not used Emacs and probably shouldn't be making any claims without fact checking them. Really colors how I read the rest of their pitch.
the author doesn't know much about Emacs (and i assume vim) but that last point about emacs is very unnecessary and clickbaity...
oh well, i don't mind pulsar being good and it probably a better fit for some people but pulsar doesn't deserves this guy
I have no idea if this author is representative of the Pulsar community, but I sure hope not.
I was nodding my head for the first half of this but then it went full conspiracy. Is VSCode really all that "controlled by Microsoft"? It's also open source. Maybe I'm naive, but I'm pretty sure VSCode killed Atom by being way faster and easier to develop plugins for.
Yep. VSCode "core" is open source, but many of the official extensions aren't (Python, C#, Live Share, Dev Containers IIRC). Besides, accessing the extension marketplace from a non-official vscode build is against their terms of service, meaning forks like vscodium don't have easy access to most extensions.
It is not that hard to believe that "Microsoft also wanted as many developers as possible to do all their coding using an editor controlled by Microsoft" Seems like pretty standard MS practice.
Curious who and who?
Most of the diehard Vim users I encountered were kind of in the DUVASWUV camp (DHH Uses Vim And So We Use Vim), i.e., they came to it as part of the whole Rails memeplex. That said, vi(m) and Emacs used to share the throne as the canonical Unix wizard editors because they were nearly ubiquitously available, consistent in UI across the decades, and they rewarded proficiency (each in their own way). It was a reliable assumption that a halfway decent programmer in the open-source tradition would be quite familiar with one or the other, if not both.
Nothing they describe about Pulsar is unique at all, apart from the slow loading time I guess. If you wanted time to load up HN while your editor loads, maybe Pulsar is right for you!
Everything they describe there is fairly basic functionality that is available in pretty much every popular(and niche) editor at this point. The "How to code 10x faster than an average programmer" article linked also describes basic things; hot reloading and real time linting.
Use whatever editor you want, write about whatever editor you want, but at least do some research about other editors before confidently stating your favorite one is the best along with incorrect facts about others.
This reminds me of the blub paradox[0] except for editors instead of programming languages.
This was true when the article was written, but it is no longer true.
Ditto for the Atom folks with Tree-Sitter. You see both these technologies show up in neovim, emacs, hip new kids like helix…like: yes, input latency or memory usage are important for a text editor—but it’s a bummer when people’s takeaways from these two are “lol electron, trash corporate engineering”, when the teams behind them were out-implementing the even-more-open-source world on important things like this.
As for the closed-source world…Jetbrains has been basically unchallenged in the general-purpose IDE game for ages. It’s exciting to see what they’ll do now with a fire lit under their butts.
If you want to use anything other than VS Code as an editor, why not pick something based on native technologies? What's the point of picking an editor that takes 6-8 seconds to start and still is way behind VS Code in terms of development?
Including, apparently, the author.
You can:
- See images in neovim: https://github.com/edluffy/hologram.nvim
- preview markdown: https://github.com/iamcco/markdown-preview.nvim
- have a “graphical” user interface: https://github.com/neovide/neovide
- have a GUI written in JavaScript: https://github.com/smolck/uivonim
You can’t put electron in the terminal, though, so it seems that pulsar lacks features that neovim has, while neovim does not lack any feature that pulsar has.
Also, Vim and Emacs use modes to allow users to either write the text in the file itself or to enter commands for the editor. Modes are terrible to use, and thanks to people like Larry Tesler, we haven’t had modes in any new software since the 1980’s, and nearly all of humanity is blissfully unaware of what modes even are and will never be exposed to them. Instead of using keyboard shortcuts via modes, we today have keyboard shortcuts like Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V which are easy to use.
VSCode: 3s. Firefox: 2s. Chrome: 2s. Safari: 1s.
> Also, Vim and Emacs use modes to allow users to either write the text in the file itself or to enter commands for the editor. Modes are terrible to use
Fuck you
Personally I don't see how it does a significant number of things better than VS Code, which has much more market share already. Not being controlled by Microsoft is a plus for sure (everyone using VSCode should be aware that the official builds are actually proprietary).