Chime 2.0 – a Go Editor for macOS | Hacker News Reader

Chime 2.0 – a Go Editor for macOS

chimehq.com

72 pointsparsd40 comments

Why does the title refer to this as a Go editor when the linked page is talking about having support for 23 different languages?

It seems it was originally a Go-only editor when it came out five years ago (looking through their blog posts). Ruby was only added earlier this year, and now this supports more languages. So yes, weird to describe it as a Go Editor still, but it would have been accurate before May.

I did ponder whether to not mention Go in the title, but I had noticed that it's unclear what the devs mean by "support for 23 languages". Go is known to have been their main focus. In general, there is no documentation whatsoever, although the editor is interesting.

We did start off with just Go. After doing a bunch of infrastructural work, we added another, Ruby. We've just finished generalizing this, in a way that both more 1st- and 3rd-party extensions can be created. To date though, we've only gotten to Rust and Swift.

The lack of integrated terminal or method of running a go program makes me question what use this is to someone. Until either of those is implemented, this is a no-go for me. Not even mentioning that it costs money to use without adding any value over free editors.

For me, the lack of those features is itself a feature.

I don't have any interest in using the subpar terminals/"execute this thing" buttons included in many editors. I'd rather use a terminal that I actually like -- the one I use for everything else.

I also don't want any "magic" to happen under the hood to run a thing (looking at you, Java IDEs). I want anyone to be able to download the thing I'm working on and run it without being tied to a particular editor/IDE, and the best way to do that is to put your build/run stuff into something portable (shell script, Makefile, task file, whatever) instead of relying on a button in a GUI somewhere.

> For me, the lack of those features is itself a feature.

For me as well. However language specific IDEs these days usually don't have much if anything on more popular editors.

With maybe a few exceptions that I'm unaware of, all integrated terminals are optional features that can be disabled. I agree that editor-specific run configurations are over the top and bad form, however an integrated terminal is a very useful feature that I use all the time, especially when working with Go.

Edit: And that said, if I'm paying money for a product it better have features that I'm going to need, and if I don't need them it better have a way to disable them.

> The lack of integrated terminal or method of running a go program makes me question what use this is to someone.

I'm quite happy with my current editor and probably wouldn't use this, but I have also never used either of those features. I run my code using a separate terminal in a separate window, and can't really understand why anyone likes squashing their terminal into the same space as their code (although I recognise that they do, and I'm glad that they can if that's what they want) - seems like it would be distracting and reduce the amount of code you can get on screen at once.

Only benefit i have found is if it is on a remote machine and you do not feel like ssh-ing twice.

I like having my terminal attached to my editor, but I don't like it integrated with the editor. Some of the integration features are cool, like clicking to view a file in the editor straight from an error message, but I always get frustrated with the integrated terminal's small size, and it's not convenient to resize it. Or it can slow down the editor when a lot of output is happening (VS Code). Sometimes it's a third-party solution that isn't well maintained (Atom, Sublime Text).

Ideally, I'd love a way to glue sets of windows together and move them around as one piece, without being a tiling window manager.

Looks like the application requires macOS v12, which is only a year old. What features does it require that means it can't be backwards-compatible? Is it a SwiftUI thing?

Honestly, dropping v11 for 2.0 was a really tough call. Adopting ExtensionKit, and getting that out the door right when v13 shipped was difficult, but that was the goal we set out for. Supporting v11 made a number of things more difficult, and SwiftUI was some of it. It was not strictly technically necessary, but it made it easier.

Chime, a Go Editor for macOS – v1.0 Now Available - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22436773 - Feb 2020 (26 comments)

Chime – A Go Editor for macOS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21963708 - Jan 2020 (126 comments)

How is Chime better/different from other options, like say Sublime Text?

As a paying customer of both, I can tell you that at this time and for the time being, it's not better, and it's, indeed, worse, and feels slower regardless of being a native app!

I am a paid customer and I've been trying to use it, but it's not useful yet. I bought this as a specialized IDE for Go but then they added Ruby and other languages I don't really care about and Go is not in focus anymore, so, what's the point of being one of the many - Nova, CodeEdit, Sublime Text, VS Code, you name it!

I am disappointed!

I'm truly sorry to hear that you are disappointed. And I really do get it! The full story is long, but I can sum it up with: our number one request, by far, is support for more languages. Even since this release, we've still gotten requests for yet more not yet available.

The hope is that an open source extension system will make it much easier to add new languages and improve support for existing ones.

But, I also want to be really clear: if you aren't happy, contact us and we'll try to make it right. If you are willing, I'd also love to hear from you about problems and/or missing features. We prioritize requests from license holders over all others.

I just downloaded this to give it a trial and so far my exprience has been infuriating. I go to quick open a file - it takes 5 seconds to provide me a suggestion, I select my suggestion and hit enter, nothing, I double click, nothing, I hit the space bar, nothing.... Okay, let me maximise the window, I double click the window title, nothing, hmm, let me double click where the window controls are, nothing. It hardly feels 'Mac native'.

edit: after typing this out and letting it rest in the background, the quick open now actually opens a file.

I'm sorry it's working so poorly for you. 2.0 has some performance issues that do make it seem more like slow-open in a number of situations. We're working on it.

honestly even having a progress bar on the bottom right of the status bar would help - then at least people know it's doing something

Cute but seems a bit too simple. I’m no fan of VSCode, I like my UI clean and simple (like Atom for example). Oh well, will continue waiting on Zed.

out of curiosity: still using atom or vscode or switched to something else?

I’m still running Atom. I’m hoping Pulsar will keep Atom alive. Besides of VSCode, I tried using Sublime for a while. Its absolutely great slick editor (pricey but I was willing to pay for that comfort) but the plug-ins I use were very mediocre and subpar. How about you?

At work I run VSCode. At home I try to run Nova. But I do not seem to get used to it and I fall back to VSCode a lot of times. As a "secondary editor" I use TextMate 2.0.

Let's see if Zed is going to be good. Or maybe I should learn neovim.

I use BBEdit as my secondary editor. It’s pretty fast and stable. Nova looks pretty mature but it doesn’t have some extensions I need :(

Seemed interesting based on the amount of languages the editor supports on paper, but a quick trial showed that at least C# support is very, very barebones, even theoretical, as I couldn't get any kind of autocomplete to work, for example. After few minutes of usage Im unsure of what it provides aside from some syntax coloring. Maybe I did something wrong?

You did not. Aside from Rust and Swift, all the added languages are preliminary. A minimal extension is required to, for example, connect Chime up to an LSP server to get semantic features going like completions and diagnostics. We do not have a 1st-party extension built for C# yet.

Why not implement first class support for LSP servers, and offer extensions that wrap official LSP's?

That's more or less exactly what we've done. Our SDK does have support for LSP. But, unfortunately those extensions still need to be made. Or are you talking about a generic LSP extension that is server-agnostic? That is definitely buildable, but my experience has been that the experience tends to be a lot better when customized for a particular server.

For context, this is probably posted after Apple ExtensionKit[1] made it to the homepage of HN.

[1]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/extensionkit

I'd expect the website to describe some of the features, but I can't seem to find any real sales effort. Lots of stellar competition in this area considering Mac-only editors alone: TextMate, BBEdit, Nova.

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