Pulsar, the best code editor since Atom | Hacker News Reader

Pulsar, the best code editor since Atom

optimizedbyotto.com

54 pointsottoke73 comments

> While both of these [Emacs and vim] can probably compete with Pulsar in number of extensions available and the amount of customizations and keyboard shortcuts, neither of them have a graphical user interface, and they are completely incapable of doing things like showing images or, for example, a Markdown preview (which by the way you can open in Pulsar by pressing Ctrl+Shift+M).

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.

Also nowadays there's a few GUI frontends for Neovim such as Neovide.

See, I didn't know that. But, I wouldn't go around claiming it either. Especially if I was making that claim to disparage a competor to my product.

Eh, not really. Last I tried these, the mouse was able to move the cursor, and that was about it.

Neovim in the terminal has a basic right click menu (select, copy, paste), scrolling, and buffer select. That's just what I've come across.

IIRC, the 'clipboard' for the terminal was separate from the rest of your desktop. You couldn't copy from your web browser to your neovim the same way you would with a GUI text editor.

Yeah Vim uses registers which are like multiple clipboards. By default, yank/copy and paste don't use the register linked to the system clipboard, but this is just a setting. https://neovim.io/doc/user/provider.html#provider-clipboard

Thank you. I just got around to reading the article and was horrified to find him disparaging vim, and emacs, while being completely wrong about both. Very soured.

This article can be summarized as "I use Pulsar because that's what I'm used too" combined with incorrect "facts" about other editors and some shit slinging at them.

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.

[0] https://paulgraham.com/avg.html

> Zed, however, is not open source

This was true when the article was written, but it is no longer true.

https://zed.dev/blog/zed-is-now-open-source

The author asserts that Emacs uses modes (it doesn't by default), does not have a GUI (it does), and cannot display images (it can). Not that this detracts from the point they should have made, which is that it has a steeper learning curve than Pulsar.

Clearly the author has never used Emacs, because they have confused Emacs "modes" (which are more like features that get turned on and off) with modal editing (like vim).

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.

Also, as a vim user, modes are completely fine and I do not believe that modes slow me down. I’m not sure why the author is so insistent on this point.

Intuitively having to press more keys in order to accomplish an action sounds like it would be slower than a single key combo. Of course this fails to account for the fact that pressing something like Option+Fn+Backspace to forward-delete a word is far more awkward than f-d and therefore takes longer.

TIL Option+Fn+Delete can forward-delete a word! Thanks!

I hate to defend the author since it's clear the author has some significant knowledge gaps, but Emacs very much uses modes by default.

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 mean, i personally don't think atom was ... good so the title kinda made me laugh but thats me XD

> 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.

haha, shots fired!

Considering how confidently utterly wrong the author of this article seems to be about Vim and to an even more substantial degree Emacs, I'm not inclined to put much stock in this as an insight.

I think it was just a bad joke rather than an insight. As a neovim user myself, I personally know a couple of extremely oustanding programmers who use emacs.

yeah, i read it as a joke as well.

Evil mode giving you Vim macros, combined with Elisp as a real programming language.... ooh now that's some fun IDE a la carte-ing

And then you have Linus Torvalds who uses nano

I thought he used his own fork of a micro emacs?

Ah, yes, my mistake, he was only thinking of switching to nano:

> And it's all done in a traditional terminal, although I don't use 'vi'. I use this abomination called "micro-emacs", which has absolutely nothing to do with GNU emacs except that some of the key bindings are similar. I got used to it at the University of Helsinki when I was a wee lad, and I've not been able to wean myself from it, although I suspect I will have to soon enough. I hacked up (a very limited) utf-8 support for it a few years ago, but it's really showing its age, and showing all the signs of having been written in the 80's and the version I use was a fork that hasn't been maintained since the mid 90's.

> University of Helsinki used it because it worked on DOS, VAX/VMS and Unix, which is why I got introduced to it. And now my fingers are hardcoded for it. I really need to switch over to something that is actually maintained and does utf-8 properly. Probably 'nano'. But my hacked-up piece of historical garbage works just barely well enough that I've never been really forced to teach my old fingers new tricks.

https://www.tag1consulting.com/blog/interview-linus-torvalds...

Right? The greats all used ed.

Nah, programmers of that caliber will use a magnetized needle directly on the hard disk platters.

I see where you're going with this, so let's just shortcut ourselves to the end: the Emacs command `M-x butterfly`.

for those who don't know -> https://xkcd.com/378/

I don't really use Pulsar as its heavy weight. But I'm glad for every legit open source project that pushes editing forward be it NeoVim, Emacs etc. The mono culture of do everything in vsCode under MS's thumb is not a great idea. Microsoft has proven itself untrustworthy time and time again.

I don’t consider VSCode the best code editor, but I will say: it is the best thing to happen to code editing for quite some time. LSP has made it much easier to create an editor, or add support for niche languages. Even for big names like vim, which have always had a deep bench of plugins, it’s amazing to see this stuff “just work” now which used to require constant fussing (and the occasional blood sacrifice to tim pope).

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.

I don't understand what the author bases his claim on. Pulsar is based on Electron, so it isn't going to be faster than VS Code. And taking a quick look, it's way behind VS Code in terms of features. It doesn't even have a built-in terminal.

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?

I cannot imagine ever abandoning Emacs (or vim for that matter), but I also can't imagine why anyone would want to continue Atom. If its environment worked for you, it seems like VSCode is clearly the right tool for that job.

I used to use and love Atom, but it was pretty slow, to be honest. I switched to VSCode after it was unsupported by Microsoft for a while, and I've been happy with the switch. I wasn't aware of this fork at the time. Curious if improvements have been made since then, but I'm very happy with VSCode at the moment.

I don’t love VSCode but it’s what I mostly use. It’s good enough for most users and having everyone on my team have the same setup helps debug local issues. It also never seems to have any major performance issues which I’ll give MS kudos for. Maybe because the core editor is still pretty light and most things are plugins ?

> nearly all of humanity is blissfully unaware of what modes even are

Including, apparently, the author.

> neither of them [vim, emacs] have a graphical user interface, and they are completely incapable of doing things like showing images or, for example, a Markdown preview (which by the way you can open in Pulsar by pressing Ctrl+Shift+M).

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.

The question this leaves unanswered is: why not VS Code?

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.

> Maybe I'm missing something and Atom/Pulsar have some killer features that VS Code doesn't and won't ever have.

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)

We have vscodium

Which is still just downstream from VSCode and suffers as a result (eg Remote stuff not available officially for example).

PS I do use VScodium, and am glad it's there as an alternative and a developing ecosystem of extensions.. I still always feel the shadow of MS when using it. Kindof like using Chromium as opposed to Chrome.

Second edit: I mainly use another editor but sometimes VSCode things are nice so VSCodium is there for me

I used Atom until it was killed. I have tried many times over the last few years to switch to VSCode (for some of the benefits you mentioned) but there's never been a way to configure a few things that are non-negotiable for me. I have really spent way too much time trying to get it set up how I want but it's just not possible from what I can find. I also strongly dislike some of the general approaches to UI/UX and to updates in general.

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.

I've switched to Sublime too. They have a Vim mode. It's the best editor I've used so far. Doesn't have all the features of VS Code but for pure editing it's great.

Sometimes you simply can't describe how a thing feels subtly wrong.

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)

    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.

TIL that modes are obviously terrible and I should feel bad for learning how to use Vim’s modes effectively

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.

Faster than Sublime? Unlikely.

How is it better than VSCode?

So many words, and no answers to the obvious question — how does it compare with VS Code?

So the point is just: Pulsar is the resurrected/continued Atom code base.

It's the same old thing again and again. People can't think outside the box. It's the same look I can do this too thing.

Besides many other ignorant mistakes in the article, the link to how modes are terrible doesn't explain how they are terrible

VSCode is a good successor imo. I liked Atom for it's simplicity and not getting in your way - which i think vscode does well.

VS Code is good enough. I'll stick to it till I start to make my own and start dogfooding.

"Pulsar, the best fork of Atom" - there I fixed it for you

I don’t get the point of talking about how much you love something by shitting on what other people use. Ha ha emacs users are idiots. Maybe I’m being overly sensitive but whats the point of saying this? Can’t you just talk about whats great about your thing and not take pot shots at other tech.

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 know of a few tech circles which basically define themselves by not being something else. Every time they talk about themselves they must take a jab at their “competitor”, who likely doesn’t think of them at all. It’s a major turn off. I have no desire to be part of a community founded on hate and who can only define their values in contrast to someone else’s.

I have no idea if this author is representative of the Pulsar community, but I sure hope not.

It did read as kind of rage-bait-ish. You're not being overly sensitive at all.

Best code editor from the two author have tried?

> It takes maybe 6–8 seconds for it to fully load from scratch, but once it is open, using it feels pretty snappy. The slowness is due to being an Electron app, which is basically a web browser.

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

TL;DR: It's the continuation of Atom.

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).

> VS Code is actually the reason why Atom eventually died. In 2018, Microsoft acquired GitHub, the world’s largest open source hosting platform, to get premier mind share of developers, and as part of that plan, Microsoft also wanted as many developers as possible to do all their coding using an editor controlled by Microsoft.

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.

> Is VSCode really all that "controlled by Microsoft"?

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.

VScode official build is not open source. They take the open source code and apply some stuff related to their proprietary extensions and product and then release it. And as you said you can't use their proprietary extensions or their extension marketplace endpoint (legally at least) outside their official build

VSCode extension store are controlled by MS, think it has being mentioned here on HN as on the control point. I don't totally avoid VSCode, but would ONLY use it as VSCodium and extensions that works in that.

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.

Atom was hot garbage, what the hell are you on. Vim is cool but also not an IDE, NeoVim is what you could compare to. Why not VSCode?

Because VSCode is also not an IDE.

Curious who and who?

I've known many world-class programmers who use Emacs, among them Kalman Reti and Steve Summit.

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.

Vim? I remember DHH was the premier TextMate evangelist. All his videos were TextMate only.

Being a Rubyist and using vim is definitely a thing. Looks like I was off about DHH being the origin. It certainly wasn't Matz, he uses (and contributed to) Emacs.

he still uses textmate afaik

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