Pulsar – A Community-Led Hyper-Hackable Text Editor | Hacker News Reader

Pulsar – A Community-Led Hyper-Hackable Text Editor

pulsar-edit.dev

29 pointsdotcoma18 comments

I've got to give Atom a lot of credit for laying the groundwork for VS Code, but I can't imagine ever going back to use it. I doubt this project will ever get the performance to an acceptable level, since it seems like that was never an architectural goal for Atom. VS Code proved that it was absolutely possible to have a performant editor written with web technologies, you just need to prioritize it from the start. That's true for any application, of course, but not something web developers are accustomed to (especially not a decade ago).

It made me a bit nostalgic trying it out again, though. I used Atom for about a year before switching to VS Code, and I remember the vibrant community around it. It definitely fulfilled it's goal of being hackable, since there were extensions that completely extended the UI in some pretty neat/silly ways.

There's https://zed.dev/ now

Zed has a sweet sales pitch. Once they add extension support, I'll tune back in.

It already contains extension support (not sure why it's not prominently mentioned in in their docs though).

The built-in ones are here: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/tree/main/extensions. There are others outside the main tree as well, all of which are accessible within the app.

I definitely wouldn’t call vscode performant. The UI elements have noticeable latency and most things feel slow. Startup takes multiple seconds.

I'm old enough to have been told I should get off emacs and start using Atom because it's the future ^tm on here around 2016. Since then the only thing that's changed is that I'm using more responsive emacs configuration and I've figured out how to use shiftL and shiftR for `()'.

When people ask why you should use old software this is it. You learn it one and it runs forever.

Huh, I thought at least part of the Atom team went on to work on Zed

Tried to install it on asahi-linux fedora. Got a segfault:

```

/usr/bin/pulsar: line 151: 480856 Segmentation fault nohup "$PULSAR_PATH" --executed-from="$(pwd)" --pid=$$ "$@" --no-sandbox > "$ATOM_HOME/nohup.out" 2>&1

```

Looks like it's a fork of Atom?

Looks like it from the Documentation. The User and Developer Guide references Atom quite a bit (includes the original Atom docs too)

An aside, but I wish more webpages for applications put screenshots on the front page. Probably would had made it easier to notice if the application was based on Electron or not

I would love a fast, flexible, open source, elegant text editor, but this is a 300 MB download.

Has anyone found screenshots?

It's on the github

Knowing that it’s on GitHub, I could to this:

  1. Scroll down to the bottom of the home page:
  2. Under the "Team" subsection of the footer, click "Org Repositories".
  3. Now we’re on GitHub, click on the first pinned repository: "pulsar".
  4. Scroll down, *now* there’s a screenshot.

If I didn’t know it was on GitHub, I would never have gone through step (2). Those screenshots are decidedly not easy to find.

There is a GitHub icon directly at the top right of the side so your first two steps can be combined into one shorter one. But yes, screenshots should absolutely be on the home page, and prominently so.

Thank you, I'd never have found that. For future travellers:

https://github.com/pulsar-edit/pulsar

There's a github logo in the corner of the linked article

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