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?
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Vscodium
You don’t need that when you use NixOS 😋
Any idea how well vscodium runs on macos? Is the performance worde than normal vscode?
It’s the same code as VScode, just without telemetry, so probably the same or marginally better
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.
I tried both and it’s the same
As one of the Pulsar team, thanks for the support! Always nice to see it being recommended on these kinds of threads.
I would suggest adding some screenshots to your website
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Playing around with lite-xl, thanks for the recommendation. Lacks many features for now, but seems to have a huge potential.
lite-xl looks promising
the main missing feature imho : being able to search/filter settings, keybindings in particular
Lite-XL looks really cool, it’s awesome to finally find a modern editor that is not using webview bloat for the UI.
Lunarvim
This looks great. I’ve been using Spacevim for years but will check this out
Actually a pretty good on-the-go alternative to GUI IDEs. Always using it to quickly edit configs and scripts.
I am using it, as an “IDE” for everything.
How does it compare to similar stuff like AstroNvim, SpaceVim, NVChad, etc? I’m trying to choose one but having difficulties 😥
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.
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 😅
I think you are doing nothing wrong with choosing Lunarvim. Anyway, If you ever are unhappy with it, you can pretty much just create your own neovim config.
No problem! That’s definitely an easy problem to have with (neo)vim.
It’s got a pretty good community, you always find some help online. It comes per default only with “needed” plugins, which makes it a pretty nice IDE already. If you ever need more plugins, it’s also not complicated to install them,
You could try VSCodium. VS code but less spyware-y
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.
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.
I have VSCodium installed via flatpak. Works perfectly.
Edit: has open-source extensions too.
Neovim + LunarVim is most of what I need for software engineering out of the box. It even has debugger support. Plus it’s way faster than VSCode and terminal friendly.
Yea, I also use neovim with NvChad config. Even use NVim in my termux.
Lapce is an alternative that you can try, though it’s self-described as “pre-alpha”.
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.
Vscodium or Geany
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.
If you like Kate you can try Kdevelop. It’s the same editor base but a bit more IDE like
i just use vim for everything except debugging, and vscode for debugging
If you program in Python check out Spyder, some other languages also have specialized IDEs that can be really good.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What a weird take. You’re allowed to pay for whatever you’d like. Personally, I can’t afford to pay for any JetBrains product, even if I wanted to.
Not only are there alternatives which may be better overall or better suited to someone’s needs, that wasn’t even my point. My point was more that it is only temporarily free, and so the parent commenter’s comment of “it’s free” should be taken with a grain of salt if you’re considering the product.
Moreover, we’re in the Open Source community: Fleet is neither free nor open source, and pointing that out here is relevant.
Is it open source?
