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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[–] pol@infosec.pub 92 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Vscodium

[–] simonweiss@lemmy.ml 33 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

This + package to enable VSCode marketplace. The only VSCode features it lacks afaik are out of the box settings sync and remote container development, which colud be substituted with plugins.

EDIT: also be sure to check out Lapce suggested by Yote.zip - it's a banger.

[–] pol@infosec.pub 3 points 1 year ago

You don't need that when you use NixOS 😋

[–] sprl@lemm.ee 3 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Any idea how well vscodium runs on macos? Is the performance worde than normal vscode?

[–] BurnedOliveTree@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago

It’s the same code as VScode, just without telemetry, so probably the same or marginally better

[–] lenathaw@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 year ago

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.

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[–] kool_newt@lemm.ee 28 points 1 year ago (4 children)

For anyone that used Atom, check out

https://pulsar-edit.dev/

Fuck microsoft

[–] Daeraxa@lemmy.ml 13 points 1 year ago (4 children)

As one of the Pulsar team, thanks for the support! Always nice to see it being recommended on these kinds of threads.

[–] dot20@lemmy.world 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I would suggest adding some screenshots to your website

[–] Daeraxa@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] kool_newt@lemm.ee 3 points 1 year ago

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!

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[–] NaoPb@beehaw.org 3 points 1 year ago

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.

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[–] Daeraxa@lemmy.ml 22 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)

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.

[–] CrypticCoffee@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] o1o12o21@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 year ago

Playing around with lite-xl, thanks for the recommendation. Lacks many features for now, but seems to have a huge potential.

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[–] g7s@lemmy.ml 17 points 1 year ago (10 children)

Lunarvim

[–] simonweiss@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Actually a pretty good on-the-go alternative to GUI IDEs. Always using it to quickly edit configs and scripts.

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[–] copylefty@lemmy.fosshost.com 2 points 1 year ago

This looks great. I've been using Spacevim for years but will check this out

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[–] abuttifulpigeon@lemmy.world 17 points 1 year ago

VSCodium. Basically ungoogled-chromium but VS Code and Microsoft.

[–] nope@yiffit.net 15 points 1 year ago

You could try VSCodium. VS code but less spyware-y

[–] yote_zip@pawb.social 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Lapce is an alternative that you can try, though it's self-described as "pre-alpha".

[–] simonweiss@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] Lauchmelder@feddit.de 9 points 1 year ago

I wouldn't exchange my neovim config for anything. After getting used to how vim works and installing all the plugins I need, I feel like this is my favourite editor. It looks nice and I enjoy using keyboard shortcuts over using a mouse.

That said, the day I lose my neovim config is the day I die. If it disappears I'm doomed

[–] monobot@lemmy.ml 9 points 1 year ago

People are writing different opinions, but you are right, best IDEs are comercial software.

I think it is just because it takes a lot of time and effort on boring stuff to make this tools smooth. Generally in open source we work on fun parts and leave those boring last 20% unfinished, which is ok with me.l

[–] Ascend910@lemmy.ml 9 points 1 year ago

Maybe codium will be what your looking for

[–] nickwitha_k@lemmy.sdf.org 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] leraje@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I have VSCodium installed via flatpak. Works perfectly.

Edit: has open-source extensions too.

[–] Solaris1789@jlai.lu 7 points 1 year ago

Vscodium or Geany

[–] TrivialBetaState@sopuli.xyz 7 points 1 year ago

My first comment would be that free software made by a corporation is still free software. Like Eclipse, which was originally made by IBM and is a huge ecosystem, especially for "java and friends." So, there is nothing wrong with VS Code(ium). It is a "proper" open source editor and a very good one (I don't use it though - I prefer EMACS).

As for community-base alternatives (which is probably what you mean), you could consider kdevelop or pulsar. There are other alternatives which are equally good and surely one of them will fit your purpose. You mentioned Kate and I can't find anything wrong with it, especially once you start installing the plugins that are relevant to what you do. Same with Gedit.

[–] perivesta@feddit.de 6 points 1 year ago

If you like Kate you can try Kdevelop. It's the same editor base but a bit more IDE like

[–] erAck@discuss.tchncs.de 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I heard good things about Geany.

[–] Rodeo@lemmy.ca 5 points 1 year ago

I love geany but it's basically done. The little development that happens is maintenance only. It's great at what it does now, but don't expect any new feature (rip LSP)

[–] django@discuss.tchncs.de 5 points 1 year ago

I don't understand the meaning of "visual editor" in the context of "text editor". But i can tell you, that i am a happy user of Spacemacs, a distribution of GNU Emacs. Doom Emacs seems also to be pretty popular. One of my favorite emacs packages is the git client "magit": https://video.emacs.ch/w/kFF1N8kveg3eCx86tU6aMW

[–] NeryK@sh.itjust.works 5 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] ed_cock@kbin.social 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Visual Studio Code is kinda heavy, so why not Netbeans or Eclipse?

[–] falsem@kbin.social 4 points 1 year ago

A real wise guy, eh?

[–] ed_cock@kbin.social 4 points 1 year ago

If you program in Python check out Spyder, some other languages also have specialized IDEs that can be really good.

[–] tho@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 year ago

i just use vim for everything except debugging, and vscode for debugging

[–] Marxine@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I alternate between VCCodium and Kate, both are fine to me, but Kate feels snappier since I'm on KDE. It's also less of a resource drain.

[–] MarcellusDrum@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I can't manage to make Kate look half descent on Mint (Cinnamon). It does look great on Plasma

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[–] Mot@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I frequently use Kate as a backup as well. Do you configure it in anyway?

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[–] rikudou@lemmings.world 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] 133arc585@lemmy.ml 7 points 1 year ago (4 children)

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.

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