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
If you program in Python check out Spyder, some other languages also have specialized IDEs that can be really good.
If you need something specific for Python, there is Eric
I am on the path VSCodium --> Lapce under NixOS for visual editors and to decorporate my workflow. i.e. away from VSCode which is [otherwise] exceptional.
However, Helix looks incredible.
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
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.
lite-xl looks promising
the main missing feature imho : being able to search/filter settings, keybindings in particular
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.
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.
