The key to being productive as a programmer is to have a great code editor. I have been an avid user of Atom since 2014, and its successor Pulsar since now in 2023.

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. 🚀

See also [email protected]

  • @LucidDaemon
    12•10 months ago

    I agree with this. In my opinion helix is the best code editor.

    • Royce
      7•10 months ago

      @LucidDaemon @Aurenkin out of curiosity, how long have you been using Helix and what do you like about it? I tried it awhile back and liked it, but it wasn’t able to break VS Code’s iron grip on my dev workflow.

      • @LucidDaemon
        3•10 months ago

        About 6 months since I’ve switched away from vscode. To make Helix worth it you also need to use software that compliments it.

        I work in DevOps, so I don’t do a ton of programming but everything I do is via terminal. I use Kitty Terminal, ZSH with oh-my-zsh for the shell, Zellij for an emulation layer (think tiling and tab manager in kitty), nnn for in terminal file manager, and helix for editor.

        I almost never leave the terminal now, except when web browsing.

        • Royce
          1•10 months ago

          @LucidDaemon Aaah, that makes sense. I can see how Helix would be perfect for that use case.

          Most of my work is webdev (JS/TS, Ruby, etc.), so it’s not quite the same. But I’d love to get back to Helix and use that more in my day-to-day. Would be nice to stay in the terminal more rather than bouncing back and forth between kitty and vscode.

        • @[email protected]
          1•10 months ago

          I remember being really interested in Helix when it came out, but it didn’t have a built-in file picker.

          Is this still an issue for users? Is there a built-in solution, or a usermade solution to this?

          Also, is there plugin support?

          I can’t use an editor without rainbow indent/brackets, without them code just takes too long to read that it becomes frustrating.

          • Turun
            1•10 months ago

            Space-f lets you open a file in the current workspace, and :open /path always let’s you open any file on the computer

            Plugin support not yet I think. Not gonna lie, I chose helix over nvim for it’s good out of the box experience, so I didn’t actually have a need for plugins yet.

            Fair enough. That would be a use case for a plugin (or simply a setting!)

            • @[email protected]
              1•10 months ago

              Space-f lets you open a file in the current workspace, and :open /path always let’s you open any file on the computer

              Is this a file tree, or just a fuzzy finder?

              Fuzzy finders aren’t a substitute for a file tree picker. They’re only great, until you don’t know the name of a file, or until you need to know of a file’s existence in the first place.

              • Turun
                1•10 months ago

                File tree not a file tree like in a file explorer, more like the output of find, but with filtering. The letters you type to restrict your search only need to present in that order in the file path, not as a string.

                So “abc” would match “./assets/others/abort/cancel.png”, not just “./assets/abc.png”

                Additionally, lower case letters match case insensitive, upper case letters match case sensitive. This is surprisingly helpful if you don’t use exclusively lowercase file names.