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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You could try VSCodium. VS code but less spyware-y
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
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 Like Eclipse, which was originally made by IBM and is a huge ecosystem, especially for “java and friends.”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.
I heard good things about Geany.
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)
If you like Kate you can try Kdevelop. It’s the same editor base but a bit more IDE like
Vscodium
Lunarvim
Lapce is an alternative that you can try, though it’s self-described as “pre-alpha”.
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.
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
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
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.
I can’t manage to make Kate look half descent on Mint (Cinnamon). It does look great on Plasma
