Open Source @lemmy.ml MarcellusDrum @lemmy.ml 1 yr. ago

Visual Studio Code alternatives for Linux?

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?

86 comments

Vscodium
- 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.
  
  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
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- 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
  
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  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.
- 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.
- Atom was really glitchy for me when I tried it a few years ago. Has it improved?
  
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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.
- I see a lot of potential in Lapce, but sadly the extensions (which are necessary, since it has basically no ootb language support) are very poorly maintained and outdated. Last I used it the Javascript/Typescript support was simply not sufficient for active use. I am very hopeful for Lapce's future though!
  
  Edit: Just checked and the TS/JS extension is still on version 2022.11.0. The code formatting still doesn't work (for me) :(
- 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.
VSCodium. Basically ungoogled-chromium but VS Code and Microsoft.
Lunarvim
- 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.
- This looks great. I've been using Spacevim for years but will check this out
- 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.
  
  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,
- Astrovim too.
You could try VSCodium. VS code but less spyware-y
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- 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.
  
  Why? It's completely open source.
Maybe codium will be what your looking for
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.
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.
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 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 have VSCodium installed via flatpak. Works perfectly.

Edit: has open-source extensions too.
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.
Vscodium or Geany
If you like Kate you can try Kdevelop. It's the same editor base but a bit more IDE like
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)
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.
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
Visual Studio Code is kinda heavy, so why not Netbeans or Eclipse?
- A real wise guy, eh?
If you program in Python check out Spyder, some other languages also have specialized IDEs that can be really good.
i just use vim for everything except debugging, and vscode for debugging
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
  
  Ouch, I can imagine how it feels. I've always been a KDE user, but I've tried other DEs before Since I used lots of KDE stuff (Krita, Kate, KdenLive) I stuck with it.
  
  That's actually an issue with most Debian-/Ubuntu-based distributions, as Debian/Ubuntu still does not package QGnomePlatform. This is preinstalled on Fedora and makes Qt apps, like Kate, look nice on GNOME.
  
  If I remember correctly, Flatpak apps from Flathub are unaffected by this Debian/Ubuntu issue, as Flathub includes QGnomePlatform in their runtimes.
- I frequently use Kate as a backup as well. Do you configure it in anyway?
  
  I like to remove the top menu and have the icons to the sidebar. Other than that, I activate a few plugins and keep it pretty vanilla. Most of the default configs are fine to me, and the command bar helps a lot.
I like very much helix and since i am using it I didnt had any issue. It doesnt overwhelm with customization like vim.
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.
  
  Huh, TIL. I never even considered it being paid, because you can't really compete with VS Code with a paid product. If you don't mind paid products, chances are you're already using some of JetBrains IDEs because they are simply miles ahead. Fleet being paid just doesn't make sense. Well, we'll see what they come up with.
  
  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.
- Is it open source?
Now it absolutely isn't open source or even free, so if that is a must feel free to ignore me, but I personally do still really like using Sublime. Once you install SublimeLSP I find it genuinely really clean to work with. And even though it's technically not free, you can use its free trial version for as long as you want (with the only drawback being an annoying popup), if you do buy it it's a one-time payment, not a subscription, and the package eco system is mostly open source (SublimeLSP e.g. is open source).

Again, not free, but much faster, more light weight and imo cleaner than VSCode, and definitely not very corpo given the rather small size of Sublime HQ.
- I’ve used sublime for over a decade and simply cannot stand how slow other editors are in comparison. Searching, jumping between files, etc is all just as fast one our huge production codebase as they are on my tiny personal projects. It’s insane
  
  I use Atom for personal projects and Sublime for work - it's shocking how fast Sublime loads up in comparison.
  
  Hopefully Atom's successor can address the performance issues, by the other comment threads here it looks like Pulsar is a contender
- I agree with all this except the "one time payment" is only good for three years of updates.
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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.
Sublime Text is great.
If you need something specific for Python, there is Eric

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