Hi pals!
I’m just curious on which plugin we need to concentrate more, so:
Which IDE you use for Crystal?
- Vim based
- Emacs based
- Textmate
- Sublime Text
- Atom
- VS Code
- IntelliJ family of IDE
0 voters
I use Geany 
1 Like
Sorry 
1 Like
I use Geany
1 Like
Sorry I cannot change a poll. For everything not mentioned (like Geany), please comment in the post.
If I may, my current take on this is that focus probably be put on one of the language server implementations.
The language server protocol can be used by a wide selection of editors, so the choice of editors matters less than the choice of the language server.
Currently available for Crystal (afaik) are scry and crystalline.
I’m currently using crystalline, since, even though it crashes (and reloads) several times during development, it offers better autocompletion and hover information.
2 Likes
On which O.S.?
Arch Linux.
But I don’t really notice crystalline crashing, since Sublime Text LSP just restarts it, or at least I think it does.
Works good enough
VS code, Crystalline on Ubuntu
I use VS Code because it is what currently works best. If another editor/IDE were to become better for Crystal then I would use that.
vscode wins
My idea is to have all plugins with the same basic features (sintax highlighting, snippets …) at the same level, and to have external tools to get more advanced features (LSP, debugging, static analysis) so that everyone can choose the editor that suits him best.
However, keep in mind that no programming language that I know has plugins for all editors / ide because the effort to keep them updated is considerable, so there will always be a “recommended” editor or on which there are more efforts because the adoption is greater .
That will be always probably “the reccomended” editor for Crystal
1 Like
I use write/use Tijolo 
. But nowadays the editor doesn’t matter, if you want a better Crystal support on any editor, contribute to Crystalline or SCry, the Crystal language servers available nowadays.
4 Likes
Better decide to concentrate the efforts on only one
60% of the time Brackets (my default editor) and 40% (and increasing) Nova (as I haven’t found a plugin for Brackets to support Crystal yet)
I use Sublime Text for its lightweight nature.
Offtopic: The factors that matter most for me on an editor are:
-
minimum resource usage (on this factor, Tijolo from @hugopl is the first one
) - good user interface
- plugins (like LSP support, emmet, etc)
- mouse support (this is the only reason I do not use Tijolo
)
I cannot understand why many developers are not bothered to the fact that VS Code and Brackets are made with Electron, which increases the resource usage (RAM, in particular) a lot.
Also, I can’t understand why the VS Code and Brackets creators did’t use the native OS webview instead of Electron, a move that would reduce such unnecessary RAM usage.
Numbers are important.
It’s all about the plugins and the ability to basically make a custom IDE with only the features that I care about.
VS Code being wasteful of resources does bother me, but not as much as using an editor that’s missing the features that I like or as much as using a traditional IDE that is stuffed with features that I don’t want to the point of having a bloated UI would do.
I believe that the reason for not using the native webview is that at the time (maybe still?) it was inconsistent across different platforms and they wanted a multiplatform solution that looked the same and behaved the same on Windows, Mac and Linux without having to do too much platform specific development.
3 Likes
And VS code really isn’t that bad. They’re doing some incredible black magic to keep the resource requirements comparatively low. And the user interface is quite snappy. I have not seen such a performance in other applications using a web render stack.
3 Likes
My other applications don’t need a lot of RAM, while my computer has got plenty of it (96GB, got them dirt cheap on eBay, less than $50 in total, iirc), so it doesn’t really matter to me how much the editor might use, but I totally see your point here. I would assume it’s similar for many others and RAM might be required occasionally, but most of the time they have plenty and don’t care about any wasteful usage.
While I usually avoid Electron and would prefer using something native (mostly for keyboard shortcuts, context menu features etc), it anyway fits most of my needs, or does so at least better than the other editors.
1 Like