People use plugins that has the best solution for their problems (yep, usually they count “free” as part of the solution), and people create the best ones for the most popular IDE hosts. That’s paradoxical, like “chicken and egg, what came first?” but at the same time, at this current point in time, it answers the question with a great precision. The most popular plugins, the best language support for a generic host, will rise in the most popular IDEs, if not today, tomorrow.
My tasks don’t require any plugins - but language support is a huge point for me, yeah.
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.
I believe that the resource consumption is almost the same with webview, because internally they still use the same engine.
and Sublime Text is not actually that faster after you install a dozen of extensions, since python is much slower compare to javascript. not to mention many web related extensions are written in nodejs (like emmet) so you still need to include v8/nodejs runtime for those extensions to work, thus further slowing down the editor.
IDE hosts adds language support through plugins/add-ons/extensions, the language for adding external features varies with the hosts, the results of extending its basic features are the same.
I can’t say that I’ve ever really cared if my editor used more RAM or not, all machines I’ve used have 16 or 32 gb RAM. But I don’t use VIM for the low RAM usage reason, I use it because I like it better for development. VSCode is a nice editor too, but I’ll stick with VIM
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I didn’t try it hard, but GitHub - lapce/lapce: Lightning-fast and Powerful Code Editor written in Rust seems a very interesting project. However it uses Xi-editor as text widget that is a project no longer supported by its author (but this assertion of mine may be outdated).
I still re-writing (and using) Tijolo in GTK4 and writing my own text widget (just because it’s a really interesting problem), so it still in a very alpha stage…
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Wow. Thank you so much for sharing about Lapce! I’m evaluating it right now! The RAM usage is really low (149MB) and it’s responsive since the startup (instantaneous).
Update: Xi-editor is being maintained again. Last update made 20 days ago.
Isn’t brackets for web development? I’m not sure how much sense it would make to support a crystal plugin for that.
I don’t know if it’s intended for some specific use - I just use it for any text editing when I have a gui (and nano or ee otherwise).
I like how it looks, to have a file tree, some of its keyboard shortcuts, the search (most importantly: if something is selected and I do cmd+f then my selection gets automatically used as search term, and any further occurrences of my selection become highlighted - this way I often don’t even need to leave my current position, and if I really search for things I can do so without having to type them nor having to give up on whatever I might have right then stored in my clipboard), not to have files in different tabs, that it doesn’t create files in my code folders, but most importantly: it’s one of the fastest to open (in the past I often used nano simply because I didn’t want to wait for some editor to open) and I open new editor instances frequently.
Currently I have only three complains about brackets:
- I would like to be able to resize the “Working Files” area in the upper left corner, to reduce scrolling whenever I have too many files opened
- I miss some of the standard OSX features, like context menu options (e.g. when an URL is selected, or spelling or such things), standard os features for text symbols, and most importantly the ability to access the file object from the title bar (e.g. to grab the file from the title bar to move or copy it into a folder)
- missing syntax highlighting for Crystal; I would be already satisfied if .cr files would be treated like ruby code automatically (for some rough syntax highlighting, but mostly to be able to use the shortcuts to (un)comment lines)
The last one should be probably easy to fix, I guess I’ll go and have a quick look.
EDIT: if someone else wants it: can be achieved with ruby -e "File.write f='/Applications/Brackets.app/Contents/www/main.js', File.read(f).gsub('\"rb\", \"ru\"', '\"cr\", \"rb\", \"ru\"')" (might need to adjust the path)
I pretty much default to Emacs for all text editing anymore. Besides Crystal, I do a lot of personal projects in Common Lisp, and there’s a mode for Emacs called SLIME for that language that simply I can’t live without. So I’m already used to it and have it set up exactly like I want. Plus I listen to music with emms-mode, so I likely have an editor window open anyway 
I use both vim and vs code
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I’m a fan. Geany’s simple and fast, and the Terminal integration is sort of the next-best thing to a Crystal REPL.
A genuine Crystal plug-in would be groovy. I hoped to combine the geany-lsp and crystalline projects, but geany-lsp wouldn’t build.
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I have to say it’s amazing so many Crystalists use Emacs based editor.
I now use Kate, which has basic support of the language.
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Wow, that is fast. (Hrm, just what we all needed: Another set of keyboard commands to learn.)
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