Though it does support AI or vibe coding it doesn't push it, while using the editor they don't even advertise it. You could go about using the editor without encountering it. They are just just few small buttons in the corner if you want to use it.

I was all in until I saw it supports vibe coding.

I started using Helix in the last year and it has been fantastic. I mostly work on embedded systems in C, C++, Rust and some Python. I love having a modal editor that uses select->verb syntax and that actually cares about discoverability.

Same I've switched from VSCodium back to AstroNVIM recently.

Eclipse Theia is meant to be a 1:1 replacement for VSCode, and it's a completely independent rewrite. Afaik the only part they share is the "Monaco" text editor component, but there's not really much lock-in risk there.

Eclipse are also the people who run the open-vsx extension registry.

Personally, I am very happy with Sublime Text and don't see myself using anything else any time soon. But if I did need an alternative, Theia might be my first choice.

Edit: another one that hasn't been mentioned yet is Lite-XL

They say they want to distance themselves from Microsoft. VSCodium is a stripped/forked VSCode, I have to assume that's why they want to evade it. Theia is a separate, independent project that adds VSCode-plugin-compatible APIs.

if they're against vscodium I'm not sure if theia is significantly better

Just wanna chime in with PhpActor experience (most common php LSP in Mason): incredibly buggy in big projects. Code actions are basically broken, references randomly stop working every half an hour.

Laravel isn't my main beat, but if it were I'd have to spent a dozen hours fixing it first. Rust (rust-analyzer), python (pyright) and csharp (csharp_ls) are all a dream compared to it.

Eclipse Theia is a VSCode-like IDE

• https://theia-ide.org/
• https://github.com/eclipse-theia/theia/

I don't know if all your desired tooling is covered.

Emoji are fine though; emoji are cool.

Emoji are the devil. 😠😠😠😠😠

I actually think it’s an interesting idea. We’re prone to click on a lot of links while browsing a page, going down a rabbit hole, spending way too much time there and regretting it later. If we had to copy and paste every link (which is still very quick to do, it’s not as if we had to type the whole thing), would we end up having more control about our internet media consumption? Having to take three seconds to copy and paste the link in my address bar might make me reconsider whether I actually want to visit that page right now, instead of just doing it out of habit. I don’t know if that’s really part of the motivation for “text-only links”, and I don’t think I would make that choice for my website if I had one, but I still find it interesting.

And really, the lack of clickability is not a huge step back, just a small, minor one, considering how quick and reliable it is to copy and paste. It’s in no way comparable to printed media, where you’d have to manually copy the reference and then go look it up in a bookshop or library.

That said, I am concerned about how it may affect accessibility. I’m very ignorant about those things, but I suspect it would be a hassle for people using a screen reader?

I'm Helix only since a couple of years. My dev life is great.

Well, if we're already posting all the new Rust-based editors, then we're still missing Helix: https://helix-editor.com/

Unlike the other two, it's community-developed, but it being terminal-based might not fit everyone's taste...

If I could find something that offers a “run this cli command on file saving”, that’s really about the biggest requirement I hope to have in place.

You can do that via CLI, too, by the way. You can watch your source code directory for file changes with entr: https://manpages.org/entr
Make sure to see the examples at the end of the man page, since usage isn't entirely obvious...

And if you want KDevelop without being so focused on KDE development, then that's basically Kate: https://kate-editor.org/
If you install the LSP servers for your toolchain (and check that Kate auto-starts them), then it can assist pretty well for different programming languages (i.e. virtually indistinguishable from VSCode, as far as I'm aware).

Gonna be that asshole who suggests neovim. Same deal with the insane plugin community but we have more control and can do more stupid (and useful) shit.

I've been using it for laravel development for years (though with blade mainly) along with, on seperate repos, react and react native. The tailwind language server works well too

On the running commands on save yeah you can either use hooks or just overload the :w command to do whatever you want. If you take the later route, anything after a ! In command mode runs as a command in your default shell (non-interactive mode)

It'll take some time to build out something to the level of vscode yourself but it's been very worth it for me. I feel like the editor is an extension of myself. Yeah, ok, that sentence felt like a bit too much dick sucking even to me. Seriously though it may seem simplistic at first but with the right plugin setup I've yet to find anything I miss from vscode and I was an absolute unit of a power user on that thing.

Glad you're able to adjust to a new workflow too because you'll need to be if you take the plunge.

Anyway, hope you find something even if you don't pick neovim. Just don't pick Emacs or I swear to god I will cry

Kind of interested in this too. I just started redeveloping a php site in codeigniter bringing it from version 2 to 4 and when I first attempted this a year ago, it didn't seem that neovim support wasn't very good for php.. I could be mis-remembering. I keep a nice setup with neovim and tmux which also works great in an i3 environment.

I've basically been just using a basic neovim setup for now (haven't even setup the language servers yet) while wrestling the app back up to speed. But with a neotree and multiple tmux windows for commands, it's still been a pretty fluid.

https://lap.dev/lapce

A potentially interesting alternative to Zed without the AI...

(That I have not used, so I don't know if it's good or bad)

I've been keeping an eye on the Zed editor. Developed by some of the same people that made Atom. It's probably stable enough now that I need to give it another go

Link is https://prod.pythonsaber.xyz/ for reference if it doesn’t show up.

come on luddites

we're all doing WASM in Rust these days

I'm definitely a fan of avoiding huge frameworks.

One complaint I have about plain old JS and HTML, though, is that you end up writing a lot of HTML components as just strings. Plain strings of text that is supposed to be valid HTML, but you're not going to get any help with formatting, linting, or even just syntax highlighting when a lot of your code is literally just a big string. The example of Web Components in this post even shows that.

It mentions developer experience vs. user experience as a nod to this, and the "every HTML components is just a big old javascript string" problem is one I always run into early on with my hobby projects, which makes me decide to use a small UI framework pretty quickly. My favorite is Mithril. It's tiny and does basically what you want React to do, without being React. You write these nested Javascript functions that get turned into HTML. So there's no extra loader step, and it plays nicely with Typescript.

Effing thank you!

So is this a matter of people turning mostly-static websites into React monstrosities or is it something else?

Yep, replaced simple HTML with JSON and client side templating, realised it was inherently slower so re-invented server-side generation (now called SSR, server-side rendering, because everything needs a fancy name), and then merge it all together on the client (rehydration).

All this for content that is 99% static and doesn't need that level of interactivity, even the linked site is doing it for some reason, and they don't even have comments or something that would explain it. They're using it purely for navigation where a plain link would suffice.

I’d guess more like gopher