saturn

Dyson Sphere Around a Pulsar

Well this year has been rough for Chlorine.

Basically, I wanted to keep Chlorine plugin working, but Atom was degrading over time. So, I decided to… make a new editor from the ashes of Atom! Or, basically, reuse the plugins that already had the visual elements, for example, and creates a new thing.

That obviously didn’t go right. The reason is quite simple – in the beginning, the idea was to reuse the fragments and plugins of the Atom, even if I had to depend on internal state because, sure, Atom was stale but at least it was receiving updates and security bumps over time, even when their Electron version was really far from the latest stable.

But then Atom died and I had to make a choice. Either I would keep developing Saturn and give up Atom completely (that was one of my ideas), or I could try to keep a version of Atom that did not have the backend functionality; another option was to change editors, for example, to a NeoVim version that had a webview, and focus on developing Clematis. None of these were ideal, especially because the only NeoVim editor that have a programmable webview is NyaoVim, and that is also dead.
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By Maurício Szabo, ago

A sun sets, a pulsar is born

Recently Microsoft announced that the destruction of the Atom editor – I already posted about that, but I want to say that the community response for the sunset was really wonderful – in the beginning, I really thought that the Atom editor would die with the Microsoft announcement. But after posting on a lot of channels, and a very organized “call for arms”, we were able to organize ourselves and create something wonderful – the atom-community is now more active than ever, and indeed there is work being done right now.

People decided join our discord servers; we are reimplementing the API that will be discarded by Microsoft, and modernizing the editor like, for example, bumping tree-sitter and Electron (we now can run Atom on Electron 12); we also will need to rebrand it, and the name chose – Pulsar – could not be more fitting: it’s easy to remember, it basically means a “star that dies, but starts to spin faster and give bursts of radiation”.

I also was able to somehow bootstrap the editor without the original “bootstrap script” from Atom (that is famous to not work correctly, and also need an older version of Node.JS). I was also able to build binaries of Atom with “electron builder” – it’s library from the electron community to build the binaries instead of the way Atom do today (that is a bunch of scripts).

So this makes 5000 lines of code less that we have to keep of Electron scripts – except for the fact that there’s actually a lot of things in Atom that depends on things that these 5k lines do – like some plug-ins that misbehave when you don’t run the scripts, and all the test code that currently will not even run if you don’t bootstrap things.

So what this means for the Saturn editor? Is it the death of the product, like, will Pulsar will be basically the editor that I want to have? And unfortunately, it seems the answer for that question is “no”.
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By Maurício Szabo, ago

Killing Atom

So, Microsoft blogger decided to post about “sunsetting Atom”.

Honestly it’s an amazing euphemism for “for killing Atom” so I’m not going to bother to sweet-coat anything: in fact this post will probably have some harsh words, so if you like Microsoft (for some reason) I advise you to stop reading…

Anyway: Microsoft is a shitty piece of crap company. They committed so many crimes and the reason why they didn’t answer for most of these is because they bought the lawyers that were accusing them. When they they posted that they are going to Sunset Atom, it sounded like an inevitable thing – Atom was stalled, so they’re going to archive the repositories and if someone wants to keep using this just fork it and keep developing the editor.

But the truth is – not even this is possible. And we’re going to find out why in a moment, but first a little bit of story:

Even though Microsoft told everybody that they were going to keep developing the editor, it is strange that years later they decided to just give up on the idea. But this decision was not rushed in any way – they were planning to do that for a long time!
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By Maurício Szabo, ago

Can I split the Atom and, from the parts, generate another thing?

So… my last post was somewhat sad – I tell about how impossible is to keep the Atom editor. Unfortunately, it still holds true – it’s close to impossible to handle the insane amount of code that Atom have.

But maybe is there a different way? So I decided to try: presenting, Project Saturn: a huge editor, but less dense. That’s the idea.

Saturn always fascinated me, and still fascinates: it’s a huge planet, but less dense than water. With a sufficient big bowl of water, Saturn would float. That’s precisely the idea I want in this new editor: to be less dense to keep, while somehow maintaining the power and “wow factor” of the editor. So, how to do it?
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By Maurício Szabo, ago