Hey everyone. I’ve been a Linux user since 2008, and have kept myself solidly within FOSS or GNU/Libre software for a really long time. Not to be a total walking stereotype, I am fundamentally against Microsoft for a multitude of reasons, and I wanted to see if anyone out there has moved onto something different as well. VSCode is a juggernaut in terms of what it can do for developer workflows thanks to the insane plugin community, so I know I’ll need to adjust to a new workflow to a certain degree.
I develop in Laravel and some Symfony, MariaDB and PGSQL, Vue3 and Tailwind. Testing, static analysis, and linting suites are ran on the command line, so that’s not an issue. I don’t use AI in any capacity of my life, so that’s also not a requirement. 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.
I tried KDevelop with PHP support, but that IDE feels very much geared towards KDE development first and foremost. I gave Netbeans a shot last year, and I couldn’t quite get my groove going after a couple weeks. Every couple of years I keep checking in on editors like Netbeans or Sublime… but I feel like I’m not aware of other options.
Suggestions are welcome. Thanks!
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
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).Thanks for this. I’m on KDE, and I have to admit that I never took the time to look into Kate for anything outside of editing random text files. So, I’ve now jumped in and will be test driving this for a few weeks to see if I can make the switch.
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
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
I don’t know if all your desired tooling is covered.
if they’re against vscodium I’m not sure if theia is significantly better
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.
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
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)
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…
I’m Helix only since a couple of years. My dev life is great.
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.
