Featherweb Blog

Looking for a new editor

Now that Atom is put on its death bed, the question becomes what's next? Most bloggers so far advised to be pragmatic and move to Visual Studio. Same as happened when Adobe stopped developing Brackets, even Adobe itself told the Brackets users to choose Visual Studio.

Some argue that even if Atom would be successfully forked, that fork would not stand a chance to survive the competition from the multi-billion dollar owner of Visual Studio. Sigh, is that being pragmatic or being defeatist? I can only hope some judge will, in the foreseeable future, decide that open source projects cannot be bought or otherwise silenced by money. Until then, stealing from the brightest minds to create a monopoly will just continue.

A new sunrise

always follows a sunset, marking the end of a night...A lot of dawn can -and will !- happen between now and December 15. I started seriously looking for a new editor and I'm hopeful. One of the projects I started to actively follow is Zed. These guys seem to be experienced no-nonsense developers with a passion for speed and innovation! A first public alpha is scheduled for the end of this year. No promises though. There's already a private alpha. I think you need to be invited for that. My only worry is that Zed will be a very professional coding editor for developers, not really the html editor I need. We'll see.

Here comes Phoenix

Modern, Open-source, IDE For The Web

Rising from the Brackets ashes, surprisingly useable already: Phoenix. For now it only works in Chrome, Chromium and Opera. I tried Brave and Firefox: it seemed to work but opening (and saving back to) a local file or folder was not possible with these two browsers. I downloaded Opera and was really positively surprised, despite Phoenix being labeled "experimental" and "alpha" at this point in time. The developers behind the Phoenix project have already created a new community edition of Brackets, version 2.01. (for windows and mac) They see the Phoenix IDE as a test-bed and base for a future Brackets 3 edition.

With a little help from my friends

If you too believe in an open minded, open source, collaborative future and you also love free web writing, let me know what you have discovered. I am only one person after all. Be it an article, a blog post, an editor project, whatever made your juices flow more unrestricted.:) Thank you!