I tinker a lot with shell scripts and usually just bounce back and forth between vi and command-line testing. But when I get a longer script in progress, I find a GUI text editor makes work a lot easier. I've got pluma (which is installed with MATE) and geany which I installed later, but now I'm hearing about pulsar, which is a fork of the old atom hackable text editor. Has anyone tried pulsar and how do you feel about it? I should find one and stick with it, so I'm at the cusp. I don't think I need a full IDE (geany) and pluma just feels a bit wonky to me. Any suggestions?
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I use geany as my default text editor and very seldom recollect its IDE capabilites. geany fits my taste very well and I do not feel an urge to look for alternatives.
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Back when I used 
16.04 I did use Geany for 'serious' work or Pluma for quick edits. Geany was lightweight, extendable as needed and of course, it's a GTK app so it fits in well.
Never tried pulsar (or atom), I didn't like the lack of a toolbar and with them looking alien to other apps. I see Electron-based editors could be overkill for bash scripts, unless they have plugins or features that makes writing them easier.
While in a terminal, nano with syntax highlighting works for me. Not had a need to learn vi!
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I'm tossing up between something like geany and neovim as I migrate away from vscode. The question for me is do I want a "full vi" setup (like neovim), or something that has many of my favourite vi commands via a plugin (like geany).
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I used Atom a lot for both Python and Ren'py and was disappointed it was being sunset so I am more than a little intrigued about Pulsar. FWIW, I would recommend Pulsar just based on my experience with Atom.
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One thing I like about Pulsar is that it's cross-platform. I've downloaded and installed it on both my MATE server and one of my Macs (where I had used Atom before). One of the first things I've noticed is that it has tons of keyboard shortcuts and is lightning fast (after it loads).
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According to About Geany | Geany
Geany is known to run under Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, macOS, AIX v5.3, Solaris Express and Windows. More generally, it should run on every platform, which is supported by the GTK libraries. Only the Windows port of Geany is missing some features.
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I seem to be fated to running macOS text editors that get discontinued: atom and erbele to name two. As for using vi, remember EDLIN under MS-DOS? Awkward and unintuitive, but you could always be assured it was on the system. I've used vi for so long that it's almost instinctive. In fact, I've set the EDITOR environment variable to vi (/usr/bin/vi) so that if I start writing a long script I can simply move into it by pressing Ctl-X E. Replacing vi with pulsar (or any editor for that matter) makes the whole job of writing scripts/commands a whole lot easier.
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Stephen, if you go thru the Vim_User Google Group discussion postings, you will see that many of the members of that Community feel that neovim, while attractive in some ways, is just a "different paintjob", rather than a "levelling-up" compared to Gvim (which, by the way, is my own favourite text editor, which does have some GUI aspects to it, but I do use Geany for the "integrated development approach", which is what an IDE is for 
).
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Having just reviewed the initial blurb on pulsar, and the note on the sunsetting of Atom, I would venture to suggest that those are/were two applications intended for development of cloud-based applications and, if that is not where you intend to have your application operate from, then those would, in my minimal-exposure estimation, be overkill for a rather "contained" desktop application. IMHO
Of course, given my minimal-exposure, I could be wrong!
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This discussion (which I started ) got me looking closer at text editors, and I found within Geany that which could be a game-changer for me: The built-in terminal emulator! I typically don't have much use for the messages panel, so I keep it off or minimized, and now I see that it contains a terminal. For my purposes, this is a great way to test the syntax of a bash command or concept without having to run two terminal windows (one for the code, the other for the testing). Pulsar doesn't have this (although a package may be available for it).
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Great discussion!
I am enjoying Pulsar so thanks for sharing!
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Just an update, I played around with Pulsar and it is pretty good, but I keep asking myself if it is better than VS Code and the answer, for me, is no. All my coding projects are in VS Code and Pulsar, while very good, is not better than VS Code so it is hard for me to rationalize a switch. Additionally, I made the jump to VS Code after Atom was discontinued so I would hate to start Pulsar and then have it discontinued as well.
I will say Pulsar is more fun than VS Code in the sense you can hack it, create UI and Syntax themes, etc. It has "linux vibe" to it for sure.
I totally enjoyed playing around with Pulsar so thanks again for the discussion.
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