 One of the biggest stories in 2022 was the announcement by Microsoft, who now owns GitHub, that they were going to kill the Adam Text Editor. The Adam Text Editor was originally built by GitHub. They created the Adam Text Editor. They were the maintainers of the Adam Text Editor. And then, of course, when Microsoft bought GitHub, Microsoft became the maintainers of the Adam Text Editor. But Microsoft has VS Code, a very similar project. We knew when Microsoft bought GitHub, they weren't going to continue on with Adam forever. They'd probably eventually killed the project. And that's what happened about five or six months ago. They announced that they were going to sunset the Adam Text Editor, which caused a lot of anxiety and anger in the community because a lot of people depend on the Adam Text Editor. Many people have been using it for years and they love the project. Many of them have been contributing to the project for a number of years. But one of the things with free and open source software, I often say this, free and open source software never dies. If there's enough people around that want something to continue as far as free and open source software, if you want to put in the effort to maintain it yourself and to continue developing this piece of software, you can make it happen. And that's exactly what the community is doing with Adam. What they have done is they have forked Adam and they're going to continue on with this new text editor that they're calling Pulsar. One of the contributors to the Pulsar text editor reached out to me. He messaged me and to let me know about this new project. And he, of course, he wanted me to share the announcement that this thing exists with you guys. And that's why I'm doing today's video. He wrote to me, hey, DT, I know you aren't the biggest fan of the Adam Text Editor, but I know you do love open source. And I thought you might like to know that a small community came together after GitHub decided to kill Adam off so that we could keep it going. And we renamed it Pulsar. This isn't some pipe dream either. There is a lot of good work going on to modernize it, bumping node versions, electron versions, et cetera, with a view to bringing it up to date. We plan to really emphasize the hackability of it. Really think of it almost like a JavaScript Emacs where you can alter and customize almost any area of the editor you want. That sounds really interesting because honestly, the Adam Text Editor did have a lot of really neat plug-ins. It was quite customizable in that department. It was very good. Did it be better? Yes. And I love the fact that this new fork of Adam is not just going to be the same thing, right? Especially now that it's a community project, it's not something run by GitHub or Microsoft. I think you're going to see a lot more development in that kind of area when we talk about customization and flexibility and the ability to make your Text Editor truly extensible. I think being a community run project is the right way to go. So what we're looking at right now, this is pulsar-edit.dev. That's the web URL for the pulsar site, the official website. There is also a GitHub and if I go to the GitHub and there's several pulsar-related repositories and there is a ton of contributors that are working on this thing, and they're working on this thing rather fast and furiously because on the 15th of this month, I believe that is when Adam officially sunsets and that's when the Adam repositories are going to be dead. If I go back to the official site at pulsar-edit.dev, one thing I noticed when I go to download because when this guy messaged me, I thought, well, let me take a quick look to see how this fork of Adam looks. I go to their downloads page and there's nothing to download. It says under construction, now this is a brand new fork, it's just getting underway. So anything we would take a look at would be alpha or beta level software, right? They're probably not wanting anybody to really run this thing, maybe for production reasons, right? Just yet, they're going to get this up to speed rather quickly though, but I did notice on Linux, there is an app image, there's also a RPM package, a dev package, and you could also run it simply as a tarball, right? You can just extract a binary executable from a tarball. But of course, being on an Arch Linux-based distribution, I figured somebody probably already packaged this thing in the AUR and I was right. I found Pulsar-min in the AUR, so I went ahead and installed Pulsar-min using Paru or if you're using Yay or another AUR helper on Arch, you can install that particular package. And let me go ahead and launch Pulsar, just to verify that it does actually launch. Now I was never an Adam user, so I'm not really going to show you much about Pulsar because I've never really used either Pulsar or Adam too much, but it's your standard kind of IDE, right? It's more than just a text editor, it's a complete IDE. And as you often get in full IDEs, you get this little side column here where I could open a project and you'd see like your little file tree or whatever and you've got several panes you could work in, so you could have multiple projects open. What I'm going to do, just to verify that it'll actually launch some files, I'm going to go into my home directory, I need a hidden file, I'll do my bash rc. Let me do ctrl-h here in the file picker to show hidden files because they're not shown by default. And then I'm going to scroll up here, let's go to the bash rc and there's the bash rc and this pane here, I thought it maybe would open it in the main pane, but it did not. Let me just close this pane, that's the welcome pane and now we have this horizontal split here with untitled, let's get rid of that, a welcome guide, so yeah, so if you didn't know exactly where everything was, that's actually a nice touch, it's kind of almost like the dashboard you get in something like Doomy Max or the dashboard you get in something like a Lunar Vim or you know, any of Astro Vim, any of those Vim distributions, but I'm going to close the welcome guide here, you're going to see Adam being a GUI applications, the font rendering, it's really nice, really beautiful syntax highlighting and everything, of course it uses the standard default color scheme that Adam used which was dark one, which you guys know that Doomy Max uses kind of a similar scheme that they call doom one, it's essentially the same color scheme, they just renamed it to doom one from dark one, but I love this particular color scheme and I do notice that there is another tab open change log, let's see, yeah, we do get a change log for this particular version of Pulsar, it's letting us know it bumped Electron 12 to node 14 and also added a rebranding API, probably a lot of rebranding going on because Adam is large code base, it's not a small project and you probably do have to do a lot of rebranding stuff when you fork a project this size, but again, I'm not really going to show you how to use this editor because again, it's not something I have much experience with, I do want to go back a little bit to the message that I received from one of the contributors, he goes on to write me, we still have some ongoing work for completing a rebrand of the website, so it's functional, the website right now, but it isn't perfect yet, we have a lot of content on there already and we really want to make the documentation for Pulsar amazing, so they really want to focus on the documentation, the other thing he mentions is they really want to get the word out that this project exists and they want people to contribute, those of you that want to contribute as far as development, contribute your time, contribute code, maybe they need people to contribute even things like artwork, maybe they need help with the website, whatever skills you have, there's probably a way you can help contribute to a big project like this and of course, they really want people to contribute financially, they're looking for funds because a project this size actually needs some money behind it to help fund that development. If I get back to the desktop and get back into the web browser, let me go back to their homepage, one thing I will say that many free and open source software projects do a rather poor job of asking for donations, I think a lot of these projects would get funded, I think they would be surprised how many people in the community would donate to their project if you make it easy for people to donate and you actually ask up front and often because on their website, one of the things that I would want to see immediately, I would like to see a donate link somewhere up here, there's nothing here that says anything about donations or contributions or anything like that, when I read the front page here, I never see anything that says anything about donating money, the only thing there is this little money symbol here and this is actually where they want people to contribute, this is opencollective.com so you can go there and contribute, I've never heard of open collective, I don't know anything about it and this is another problem with a lot of these free and open source software projects is I think they should use as many of these donation platforms as possible, but really you need to be on the major platforms that people are already members of, for example, you really need to have a way for me to donate via PayPal, most people around the world have a PayPal account, not every country around the world supports PayPal, but a large percentage of the people out there are able to donate to any project they want to through PayPal, also Patreon, many free and open source software projects have a Patreon, thus many of us that contribute regularly to various open source software projects are also on Patreon that I donate to many free and open source software projects that have a Patreon and I know many of you guys do too, of course many of you guys donate to me over on Patreon so I know there's a lot of people within the free software community, the open source community over on Patreon and I think you would see an explosion as far as your donations if you were on those platforms. Make sure you at least have a Patreon and a PayPal account that I can donate to because one of the things about free and open source software is a lot of these projects, a lot of these people that are contributing, they're just there to code, right? They're programmers, they're not, they don't have any marketing experience or business experience, that's not why they're doing this. They originally just wanted to create something, they're creators, right? They're not wanting to deal with the business part of it and I think that's why many of these open source software projects they fail as far as gaining traction, as far as getting donations and actually being able to have the funds needed for proper development. So those of you that are part of the Pulsar team, I hope you guys take that to heart and again, I would strongly, strongly recommend you have a Patreon and a PayPal, also make sure the donate link is right there up front on the website, make sure you're always asking. You could even mention like a Patreon link in the application itself, the Pulsar editor. You don't want to be obnoxious with ads because free and open source software community, we hate ads in our applications, right? But there's no reason why you couldn't have some easy link in the application at least like in the about menu where, hey, when I get the about screen that comes up and tells me the name of the program, what version it is and things like that. Hey, if you want to contribute, here's a link, you know, make sure that that stuff is there up front. That said, I'm really excited about this project. Again, I I'm a big fan, not necessarily of this editor, but I'm just a fan of open source in general, right? I want free and open source software to succeed. And I know so many of you guys were really just bummed out that the Adam text editor died. And now you have a place to go before I go. I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this episode. Of course, I'm talking about Gabe James, Matt Maxim, Mimit, Mitchell Paul, West, while you bald homie, Alex, Armoredragon, Chuck, Commander, Angry, Diochai, George, Lee, Marstrum, Nate, Erion, Alexander, Paul, P. Sarge, Infador, Polytech, Realities for Less Red Profit, Roland, Steven, tools, Devlin, and really these guys. They're my highest tiered patrons over on Patreon without these guys. This episode about the Pulsar editor would not have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen. These are all my supporters over on Patreon because I don't have any corporate sponsors. I depend on you guys. If you like my work, I want to see more videos about free and open source software, subscribe to DistroTube over on Patreon. All right, guys. Peace. Think of it like a JavaScript Emacs. That's interesting.