The Pulsar team announced the release of Pulsar v1.121, an Electron-based cross-platform text and source code editor. In addition to the usual bug fixes, this release improves the command-line interface and updates language support within the editor.
One of the standout features in this release is the enhanced CLI functionality for macOS and Linux users. Now, when you use the “pulsar -p” command via the “pulsar.sh” launcher script, it will invoke ppm (Pulsar’s package manager) directly without needing to launch the Pulsar editor first.
This improvement mirrors Windows users’ enhancement in the last update, ensuring a more consistent experience across all platforms.
The Linux CLI has also become smarter in detecting where Pulsar is installed on your system. This enhancement particularly benefits those who have extracted Pulsar from the “.tar.gz” tarball distribution.
On the platform-specific improvements side, Pulsar 1.121 addressed a critical issue affecting Apple Silicon Mac users. Previously, an outdated, hard-coded value in ppmโfrom before the era of Apple Siliconโcaused problems when installing certain community packages with native C/C++ dependencies, such as “x-terminal-reloaded” and “autocomplete-paths.”
These packages wouldn’t install correctly and required manual fixes via the terminal. With this update, those packages are now built and rebuilt successfully on ARM64 machines, eliminating the need for manual intervention.
For Windows users, the new version relocated the option to add Pulsar to the system PATH from the settings menu to the installer. This change makes the process more reliable and ensures that the PATH is properly cleaned up during uninstallation.
Inside the editor, Pulsar 1.121 brings updated several language grammars to their latest versions, including CSS, Markdown, JavaScript, TypeScript, and HTML, thus enhancing syntax highlighting and code parsing.
Under the hood, there’s been a major refactor of how Tree-sitter indentation logic is organized within the codebase. While this doesn’t immediately affect your day-to-day use, it lays the groundwork for more advanced indentation features in the future.
The changelog provides detailed information on all novelties in the new version.
The Pulsar code editor is available for Linux users as an installation DEB and RPM package or a distro-agnostic AppImage file. Flatpak fans can also find it on Flathub.
