Pulsar 1.121.0: CLI improvements? Now you're speaking my language!

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Pulsar 1.121.0 is available now!

Pulsar v1.121.0: CLI improvements? Now you're speaking my language.

For this edition of Pulsar, along with the usual bug fixes, we've particularly focused on CLI usage and up-to-date language support.

On Linux and macOS, the pulsar -p command (via the pulsar.sh launcher script) will now invoke ppm directly without having to launch Pulsar first. (We shipped the equivalent enhancement for Windows in the last release.)

The Linux CLI has some further enhancements. It’s now much better at detecting where your Pulsar installation is on disk; this should help those who have extracted Pulsar from the .tar.gz tarball distribution. (Building on this, we hope we can make CLI usage easier for our AppImage users in the next release.)

Speaking of the CLI: we’ve fixed an issue with ppm that was affecting only users with Apple Silicon Macs. An old, hard-coded value in ppm, from before Apple Silicon existed, broke several community packages with native C/C++ module dependencies -- x-terminal-reloaded and autocomplete-paths, to name just two examples. Before now, these packages wouldn’t install correctly on Apple Silicon macs, and would need manual fixing from the terminal. But now, those packages will build and rebuild successfully on your ARM64 machine.

Meanwhile on Windows, the ability to add Pulsar to the PATH has been moved from the settings menu to the installer. This approach should work much more reliably, and is able to clean up the user's PATH during an uninstall.

Inside the editor we’ve got a number of improvements to language grammars. Our underlying web-tree-sitter library has been bumped to the latest stable version, as have our grammars for CSS, Markdown, JavaScript, TypeScript, and HTML.

Under the hood, there’s been a major refactor of how Tree-sitter indentation logic is organized in our codebase. This doesn’t have direct effects on the user, but should make it easier to iterate on indentation logic and deliver more features to the indentation hinting system.

In fact, there’s one new feature for indentation: a new @match.next capture. It’s not something that a grammar author would commonly need, but it allows them to do things that weren’t possible before — for instance, to move the indentation level to its proper place after a “hanging indent.”

In the coming releases, some built-in grammars may take advantage of this feature to deliver indentation hinting options that come closer to "reading your mind".

That's everything this time around, and as always a gracious thank you to our wonderful community, all those that contribute to issues, discussions and pull requests, and help make Pulsar possible through donations, bug reports, and helping to support other users.

Until next time, happy coding, and see you amongst the stars! - The Pulsar team

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