ππ First off, thanks for taking the time to contribute! ππ
The following is a set of guidelines for contributing to Pulsar and its packages, which are hosted in the Pulsar Organization on GitHub. These are mostly guidelines, not rules. Use your best judgment, and feel free to propose changes to this document in a pull request.
Its also worth mentioning, that while many items here to apply, during our early stages as an Organization, there are special guidelines to consider.
I don't want to read this whole thing, I just have a question!!!
What should I know before I get started?
- Git Commit Messages
- JavaScript Styleguide
- CoffeeScript Styleguide
- Specs Styleguide
- Documentation Styleguide
This project and everyone participating in it is governed by the Pulsar Code of Conduct. By participating, you are expected to uphold this code. Please report unacceptable behavior to the maintainers or GitHub.
Note: Please don't file an issue to ask a question. You'll get faster results by using the resources below.
Feel free to contribute to the Pulsar-Edit Discussions to talk with the community, and have questions answered. Or we also have a Discord server where questions can be asked directly with the maintainers.
Pulsar is a large open source project β it's made up of over 200 repositories. When you initially consider contributing to Pulsar, you might be unsure about which of those 200 repositories implements the functionality you want to change or report a bug for. This section should help you with that.
Pulsar is intentionally very modular. Nearly every non-editor UI element you interact with comes from a package, even fundamental things like tabs and the status-bar. These packages are packages in the same way that packages in the Pulsar package repository are packages, with one difference: they are bundled into the default distribution.
To get a sense for the packages that are bundled with Pulsar, you can go to Settings
> Packages
within Pulsar and take a look at the Core Packages section.
To see a list of repos that are within the org, you can refer to the full repo table.
There are many more, but this list should be a good starting point. For more information on how to work with Pulsar's official packages, see [Contributing to Pulsar Packages][contributing-to-official-pulsar-packages].
Also, because Pulsar is so extensible, it's possible that a feature you've become accustomed to in Pulsar or an issue you're encountering isn't coming from a bundled package at all, but rather a community package you've installed. Each community package has its own repository too.
There are a few conventions that have developed over time around packages:
- Packages that add one or more syntax highlighting grammars are named
language-[language-name]
- Language packages can add other things besides just a grammar. Many offer commonly-used snippets. Try not to add too much though.
- Theme packages are split into two categories: UI and Syntax themes
- UI themes are named
[theme-name]-ui
- Syntax themes are named
[theme-name]-syntax
- Often themes that are designed to work together are given the same root name, for example:
one-dark-ui
andone-dark-syntax
- UI themes style everything outside of the editor pane β all of the green areas in the packages image above
- Syntax themes style just the items inside the editor pane, mostly syntax highlighting
- UI themes are named
- Packages that add autocomplete providers are named
autocomplete-[what-they-autocomplete]
β ex: autocomplete-css
When we make a significant decision in how we maintain the project and what we can or cannot support, this will be discussed and possibly voted upon in our Discord Server. If you have a question around how we do things, check to see if it is documented there. If it is not documented there, please open a new topic on Github Discussions, the official Pulsar message board and ask your question.
This section guides you through submitting a bug report for Pulsar. Following these guidelines helps maintainers and the community understand your report π, reproduce the behavior π» π», and find related reports π.
Before creating bug reports, please check this list as you might find out that you don't need to create one. When you are creating a bug report, please include as many details as possible. Fill out the required template, the information it asks for helps us resolve issues faster.
Note: If you find a Closed issue that seems like it is the same thing that you're experiencing, open a new issue and include a link to the original issue in the body of your new one.
- Check the debugging guide. You might be able to find the cause of the problem and fix things yourself. Most importantly, check if you can reproduce the problem in the latest version of Pulsar, if the problem happens when you run Pulsar in safe mode, and if you can get the desired behavior by changing Atom's or packages' config settings.
- Check the faq and the discussions for a list of common questions and problems.
- Determine which repository the problem should be reported in.
- Perform a cursory search to see if the problem has already been reported. If it has and the issue is still open, add a comment to the existing issue instead of opening a new one.
Bugs are tracked as GitHub issues. After you've determined which repository your bug is related to, create an issue on that repository and provide the following information by filling in the template.
Explain the problem and include additional details to help maintainers reproduce the problem:
- Use a clear and descriptive title for the issue to identify the problem.
- Describe the exact steps which reproduce the problem in as many details as possible. For example, start by explaining how you started Pulsar, e.g. which command exactly you used in the terminal, or how you started Pulsar otherwise. When listing steps, don't just say what you did, but explain how you did it. For example, if you moved the cursor to the end of a line, explain if you used the mouse, or a keyboard shortcut or an Pulsar command, and if so which one?
- Provide specific examples to demonstrate the steps. Include links to files or GitHub projects, or copy/pasteable snippets, which you use in those examples. If you're providing snippets in the issue, use Markdown code blocks.
- Describe the behavior you observed after following the steps and point out what exactly is the problem with that behavior.
- Explain which behavior you expected to see instead and why.
- Include screenshots and animated GIFs which show you following the described steps and clearly demonstrate the problem. If you use the keyboard while following the steps, record the GIF with the Keybinding Resolver shown. You can use this tool to record GIFs on macOS and Windows, and this tool or this tool on Linux.
- If you're reporting that Pulsar crashed, include a crash report with a stack trace from the operating system. On macOS, the crash report will be available in
Console.app
under "Diagnostic and usage information" > "User diagnostic reports". Include the crash report in the issue in a code block, a file attachment with your report. - If Chrome's developer tools pane is shown without you triggering it, that normally means that you have a syntax error in one of your themes or in your
styles.less
. Try running in Safe Mode and using a different theme or comment out the contents of yourstyles.less
to see if that fixes the problem. - If the problem wasn't triggered by a specific action, describe what you were doing before the problem happened and share more information using the guidelines below.
Provide more context by answering these questions:
- Can you reproduce the problem in safe mode?
- Did the problem start happening recently (e.g. after updating to a new version of Pulsar) or was this always a problem?
- If the problem started happening recently, can you reproduce the problem in an older version of Pulsar? What's the most recent version in which the problem doesn't happen? You can download older versions of Pulsar from the releases page.
- Can you reliably reproduce the issue? If not, provide details about how often the problem happens and under which conditions it normally happens.
- If the problem is related to working with files (e.g. opening and editing files), does the problem happen for all files and projects or only some? Does the problem happen only when working with local or remote files (e.g. on network drives), with files of a specific type (e.g. only JavaScript or Python files), with large files or files with very long lines, or with files in a specific encoding? Is there anything else special about the files you are using?
Include details about your configuration and environment:
- Which version of Pulsar are you using? You can get the exact version by running
pulsar -v
in your terminal, or by starting Pulsar and running theApplication: About
command from the Command Palette. - What's the name and version of the OS you're using?
- Are you running Pulsar in a virtual machine? If so, which VM software are you using and which operating systems and versions are used for the host and the guest?
- Which packages do you have installed? You can get that list by running
apm list --installed
. - Are you using local configuration files
config.cson
,keymap.cson
,snippets.cson
,styles.less
andinit.js
to customize Pulsar? If so, provide the contents of those files, preferably in a code block or with a link to a gist. - Are you using Pulsar with multiple monitors? If so, can you reproduce the problem when you use a single monitor?
- Which keyboard layout are you using? Are you using a US layout or some other layout?
This section guides you through submitting an enhancement suggestion for Pulsar, including completely new features and minor improvements to existing functionality. Following these guidelines helps maintainers and the community understand your suggestion π and find related suggestions π.
Before creating enhancement suggestions, please check this list as you might find out that you don't need to create one. When you are creating an enhancement suggestion, please include as many details as possible. Fill in the template, including the steps that you imagine you would take if the feature you're requesting existed.
- Check the debugging guide for tips β you might discover that the enhancement is already available. Most importantly, check if you're using the latest version of Pulsar and if you can get the desired behavior by changing Pulsar's or packages' config settings.
- Check if there's already a package which provides that enhancement.
- Determine which repository the enhancement should be suggested in.
- Perform a cursory search to see if the enhancement has already been suggested. If it has, add a comment to the existing issue instead of opening a new one.
Enhancement suggestions are tracked as GitHub issues. After you've determined which repository your enhancement suggestion is related to, create an issue on that repository and provide the following information:
- Use a clear and descriptive title for the issue to identify the suggestion.
- Provide a step-by-step description of the suggested enhancement in as many details as possible.
- Provide specific examples to demonstrate the steps. Include copy/pasteable snippets which you use in those examples, as Markdown code blocks.
- Describe the current behavior and explain which behavior you expected to see instead and why.
- Include screenshots and animated GIFs which help you demonstrate the steps or point out the part of Pulsar which the suggestion is related to. You can use this tool to record GIFs on macOS and Windows, and this tool or this tool on Linux.
- Explain why this enhancement would be useful to most Pulsar users and isn't something that can or should be implemented as a community package.
- List some other text editors or applications where this enhancement exists.
- Specify which version of Pulsar you're using. You can get the exact version by running
pulsar -v
in your terminal, or by starting Pulsar and running theApplication: About
command from the Command Palette. - Specify the name and version of the OS you're using.
Unsure where to begin contributing to Pulsar? You can start by looking through these beginner
and help-wanted
issues:
- Beginner issues - issues which should only require a few lines of code, and a test or two.
- Help wanted issues - issues which should be a bit more involved than
beginner
issues.
Both issue lists are sorted by total number of comments. While not perfect, number of comments is a reasonable proxy for impact a given change will have.
If you want to read about using Pulsar or developing packages in Pulsar, the Pulsar documentation is free and available online. You can find the source to the manual in pulsar-edit/pulsar-edit.github.io.
Pulsar Core and all packages can be developed locally. For instructions on how to do this, see the following sections in the Pulsar documentation:
The process described here has several goals:
- Maintain Pulsar's quality
- Fix problems that are important to users
- Engage the community in working toward the best possible Pulsar
- Enable a sustainable system for Pulsar's maintainers to review contributions
Please follow these steps to have your contribution considered by the maintainers:
- Follow all instructions in the template
- Follow the styleguides
- After you submit your pull request, verify that all status checks are passing
What if the status checks are failing?
If a status check is failing, and you believe that the failure is unrelated to your change, please leave a comment on the pull request explaining why you believe the failure is unrelated. A maintainer will re-run the status check for you. If we conclude that the failure was a false positive, then we will open an issue to track that problem with our status check suite.
While the prerequisites above must be satisfied prior to having your pull request reviewed, the reviewer(s) may ask you to complete additional design work, tests, or other changes before your pull request can be ultimately accepted.
It happens that a pull request is started but not finished and despite our attempts to contact the contributor, we don't hear from them again.
In that case we will not merge the pull request, even if only small changes are missing. Our policy is simply to close the pull request. Why? Because an unfinished pull request essentially means giving us work and moving on. We would rather not encourage this behavior.
Also, please note that since we have spent time reviewing the pull request and proposing solutions, we reserve the right to re-use that knowledge to create a new pull request, potentially based on your changes.
We'd much prefer that you complete the pull request though, so we'll be sure to ping you a few times before that!
- Use the present tense ("Add feature" not "Added feature")
- Use the imperative mood ("Move cursor to..." not "Moves cursor to...")
- Limit the first line to 72 characters or less
- Reference issues and pull requests liberally after the first line
- When only changing documentation, include
[ci skip]
in the commit title
All JavaScript code is linted with Prettier.
- Prefer the object spread operator (
{...anotherObj}
) toObject.assign()
- Inline
export
s with expressions whenever possible// Use this: export default class ClassName { } // Instead of: class ClassName { } export default ClassName
- Place requires in the following order:
- Built in Node Modules (such as
path
) - Built in Atom and Electron Modules (such as
atom
,remote
) - Local Modules (using relative paths)
- Built in Node Modules (such as
- Place class properties in the following order:
- Class methods and properties (methods starting with
static
) - Instance methods and properties
- Class methods and properties (methods starting with
- Avoid platform-dependent code
- It's also important to note that CoffeeScript is deprecated, while the codebase is decaffeinated.
- Set parameter defaults without spaces around the equal sign
clear = (count=1) ->
instead ofclear = (count = 1) ->
- Use spaces around operators
count + 1
instead ofcount+1
- Use spaces after commas (unless separated by newlines)
- Use parentheses if it improves code clarity.
- Prefer alphabetic keywords to symbolic keywords:
a is b
instead ofa == b
- Avoid spaces inside the curly-braces of hash literals:
{a: 1, b: 2}
instead of{ a: 1, b: 2 }
- Include a single line of whitespace between methods.
- Capitalize initialisms and acronyms in names, except for the first word, which
should be lower-case:
getURI
instead ofgetUri
uriToOpen
instead ofURIToOpen
- Use
slice()
to copy an array - Add an explicit
return
when your function ends with afor
/while
loop and you don't want it to return a collected array. - Use
this
instead of a standalone@
return this
instead ofreturn @
- Place requires in the following order:
- Built in Node Modules (such as
path
) - Built in Atom and Electron Modules (such as
atom
,remote
) - Local Modules (using relative paths)
- Built in Node Modules (such as
- Place class properties in the following order:
- Class methods and properties (methods starting with a
@
) - Instance methods and properties
- Class methods and properties (methods starting with a
- Avoid platform-dependent code
- Include thoughtfully-worded, well-structured Jasmine specs in the
./spec
folder. - Treat
describe
as a noun or situation. - Treat
it
as a statement about state or how an operation changes state.
describe 'a dog', ->
it 'barks', ->
# spec here
describe 'when the dog is happy', ->
it 'wags its tail', ->
# spec here
- Use AtomrDoc.
- Use Markdown.
- Reference methods and classes in markdown with the custom
{}
notation:- Reference classes with
{ClassName}
- Reference instance methods with
{ClassName::methodName}
- Reference class methods with
{ClassName.methodName}
- Reference classes with
# Public: Disable the package with the given name.
#
# * `name` The {String} name of the package to disable.
# * `options` (optional) The {Object} with disable options (default: {}):
# * `trackTime` A {Boolean}, `true` to track the amount of time taken.
# * `ignoreErrors` A {Boolean}, `true` to catch and ignore errors thrown.
# * `callback` The {Function} to call after the package has been disabled.
#
# Returns `undefined`.
disablePackage: (name, options, callback) ->
This section lists the labels we use to help us track and manage issues and pull requests. Most labels are used across all Pulsar repositories, but some are specific to pulsar-edit/pulsar
.
GitHub search makes it easy to use labels for finding groups of issues or pull requests you're interested in. For example, you might be interested in open issues across pulsar-edit/pulsar
and all Pulsar-owned packages which are labeled as bugs, but still need to be reliably reproduced or perhaps open pull requests in pulsar-edit/pulsar
which haven't been reviewed yet. To help you find issues and pull requests, each label is listed with search links for finding open items with that label in pulsar-edit/pulsar
only and also across all Pulsar repositories. We encourage you to read about other search filters which will help you write more focused queries.
The labels are loosely grouped by their purpose, but it's not required that every issue has a label from every group or that an issue can't have more than one label from the same group.
Please open an issue on pulsar-edit/pulsar
if you have suggestions for new labels, and if you notice some labels are missing on some repositories, then please open an issue on that repository.
Label name | pulsar-edit/pulsar π |
pulsar-edit βorg π |
Description |
---|---|---|---|
enhancement |
search | search | Feature requests. |
bug |
search | search | Confirmed bugs or reports that are very likely to be bugs. |
question |
search | search | Questions more than bug reports or feature requests (e.g. how do I do X). |
feedback |
search | search | General feedback more than bug reports or feature requests. |
help-wanted |
search | search | The Pulsar core team would appreciate help from the community in resolving these issues. |
beginner |
search | search | Less complex issues which would be good first issues to work on for users who want to contribute to Pulsar. |
more-information-needed |
search | search | More information needs to be collected about these problems or feature requests (e.g. steps to reproduce). |
needs-reproduction |
search | search | Likely bugs, but haven't been reliably reproduced. |
blocked |
search | search | Issues blocked on other issues. |
duplicate |
search | search | Issues which are duplicates of other issues, i.e. they have been reported before. |
wontfix |
search | search | The Pulsar core team has decided not to fix these issues for now, either because they're working as intended or for some other reason. |
invalid |
search | search | Issues which aren't valid (e.g. user errors). |
package-idea |
search | search | Feature request which might be good candidates for new packages, instead of extending Pulsar or core Pulsar packages. |
wrong-repo |
search | search | Issues reported on the wrong repository (e.g. a bug related to the Settings View package was reported on Pulsar core). |
rebrand |
search | search | Related to the rebrand effort across the org. |
Label name | pulsar-edit/pulsar π |
pulsar-edit βorg π |
Description |
---|---|---|---|
windows |
search | search | Related to Pulsar running on Windows. |
linux |
search | search | Related to Pulsar running on Linux. |
mac |
search | search | Related to Pulsar running on macOS. |
documentation |
search | search | Related to any type of documentation (e.g. API documentation and the Pulsar documentation). |
performance |
search | search | Related to performance. |
security |
search | search | Related to security. |
ui |
search | search | Related to visual design. |
api |
search | search | Related to Pulsar's public APIs. |
uncaught-exception |
search | search | Issues about uncaught exceptions, normally created from the Notifications package. |
crash |
search | search | Reports of Pulsar completely crashing. |
auto-indent |
search | search | Related to auto-indenting text. |
encoding |
search | search | Related to character encoding. |
network |
search | search | Related to network problems or working with remote files (e.g. on network drives). |
git |
search | search | Related to Git functionality (e.g. problems with gitignore files or with showing the correct file status). |
Label name | pulsar-edit/pulsar π |
pulsar-edit βorg π |
Description |
---|---|---|---|
editor-rendering |
search | search | Related to language-independent aspects of rendering text (e.g. scrolling, soft wrap, and font rendering). |
build-error |
search | search | Related to problems with building Pulsar from source. |
error-from-pathwatcher |
search | search | Related to errors thrown by the pathwatcher library. |
error-from-save |
search | search | Related to errors thrown when saving files. |
error-from-open |
search | search | Related to errors thrown when opening files. |
installer |
search | search | Related to the Pulsar installers for different OSes. |
auto-updater |
search | search | Related to the auto-updater for different OSes. |
deprecation-help |
search | search | Issues for helping package authors remove usage of deprecated APIs in packages. |
electron |
search | search | Issues that require changes to Electron to fix or implement. |
Label name | pulsar-edit/pulsar π |
pulsar-edit βorg π |
Description |
---|---|---|---|
work-in-progress |
search | search | Pull requests which are still being worked on, more changes will follow. |
needs-review |
search | search | Pull requests which need code review, and approval from maintainers or Pulsar core team. |
under-review |
search | search | Pull requests being reviewed by maintainers or Pulsar core team. |
requires-changes |
search | search | Pull requests which need to be updated based on review comments and then reviewed again. |
needs-testing |
search | search | Pull requests which need manual testing. |