Ordnance Survey by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Has some of the best map data available for the United Kingdom, but their data appears to be proprietary?
Monaco (editor) by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
However also at the same time very limited integration with vscode, that makes using it for VScode compatibility almost useless, e.g.:
Vim by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Before we get a decent open source integrated development environment, what else can you do?
But also perfect for small one-off files when you don't have the patience to setup said IDE.
vim's defaults are atrocious for the 21st century! Vundle is reasonable as an ad-hoc package manager, but it can't set fixed versions of packages:
Vimium by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Since you can't escape shitty browser GUIs and live in the command line, the next best thing you can do is to bring Vim bindings to your browser :-)
There is one major annoyance: you can't use ESC to leave the address bar focus, but using Tab as a workaround works:
Eclipse (IDE) by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Once upon a time (early 2010's), Eclipse dominated the IDE landscape and all was good. NetBeans was around too. And Java was still unmarred by Google LLC v. Oracle America, Inc..
But then something happened.
For some reason, Eclipse started to decay.
And the project that had once been a vibrant community of awesomeness, started to become... a zombie of its former self.
Buggyness started increasing. And not even hard to fix bugs. One liners that affect every user immediately after startup.
Sometimes, to Eclipse's defense they weren't "bugs". Just features that it became evident with time every programmer expected from a modern IDE.
But somehow the Eclipse community had a deep problem. A cancer. It had completely lost touch with user experience.
Perhaps is was due to the increasing interest of the several corporations that had adopted Eclipse as the base IDE for the proprietary solutions?
Perhaps.
Many users stuck to the IDE.
Some heroic efforts were made as plugins that drastically improved certain defects. The Darkest Dark plugin comes to mind.
But all those efforts required configuration. A setup time that most users simply don't have. The core devteam had become dumb and dead, unable to incorporate such changes.
This greatly opened up the space for other competing IDEs to come along. The "semi feature complete but at least easy to use and not so buggy" Visual Studio Code and the proprietary JetBrains IDEs being some of the most notable ones.
Using Eclipse as of the early 2020's is such a mixed experience. If you spend enough time to configure out the key buggyness, there are moments where you can feel "OMG, this feature is amazing".
But the effort is just too great, and soon another bug or obvious missing feature hits you and brings you back to reality.
Every young person uses VS Code now. Eclipse is dead, and there is no way back, usage will just continue dropping.
RIP, Eclipse. It wasn't meant to be.
Figure 1.
Eclipse. usage from 2012 to 2016 according to a JRebel survey
. Source.

Pinned article: Introduction to the OurBigBook Project

Welcome to the OurBigBook Project! Our goal is to create the perfect publishing platform for STEM subjects, and get university-level students to write the best free STEM tutorials ever.
Everyone is welcome to create an account and play with the site: ourbigbook.com/go/register. We belive that students themselves can write amazing tutorials, but teachers are welcome too. You can write about anything you want, it doesn't have to be STEM or even educational. Silly test content is very welcome and you won't be penalized in any way. Just keep it legal!
We have two killer features:
  1. topics: topics group articles by different users with the same title, e.g. here is the topic for the "Fundamental Theorem of Calculus" ourbigbook.com/go/topic/fundamental-theorem-of-calculus
    Articles of different users are sorted by upvote within each article page. This feature is a bit like:
    • a Wikipedia where each user can have their own version of each article
    • a Q&A website like Stack Overflow, where multiple people can give their views on a given topic, and the best ones are sorted by upvote. Except you don't need to wait for someone to ask first, and any topic goes, no matter how narrow or broad
    This feature makes it possible for readers to find better explanations of any topic created by other writers. And it allows writers to create an explanation in a place that readers might actually find it.
    Figure 1.
    Screenshot of the "Derivative" topic page
    . View it live at: ourbigbook.com/go/topic/derivative
  2. local editing: you can store all your personal knowledge base content locally in a plaintext markup format that can be edited locally and published either:
    This way you can be sure that even if OurBigBook.com were to go down one day (which we have no plans to do as it is quite cheap to host!), your content will still be perfectly readable as a static site.
    Figure 2.
    You can publish local OurBigBook lightweight markup files to either https://OurBigBook.com or as a static website
    .
    Figure 3.
    Visual Studio Code extension installation
    .
    Figure 4.
    Visual Studio Code extension tree navigation
    .
    Figure 5.
    Web editor
    . You can also edit articles on the Web editor without installing anything locally.
    Video 3.
    Edit locally and publish demo
    . Source. This shows editing OurBigBook Markup and publishing it using the Visual Studio Code extension.
    Video 4.
    OurBigBook Visual Studio Code extension editing and navigation demo
    . Source.
  3. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook-media/master/feature/x/hilbert-space-arrow.png
  4. Infinitely deep tables of contents:
    Figure 6.
    Dynamic article tree with infinitely deep table of contents
    .
    Descendant pages can also show up as toplevel e.g.: ourbigbook.com/cirosantilli/chordate-subclade
All our software is open source and hosted at: github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook
Further documentation can be found at: docs.ourbigbook.com
Feel free to reach our to us for any help or suggestions: docs.ourbigbook.com/#contact