Install Hydrogen for Pulsar in 2024

Since the sunset of the Atom text editor, getting some of its plugins to work in its successor Pulsar has been a bit tricky.

For me the Hydrogen plugin was the most critical issue. After collection partial solutions from many forums, I compiled a script for manually installing it that has worked reliably for me for several months now, on both x86 and arm architectures.

Sorry for the delay in publishing, I hope this helps other Pulsar users.

Tested with Pulsar v1.109.0 on:

64-bit x86 running Ubuntu-23
64-bit arm (Raspberry Pi 5) running Ubuntu-23.10 & 24.0.4 LTS

Prerequisites:

git & curl

# on Debian-based systems
sudo apt -y install build-essential git curl

Pulsar:
I prefer installing Pulsar via the nix-env pacakge manager, as it works on both x86 and arm64 architectures (e.g. Raspberry Pi).

# install nix-env
if command -v nix &> /dev/null; then
    echo "Skipping installation of nix, as it is already installed."
else
    # install nix package manager
    curl -L https://nixos.org/nix/install | sudo sh -s -- --daemon
    source /etc/profile  # load nix command into current shell session
    source .profile      # reload this console's profile on top of the /etc/profile
fi

# install pulsar
export NIXPKGS_ALLOW_INSECURE=1 && nix-env -iA nixpkgs.pulsar

Install Hydrogen-Plugin

# Install NVM and NPM to help build packages
curl -o- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nvm-sh/nvm/v0.39.3/install.sh | bash
source ~/.bashrc
export NVM_DIR="$HOME/.nvm"
[ -s "$NVM_DIR/nvm.sh" ] && \. "$NVM_DIR/nvm.sh"  # This loads nvm
[ -s "$NVM_DIR/bash_completion" ] && \. "$NVM_DIR/bash_completion"  # This loads nvm bash_completion
nvm list-remote
nvm install --lts




## Hydrogen:
## The hydrogen package hasn't been updated since the sunset of Atom,
## and as of 2023-12-17 is broken when using with Pulsar.
## Here's how to install and fix it:

# delete old installation attempts
if [ -d ~/.pulsar/packages/hydrogen ] || [ -d ~/.pulsar/packages/Hydrogen ]; then 
  echo "Please allow sudo access to delete old Hydrogen installation attempts:"
  sudo rm -r ~/.pulsar/packages/hydrogen 2>/dev/null
  sudo rm -r ~/.pulsar/packages/Hydrogen 2>/dev/null
fi
# use Pulsar to install specific version of Hydrogen
pulsar -p install https://github.com/nteract/hydrogen.git -t v2.16.5
# rebuild Hydrogen with specific version of electron
electron_version=$(pulsar --version | grep 'Electron:' | awk '{print $2}')
org_dir=$(pwd)
cd ~/.pulsar/packages/Hydrogen 
npx --yes electron-rebuild --version $electron_version
cd $org_dir

Install Python kernel for Hydrogen

Option 1 (nix-env):

nix-env -iA nixpkgs.jupyter

Option 2 (pip):

python -m pip install ipykernel
python -m ipykernel install