From my own experience of teaching composers, musicians and non-musicians, and as a learner with a background in composition, the learning curve of SuperCollider is stiffer than other programs. As far as I know and have experienced, some of the multimedia arts students are more used to programming after the first few semesters than other fields such as music and humanities. Even engineering and science students in the early semesters, including maths and physics, are not used to programming.
I think that retiring the SC-IDE may discourage many SC beginners who are not familiar with the field of computer science or music informatics. This may lead to a decrease in the number of SC users.
In the meantime, I have tried using Emacs, Atom, Vim, Sublime Text and VSCode etc as SuperCollider front-ends, but my choice was mostly to use
SC-IDE and
sclang from a batch file or terminal on MacOS and Linux, and from the command prompt on Windows.
My recent experience with SuperCollider VSCode / Language Server Protocol support has been extremely positive. It is easy to install and use. The only problem is the keyboard shortcuts, which are different from SC-IDE. I also tried to install SCNVim, but I could not follow the instructions to finish it; and the others are not as intuitive to me.
Why my flavour is fixed to SC-IDE seems to be due to my lack of computer science background.
We probably need to review the recent threads on the SuperCollider frontends:
Recent threads about the frontend for SuperCollider
Which IDE is the most popular for SuperCollider editing code nowadays
Which IDE do you use?
SuperCollider VSCode / Language Server Protocol support
SCNVim - A NeoVim frontend for SuperCollider
hadron editor for SC
Anyone using Sublime text IDE?
Maintaining the current official IDE and implementing new features
@VIRTUALDOG:
Could the following Hadron Editor for SC be the next IDE if maintaining the current official SC IDE is problematic? @htor would be more active in maintaining his IDE and implementing new features requested by other users if his IDE is accepted as the default IDE.
What I can do
All I can do is use what the developers maintain and develop. I just hope that the next environment is convenient, with class names and methods popping up as you type, and related help documents being read by searching from the current cursor position.
I am not visually impaired at the moment, but my eyesight is getting worse and one day I would need more accessibility when using the computer. If it is impossible to implement such a feature with the current community developers, we need to switch to another frontend with such features (and with the features in the IDE wish list), or outsource it with proper payment using donated funds, although I think there are few users who agree with outsourcing, as it does not seem to be the basic philosophy of the SuperCollider community.