GitHub's new text editor leaked on Twitter

https://github.com/atom

by almightygod • 12 years ago

706 249 12 years ago

github.com

almightygod2• 12 years ago

whois atom.io =>

Domain : atom.io

Status : Client Updt+Delt Lock

Owner : GitHub Hostmaster

Owner : GitHub, Inc.

Owner : 88 Colin P Kelly Jr St

Owner : San Francisco

Owner : CA

Owner : US

aroman2• 12 years ago

holy cow this thing has like 70 repositories!

And I found a screenshot... looks very much like sublime text: https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/1424/1228569/cce6eb26-27a6...

edit: based on this[1], it looks like this is a GitHub-aware/integrated text editor that targets both desktop (Mac, at least) and web

[1] https://gist.github.com/elcuervo/eb68883f233baf5a46c8

alecsmart1• 12 years ago

Looks good. Any idea how we can try it?

aroman2• 12 years ago

well, it looks like you need to use GitHub oauth to sign into it, and doing so currently spits you out here: https://atom.io/nope

So I think we sit tight for now, though it looks like a release is imminent.

axxl• 12 years ago

Looks interesting! I saw a commit 24 minutes ago for "Prepare 0.7.0 release" in the Welcome package, so it looks like they're planning to go public shortly.

reustle• 12 years ago

Some more screenshots

* https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/671378/2265086/c6897dba-9e...

* https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/671378/2265022/bb148a20-9e...

* https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/2988/1796891/85e69ff2-6a93... (animated gif)

* https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/671378/2241795/ba4827d8-9c...

* https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/671378/2241819/f8418cb8-9c...

* https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/671378/2241519/04791a24-9c...

thinxer• 12 years ago

Seems like to be a Sublime Text clone in webkit?

z3phyr• 12 years ago

looks like light table

arunoda• 12 years ago

Seems like it has collaborative edit feature as well. Specially the last screenshot.

Kequc• 12 years ago

I love the edit markers in the last screenshot. But too skeptical about the performance of a text editor running in webkit. All of my experiences writing text online have been bad. So the jump into using webkit for an entire dev environment fills me with dread.

lstamour• 12 years ago

FYI, it's not WebKit but Chromium I'm betting, based on the crash reporting. If you want an idea of performance, Edge Code from Adobe will provide an answer. Oh and there's a welcome repo with an IRC channel listed. Atom.io just says "nope" for me but is likely its future home.

lewispb• 12 years ago

Some more...

* https://atom.io/assets/screenshot-main@2x-e0b7c5a0be2ef13348...

* https://atom.io/assets/screenshot-native-web@2x-2842562f4757...

The second seems to confirm this being web based.

donwil92• 12 years ago

Found a few more. https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/69169/1625945/b216d7b8-56d... https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/69169/1625938/a859fa70-56d... https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/671378/2241254/23bc3d0c-9c...

mechabyte2• 12 years ago

Multiple cursor support demo from IRC http://cl.ly/image/3M3G3s251o15

csmattryder• 12 years ago

This looks pretty cool, there seems to be Vim shortcuts [1] and even theming. Judging from your screenshot, Solarized Dark is the default theme?

But I'd have to wait until its release (or beta, should I be so lucky!) to consider moving from standard vim editor and Solarized in my Xresources.

[1] https://github.com/atom/vim-mode

songgao• 12 years ago

hmm.. so it even has an Atom package manager!

baby• 12 years ago

I always wonder why I learned emacs over vim. There is never support for it.

1qaz2wsx3edc5• 12 years ago

And it's totally gonna be awesome. I'm fairly confident they built it around node-webkit or another wrapper, perhaps in browser, I'm not sure.

What's important is that it's a text editor on top of web technologies. I was poking around doing the same a couple months back, brackets has been doing it for even longer. It's honestly sorely needed because of the amount of expression one can put into due to it's technological stack. An open, compile-less, hot-reloading editor sounds like a dream coming true.

I'm excited for it.

It also appears to be built around react, so that's really cool as well. And the code is simply great.

ollysb2• 12 years ago

Your unit tests running parallelised in the cloud is what I'm hoping they'll get to at some point.

benaiah4• 12 years ago

An open, compile-less, hot-reloading editor sounds like a dream coming true.

You're talking about Emacs, right?

This actually seems really exciting, and I'll give it a whirl when and if I can. It's just funny to see people (the Light Table fans as well) rediscover what Emacs users already knew - modifying your editor in-place is really awesome.

rhythmvs2• 12 years ago

This is even greater! Text editors are not about code only, you know. Remember this¹? Released less than two weeks ago: Github now renders prose diffs. Why?

What if Github is going for an Office (or at least a Word) replacement? Author your blog, thesis, paper, novel, whatever, in a single polyvalent multiplatform editor, with the auto-versioned source stored in the cloud (Github’s), then use it as a feed for your blog, newspaper production flow, or other automated publishing environment…

Hope the fine people at the likes of Draftin.com, Etherpad.org, Penflip.com, Prose.io, et many alii, will survive this. The much acclaimed Editorially.com closed its doors already. Maybe the visionary folks at Substance.io might consider to start negotiating an acquihire.

I feel both exhilarated and a bit jealous: I know for sure I’ll need to put another side-project of mine down.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7240122

danabramov2• 12 years ago

It's not really built on React, on a second look.

It looks like they tried it or may try in the future:

https://github.com/atom/react-coffee

But this is what they use for views:

http://atom.github.io/space-pen/

masklinn2• 12 years ago

It's closer to Light Table than Sublime Text: http://www.chris-granger.com/images/060/full.png

beefsack3• 12 years ago

Only in theme. The layout looks very similar to ST, particularly the menu.

espadrine2• 12 years ago

it looks like this is a GitHub-aware/integrated text editor that targets both desktop (Mac, at least) and web

I can confirm, from looking at the code.

It uses CSS / LESS for highlighting, and CoffeeScript for client-side programming (eg, the fuzzy completion[0], or the autocompletion).

The surprising part is that the editor doesn't seem to be a fork of either Ace or CodeMirror, the two big guys in the field. The highlighters (ie, syntax files) are in CSON. Ace is probably the closest, but it uses a completely different structure[2].

A negative impact of that is the low number of syntax files. However, there seems to be a 1-to-1 equivalence to tmLanguage (TextMate) syntax files[3].

[0] https://github.com/atom/fuzzaldrin/blob/master/src/filter.co...

[1] https://github.com/atom/language-toml/blob/master/grammars/t...

[2] https://github.com/ajaxorg/ace/blob/master/lib/ace/mode/asci...

[3] https://github.com/textmate/toml.tmbundle/blob/master/Syntax...

agos• 12 years ago

so the grammars are still a bunch of regexes? that'd be kind of a letdown

babby2• 12 years ago

Interesting. The whole Sublime Text theory takes another buff.

The tmLanguage syntaxing, while limiting, is still pretty damn easy to create and edit, thus I approve. The idea that you have to learn a new way to build new syntaxes for every editor out there is a big issue for me as if you're going to be on the edge using new templating syntaxes, flavors of other languages etc. you just have to be able to fiddle with syntax highlighting, especially with new editors with poor/incomplete syntaxes and few user created syntaxes to fill the holes.

FichteFoll• 12 years ago

I hope they won't use this awkward "double-escaped backward-slashes in reglular expressions" environment. YAML[1] is much better for this.

[1] https://github.com/SublimeText/AAAPackageDev/blob/master/Syn...

zeckalpha2• 12 years ago

Any word on how to get in on the beta?

RussianCow• 12 years ago

It sounds like they're preparing to open this to the public. I don't know, though. We'll just have to wait and see.

keeran• 12 years ago

https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/1424/1228569/cce6eb26-27a6...

"Collaboration is now working (and accepts 2FA logins)."

jitl• 12 years ago

What sets this apart from the other WebKit-based text editors, LightTable and Brackets? In general it seems like there's been an explosion of new text editors with this style since TextMate went into hibernation around 2008. It's great to have options, but there's lots of these TextMate clones now.

netghost• 12 years ago

TextMate is still alive: https://github.com/textmate/textmate

But to your main point, I would assume this has really really really good github integration...

bsimpson3• 12 years ago

True, but until Sublime started eating his lunch, TM2 was being developed so quiet and slowly that a bunch of people thought it was vaporware. I believe that's what the OP meant by "in hibernation".

1qaz2wsx3edc5• 12 years ago

LightTable is different then most editors by design, in that it tries to reproduce Bret Victor's idea on "the future of programming".

Brackets is really neat, it just attempts to be a good editor, it has some unique features like toggling css inline from an html file for example and other jazz.

So Atom isn't something that's really set apart from webkit-based editor, but I don't think that's what's important here. It's the potential the stack offers us.

There's also not as much competition in this area, but it's sorely needed. I feel vim, emacs, textmate, sublime and most the editors are generally closed source or have huge code bases, and they are hampering the process of innovation by creating walled gardens or creating a barrier to entry. With a editor based on web technologies things really open up a lot.

Think about an editor where you can write a feature, pass the tests, and have a hot reload. No compiling, no closed source or plugin system. Just simple coffeescript/javascript some html and css. And bam, you've rewritten your status bar without effecting work in progress. That's something an editor should give us.

I digress, I'm just excited by this.

roryokane4• 12 years ago

As a side note, it seems like Vim will get a little better soon in terms of its barrier to modifying it and creating plugins. Someone has started a credible project to create a fork, Neovim, which will be easier to modify and extend: https://www.bountysource.com/fundraisers/539-neovim-first-it....

swift• 12 years ago

I realize that vimscript or elisp may not be your cup of tea, but you can already have exactly this "hot reload" experience with both vim and emacs.

benaiah4• 12 years ago

You seem a little harsh on Emacs, but I'm with you in general. (To be fair, Emacs is an enormous pain to get into, has a bunch of legacy cruft, has odd terminology that is difficult to learn, and has a terrible default config. To be fair, Emacs is also leagues ahead of its competitors [referring to Light Table, Brackets, Sublime, and this] in terms of plugins and maturity).

I really just want something with Emacs' principles that doesn't have as much cruft and runs on the web. Light Table seems to be the best bet so far, but this looks interesting as well.

ollysb2• 12 years ago

I'd love to see a good pair-programming environment. Floobits has been having a good crack at this but has the disadvantage of having to co-ordinate both the git commits and the workspace edits on multiple remote machines. GitHub won't have this problem so I expect that pair programming remotely is about to get a ton easier.

jbranchaud3• 12 years ago

What sets it apart? We will find out when it is released. I doubt GitHub would waste there time building a TextMate clone unless they have something intriguing or new to bring to the table.

For one thing though, we can probably expect incredible GitHub integration.

james332• 12 years ago

All of the competition can only be good for us developers. This, ST3, Light Table, Brackets, etc. Bring on the text editor wars!

est• 12 years ago

Don't forget IDE family like http://c9.io/

Edit anywhere just with a browser is a win IMHO. Also easy pairing.

james332• 12 years ago

Love C9 as well, been a big fan of that one since its early days, thanks for adding that!

pritambaral6• 12 years ago

c9 is awesome! One thing keeping me though is realtime collaboration in the open source edition. (Gotta self host, flaky internet).

The closest alternative currently is CoVim. :x

q3k2• 12 years ago

Why not edit anywhere with an ssh client (ie. use vim)? Less overhead, more compatiblity with existing tools...

illicium• 12 years ago

Meanwhile, vim and emacs are sitting in the corner and quietly snickering.

roel_v• 12 years ago

Yeah. This whole thing (an endless supply of stream-of-consciousness style blog posts about one new editor after the other - first that one where the dev sold unlimited upgrades and then didn't bother to release a new version (can't remember the name), this Sublime Text thing, lighting table or whatever it's called, and for example the bruha around this 'neovim' fad) is like watching a bunch of ricers argue over whether a red spoiler will make your Acura go faster than a blue spoiler, and doing that from your 2013 7-series BMW and wondering 'what are these people talking about'.

edwinyzh2• 12 years ago

Add LIVEditor [http://liveditor.com], although it's single-purpose is for css, html and js only. It uses Webkit too, but for live preview of css and html changes only, like the real-time effects you can see with Firebug or Dev Tools.

MWil• 12 years ago

The videos on your site don't load for me. I've turned off ad blocks...

munificent• 12 years ago

All of the competition can only be good for us developers.

Competition isn't a panacea. All this means is that we get to choose from dozens of half-baked options instead of a small number of ones that have each gotten a lot of effort poured into them.

A little more cooperation would be nice, but editors are one of those things where everyone seems to want to try their hand at it before getting bored and wandering off.

See also: build systems, programming languages, games.

georgecalm• 12 years ago

Pretty crazy! Here are a few interesting plugins in there already:

  - vim-mode
  - fuzzy-finder
  - emmet (aka Zen Coding)
  - solarized-dark-syntax (heh)
  - snippets (check)
  - language-* (check; so many; awesome)
  - timecop (tracking where time is spent in the editor)
  - editor-stats (graph your mouse / keyboard activitiy)
  - ...

acanby• 12 years ago

Looks good and all... but I'm interested in the story on how it leaked on Twitter. The link just goes to the Github repo now.

almightygod2• 12 years ago

This kicked it off: https://twitter.com/mattetti/status/438494095506280448

mattetti2• 12 years ago

Thanks for the credits :) I'm indeed the person who figured out what GH was working on based on Twitter's notifications letting me know that a bunch of my GitHub friends suddenly followed the atom.io twitter account. From there it was easy to link things together.

caiob2• 12 years ago

the vim-mode better be really good to make me switch from native vim.

plorkyeran• 12 years ago

The future work section of the readme (https://github.com/atom/vim-mode#future-work-in-rough-order) lists some really basic stuff, so it's definitely not there yet.

jordwalke2• 12 years ago

I really can't wait for this to be released. I am a little pessimistic about the Vim mode. There are countless 80 or 90% complete Vim modes in various modern editors. But the absence of a truly native feeling Vim (that last 10%) is a deal breaker for many. I'd rather see more editor developers spend time finding a solution that provides a truly authentic Vim mode instead of spending countless hours merely approaching 90% compatibility. For the people who you're selling on that Vim mode (the people who would care that your editor provides it) 90% isn't good enough. There are other ways to integrate Vim modes in your editor such as using the (inappropriately named) "Netbeans interface" which actually allows Vim to run in the background while you integrate your UI on top of it across a serializable bridge. This allows a perfect recreation of Vim while letting you customize the application experience on top of it.

Aside from that approach, there are a few faithful Vim recreations that I've discovered out of the dozens that I've tried.

https://github.com/vicoapp/vico (Excellent project) http://www.viemu.com/ (Solid experience in Visual Studio) https://github.com/guillermooo/Vintageous (fairly close and getting better every day)

But I don't mean to sound like such a pessimist. The progress so far looks excellent and I can't wait to try it out. Keep it up!

Edit: I also notice that the logo looks like an iOS7 version of React's logo: http://facebook.github.io/react/

ChickeNES• 12 years ago

Why not just use Vim?

alxndr• 12 years ago

If it's not vimmy enough, I bet people will.

roryokane4• 12 years ago

Vim does not support graphical user elements, and is built around the unfamiliar language Vimscript. Those drawbacks are pretty baked into Vim and would be hard to change (though someone is trying to: https://www.bountysource.com/fundraisers/539-neovim-first-it...). Many other editors don’t have these drawbacks, allowing them to support features such as these:

• a graphical file tree browser (with icons, not restricted to ASCII art like NERDTree)

• proportional-width fonts

• a zoomed-out-code mini-map scroll bar

• Plugins written in more mainstream, cleaner languages than Vimscript. Vim does have a plugin interface for some other languages such as Python, but some OSs’ provided Vim installations don’t support those languages, and it’s hard to get a version of Vim with support.

benaiah4• 12 years ago

Curious as to your opinion on Evil from Emacs - I've been learning Evil without knowing Vim first, so I don't know what I might be missing.

platz• 12 years ago

I'm not an Evil expert, but my experience were that the conflicts with existing Emacs keybindings made things more frustrating. As a vim user interested in Emacs I'm trying to avoid Evil and other "90%" vim emulations from now on as well.

roryokane4• 12 years ago

I’ve used Evil in Emacs with http://orgmode.org/, after having learned Vim. I’d say Evil is another great, thorough emulation of Vim. It includes even relatively-obscure features like visual block mode, R, K, v_o, :%!sort, ^W window split/switch/close commands, and Vim’s tree undo model.

My only problems with Evil are where Emacs or Emacs plugins’ bindings conflict with Vim bindings, such as v_^G (that is, Ctrl-G in Visual mode) meaning “Quit” instead of “Switch to Select Mode”. Those conflicts aren’t really Evil’s fault – they’re inevitable when combining third-party plugins that don’t explicitly support Evil – but they can be annoying.

I’d say you’re not missing much with Evil that would be in Vim. I suppose you’re mainly missing Vim’s large ecosystem of plugins that are made to work with Vim keybindings and Vim’s editing model – though I see that surround.vim has been ported (https://github.com/timcharper/evil-surround). Plus Vim wouldn’t have Evil’s and Emacs’ keyboard conflicts, of course.

msutherl• 12 years ago

What really bugs me are Vim modes that don't allow you to easily add new keybindings that abstract combinations of keystrokes, i.e. map <key> <keys>. For instance, I love to bind "s" to "go into insert mode, insert one character, exit insert mode". I feel crippled without this binding, but making it happen in Sublime 3 with Vintageous is daunting. It involves understanding the Sublime API and constructing some complex block of configuration code with way too many commas and brackets (JSON sucks). In Vim, configuration is a bunch of one-liners and I love that.

JoshTriplett2• 12 years ago

For instance, I love to bind "s" to "go into insert mode, insert one character, exit insert mode".

Doesn't that already exist, by hitting 'r'?

lucian19002• 12 years ago

I may be an outlier, but I'm perfectly fine with 90%.

namuol2• 12 years ago

Maybe just use vim?

jastanton• 12 years ago

FYI https://atom.io is leaking assets. Here is an album of the images found in the css http://imgur.com/a/KG4MX#0 the css http://pastebin.com/FgN3g448 the js http://pastebin.com/p1nBmGki

1qaz2wsx3edc5• 12 years ago

The most vital one, showing it wants to be hacked at (in a good way): http://i.imgur.com/XmLcOhB.gif

Awesomeness.

TazeTSchnitzel• 12 years ago

That's just for a welcome dialog.

pseut• 12 years ago

Well, crap, they've certainly got enough pictures of rockets. Sign me up!

GamblersFallacy• 12 years ago

atom! to the moon!

jbranchaud3• 12 years ago

Any ideas if all the code behind the editor will be released as open source?

Edit: To be clear, I am not talking about all the supplementary repositories that are already open source, but rather I am wondering if the core application will be OS.

shurcooL• 12 years ago

I'm very curious too. This may make or break it for me.

chjj3• 12 years ago

Flattered to see it using marked for the markdown engine. Maybe the world is finally ridding itself of showdown.

benaiah4• 12 years ago

What's wrong with showdown? Legitimate question - I just haven't heard of any complaints about it before.

chjj3• 12 years ago

I'll keep this as short as possible, but that's not easy.

Speed: It's relatively slow (but fortunately faster than markdown.js at the very least).

Quality: It carries with it a bunch of nonsensical quirks. Some of these quirks are inherited from the original markdown, some are unique to showdown. (I feel like I could write a treatise on list behavior alone, and how ridiculously showdown and markdown.pl handle them). It's not what people are accustomed to/find intuitive today. Here's a few problems (with showdown, as well as other engines) presented in a more tangible way: https://github.com/chjj/marked/blob/master/doc/broken.md

Code quality and maintenance: Showdown is a line-for-line port of Markdown.pl. As you can guess, this is not ideal, especially when you consider that the original markdown was written extremely awkwardly - it's essentially a pile of regexes doing global replaces on a single string to produce the output. This is _extremely_ confusing and messy to those who are not familiar with a code, and the original author of showdown, as far as I know, no longer maintains the project.

rhythmvs2• 12 years ago

And rightly so! Marked indeed is a fine 𝗠⬇ parser!

How would you compare your approach to e.g. markdown-js¹, mdown-parse-pegjs², or text.js³ (which are based on PEG parsing)?

I would like to elaborate a bit on the specific differences/benefits between the many MD parsers. (I’m maintaining an inventory of Markdown resources in a repo on Github.⁴)

[¹] https://github.com/evilstreak/markdown-js [²] https://github.com/shamansir/mdown-parse-pegjs [³] https://github.com/sheremetyev/texts.js [⁴] https://github.com/rhythmus/markdown-resources

chjj3• 12 years ago

Thanks.

Speed was originally marked's top priority. I would say marked's approach takes advantage of the fact that v8 generates _extremely_ fast machine code for regexes. This is just something I discovered through many endless nights of benchmarking the entire markdown test suite.

Using complex regexes for the lexemes seems like a stupid idea to most people, but it allowed me to optimize marked like crazy, so much so that it beat discount(written in c) in benchmark times (It might be a little bit slower now due to the latest features. I decided to ignore speed for a while to focus on features - will get back to optimization eventually).

The downside of all of this: marked loses some extensibility, however, we implement as much extensibility as possible by exposing the token stream and renderer.

Accuracy and sanity quickly became marked's next top priority. There's a certain threshold of accuracy you want in a markdown engine (you don't want it to be too accurate because markdown.pl had a lot of bizarre behavior). That's a different story.

bowerbird2• 12 years ago

chjj said:

Flattered to see it using marked for the markdown engine.

i am amused as well.

because i just did this the other day:

http://gitdown.wordpress.com

"gitdown" -- so we can all get down...

i also wrote a piece called "markdown considered harmful".

https://medium.com/the-future-of-publishing/495ccfe24a52

the world needs a new infrastructure for thoughtful documents, including a new text-editor. but from the look of it thus far, this github thing lacks _simplicity,_ by an order of magnitude.

-bowerbird

frade33• 12 years ago

the next big thing for devs. I love sublime and will, but can't figure why is it taking them so long, to launch it on mac appstore.

lelandriordan• 12 years ago

Apple's 30% cut

shakeel_mohamed2• 12 years ago

Yeah, there's really no incentive for them do it aside from accepting non-Paypal customers.

caiob2• 12 years ago

Not to mention the amount of features they'd have to remove in order to comply with Apple's standards.

schrijver• 12 years ago

Curious, what is the added value for you if it is on the App Store?

jbeja5• 12 years ago

Because?

drdaeman• 12 years ago

Maybe. For node.js devs. And HTML/Markdown/non-programming coders. Not sure about the others.

A good programming editor must treat code constructs as first-class citizens and (at least partially) operate on AST level, not go with typical "hey, we have a bunch of text that we colorize and bracket-match/fold/dissect with some mostly-working regexp mess¹" approach. The latter is just a notepad, not a decent development environment.

As I suspect this editor isn't much different from notepad/textmate/sublime in this regards and it doesn't really understand a thing about the code I'm working on (just pretends it does), it seems quite useless to me.

___

¹) Like this: https://github.com/atom/symbols-view/blob/master/lib/.ctags

jalan• 12 years ago

Will this support Linux? I would love to try this on my Linux System. (Ubuntu, to be specific)

lukeholder• 12 years ago

looks like it is built on node-webkit so probably yes.

alessioalex• 12 years ago

where did you find that out? just curious

CoachRufus87• 12 years ago

Never thought I'd be excited for a text editor, but damn I can't wait for this to come out.

babby2• 12 years ago

Me too! I'm a big Sublime Text guy, right, but simply put sublime is lacking, especially in UI flexibility and advanced IDE features, like intelligent autocomplete, type checking etc.

If this thing delivers sublime-tier quality code editing in the browser and desktop AND commands a big enough community to allow for even more features (due to being open source), perhaps even IDE tier features... Sign me the fuck up. I'm tired of using closed source crap, patiently waiting for the dev to get off his ass and build more API functionality.

kumarski• 12 years ago

top of HN = leak well done = planned? maybe.

dshankar• 12 years ago

To be fair, Github wouldn't need to leak anything to get on the top of HN. Just about any thing they post on their blog gets on the front page for at least a few hours.

bowerbird2• 12 years ago

notions of fairness aside, github doesn't need hackernews. in the slightest. for attention, or for anything else...

and i'm fairly sure that paul graham would say that himself.

-bowerbird

tuananh• 12 years ago

Very likely that Github bought SublimeText.

bsimpson3• 12 years ago

Why do you say that?

dav-2• 12 years ago

Atom: http://i.imgur.com/0Qfwkp4.png

SublimeText: http://i.imgur.com/frzYwwc.png

Case in point.

jbrooksuk5• 12 years ago

Why? Because they made a clone?

cmelbye• 12 years ago

And then promptly rewrote the entire thing in Node.js? Huh?

sspiff2• 12 years ago

This looks great! I'd be more than happy with an open source, modern editor to replace the current myriad of specialized-language editors (QtCreator, Brackets, ...), Sublime Text and Komodo Edit I'm using.

bashcoder• 12 years ago

Dig the feed URL: https://github.com/atom.atom

forrestthewoods• 12 years ago

I was excited until I saw it was WebKit based. My confidence level that it won't be slow and buggy is next to zero. I would, of course, love to be wrong.

jbb555• 12 years ago

Lets reinvent everything in javascript no matter how badly...

kelmop2• 12 years ago

There is freedom of choice. You don't have to use it.

q3k2• 12 years ago

Still, he is entitled to his opinion. You don't have to downvote it. :>

scorpion032• 12 years ago

coffeescript and cson, specifically.

intrepidd42• 12 years ago

http://blog.atom.io/ seems to be WIP, the meta tags are quite revealing :

At GitHub, we’re building the text editor we’ve always wanted: hackable to the core, but approachable on the first day without ever touching a config file. We can’t wait to see what you build with it.

pacoverdi• 12 years ago

Looks 1000x times better than a project I just started based on Ace.js. Should save me a lot of trouble!

I just hope it's not tightly coupled to the backend so I can replace it with a custom one.

p4bl0• 12 years ago

Haha. https://twitter.com/shit_hn_says/status/278710645644484609

Dorian-Marie• 12 years ago

This sounds more like the future than having to get an expensive computer and setup a whole environment on it.

rjsamson2• 12 years ago

Haha - that's great. Here's the original HN discussion being referenced.

sspiff2• 12 years ago

I sure hope this will have a rich plugin API and support non-web non-scripting languages as first class citizens. That would make it stand out from most recent editors.

72deluxe3• 12 years ago

A text editor in a browser? There seems a lot of excitement about it but I can't work out why - can anyone explain? I'm not trying to be argumentative; I really am curious! It's for editing text and there appears to be massive excitement about it....?

no_gravity2• 12 years ago

I for one use my own web-based version control system and project management. If there was a good web-based texteditor that is 100% vim compatible, I could stop switching between a browser and a shell.

72deluxe3• 12 years ago

What sort of stuff do you work on? Do you use a web based editor to modify stuff locally or is it for web based stuff hosted the other side of the world?

I always SSH'd into boxes and edited stuff there if necessary, or had a local copy to work on using "normal" editors and synced it. But now I'm writing C++ so I am blessed with good IDEs so perhaps that is why I am missing the excitement over a text editor?

zeckalpha2• 12 years ago

It's not necessarily in a browser. It just seems to be using WebKit as an engine. This means that rather than having to embed e.g. vimscript, elisp, or Python into your editor to make it extensible, you get JavaScript for free. And graphics.

shirro• 12 years ago

Considering I am currently working on a ChromeBook, yeah it is is interesting for a class of users.

There are some well known web IDEs like C9 etc that don't really appeal to me and there is a Chrome app called Caret that look very Sublime Text like but lacks plugins. I am happily working with vim and tmux (although I have Sublime Text in a chroot if I felt the need) but Web IDEs have potential.

I had a play with something called godev and it had support for godoc, go-oracle, godef, fmt etc as well as all the usuals like syntax highlighting etc based on Eclipse Orion. It lacked a lot of editor features though and things like git integration so it wasn't really practical but it made me realise there is potential for self hosting a web ide.

I get the feeling there is a space for an open web ide to take off. Many of the current offerings are tied to hosted services and don't look overly customisable.

staaky• 12 years ago

Looks amazing, but why CoffeeScript?

VeejayRampay• 12 years ago

Because it's a modern and usable version of one of the most ubiquitous language of the modern web era (and happens to actually produces that language as an output, making it seamless to integrate)?

jbeja5• 12 years ago

Coffee-script is just synthetic sugar with some build in constructors for syntax elitist like rubyist or pythonistas, it not any different than using plain js. It does not save you for the quirks of js or give you any "improvement" beyond the syntax. Is a nice language, but don't put i like is something more of what it is.

swah• 12 years ago

I have the same problem with LightTable... ClojureScript is Lisp and all, but why not Javascript? Huge user base, must be faster since its CS target, and pretty good as a extension language (or just use Lua :))

mattgreenrocks• 12 years ago

I'll re-phrase an earlier comment: JS is the x86 of the web, so why argue about which macro syntax is superior?

hkdobrev2• 12 years ago

GitHub's guide for javaScript is to write every new JavaScript in CoffeeScript. https://github.com/styleguide/javascript It has been like that for years.

shaunbent• 12 years ago

They're on Twitter: https://twitter.com/AtomEditor found the link in the Source Code of: http://blog.atom.io/

It also has the line: "At GitHub, we’re building the text editor we’ve always wanted: hackable to the core, but approachable on the first day without ever touching a config file. We can’t wait to see what you build with it."

zachinglis• 12 years ago

I saw this. I have a lot of respect for Githubbers and Github but is Node really the language for a text editor? My text editor that's built natively to my OS often struggles, let alone if it's Node. Seems like they're shoehorning the wrong technology.

featherless• 12 years ago

IRC channel here: http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=##atom

s10wen• 12 years ago

Was worth a try...

https://twitter.com/s10wen/status/438637833981820929

theboywho• 12 years ago

Am I the only one who finds it hard to believe this has indeed been leaked and is not just a marketing strategy from Github? The repos are not even private.

rafekett• 12 years ago

I'm in this camp. Have you ever been to a talk given by Scott Chacon? He demos git on Github's internal repos. It's clear that there's little value placed on keeping a feature under wraps before it comes out over there.

gruntmaster9000• 12 years ago

Leak is the wrong term, and it’s doubtfully a deliberate marketing move either. More like, “suddenly being noticed because a bunch of GitHubbers followed the @AtomEditor account on Twitter”.

Also, despite the plethora of repositories, the actual editor is not available. It could be many of the public repos are public so they can be installed using their Atom Package Manager, which would likely have to jump through hoops if they were private.

mattetti2• 12 years ago

That's correct, I'm the one who first found the project and I wouldn't call it a "leak". The site is live (domain registered by GH), the twitter account is live, the repo is full, the release is probably imminent.

mattpass• 12 years ago

Looking good and this only helps confirm that web IDE's are going to be the big thing in the next couple of years.

I've been predicting/preaching about this for 2+ years now and been building my own browser code editor in that time (http://icecoder.net).

So, CodeAnywhere gets $600k in funding, Adobe is releasing Brackets to the browser soon, GitHub is launching Atom as a web based offering.

Need much more reason to leave the desktop behind?

jbranchaud3• 12 years ago

Do any of these support an offline mode?

squallstar• 12 years ago

https://github.com/atom/welcome/blob/master/lib/welcome.md

twice• 12 years ago

Is this a replacement for gist?

jbrooksuk5• 12 years ago

No. Gist is a service.

hkdobrev2• 12 years ago

Website now says "SOON". Response from #atom irc channel:

Would the editor itself be open-source?
yes
a non-opensource editor from GitHub would be ludicrous
seems like the source code will be up today

BruceM2• 12 years ago

The person who answered you isn't associated with GitHub and has been trolling the channel (and apparently you).

jashkenas• 12 years ago

There's a bunch of lovely gems scattered through the Atom repos. Some of my favorites from a first quick glance:

Biscotto — A CoffeeScript API documentation generator based on TomDoc notation:

http://atom.github.io/biscotto/

React-Coffee — A little glue that makes Facebook's React easy to use from CoffeeScript without having to resort to JSX:

https://github.com/atom/react-coffee

SpacePen: A minimalist view library for jQuery, allowing custom methods, super calls, HTML-building, subviews, and easy event binding:

http://atom.github.io/space-pen/

... and the best bit about this bonanza is that everything is really quite readable. Keep up the good work, Kevin.

Flenser2• 12 years ago

I'm confused, why would they be working on React and SpacePen? Don't they do (roughly) the same job?

genexp• 12 years ago

The editor will be collaborative. It's github.

dangoor• 12 years ago

I have a feeling that started out looking at React but opted to go with SpacePen for some reason.

feifan• 12 years ago

React is defined by its declarative nature (for ease of coding) and virtual DOM (for performance). Not sure if SpacePen does the same, but at a first glance of the documentation I'm not seeing anything along those lines…

jbeja5• 12 years ago

If it doesn't come with a vim-mode or that vim-mode is slow and painful to customize, then this will be useless.

jbrooksuk5• 12 years ago

That's not true.

People like myself who don't use Vim can still navigate code at speed.

pritambaral6• 12 years ago

I think what jbeja meant is "this will be useless for me"

jupiterrr• 12 years ago

It seems that Holman has already used it 5 months ago. https://github.com/holman/feedback/issues/432

mediastuttgart• 12 years ago

Guess, github bought sublime.

jbrooksuk5• 12 years ago

No.

eik3_de• 12 years ago

If you go to https://atom.io/docs you can authorize the app with your github account. You still get the 'soon' page afterwards, but at least you're now something like an early atom.io beta user ;)

petsounds• 12 years ago

Glad to see there's an Atom plugin[0] named after the Jean-Claude Van Damme movie Timecop[1]

[0] https://github.com/atom/timecop

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timecop

pritambaral6• 12 years ago

I like that they are already prepared(/preparing) for Node 0.11, (https://github.com/atom/node-vm-compatibility-layer)

hodgesmr4• 12 years ago

http://whois.domaintools.com/atom.io

  Domain : atom.io
  Status : Client Updt+Delt Lock
  Owner  : GitHub Hostmaster
  Owner  : GitHub, Inc.
  Owner  : 88 Colin P Kelly Jr St
  Owner  : San Francisco
  Owner  : CA
  Owner  : US

mechabyte2• 12 years ago

Looks like this is going to be released today http://minus.com/i/8HXqEh53LTsB

lectrick• 12 years ago

The way I code (and I'm surprised I seem to be the first person to state this here), is that I can run my class file in Sublime and it automatically runs its unit test within like a second. Instantly, I can know whether I broke anything or whether I satisfied a new assertion successfully without breaking anything else.

Unless this editor can do something similar, this is pretty much useless for any non-html non-css code developer who has already learned that unit test suites are the way, the truth and the life.

hodgesmr4• 12 years ago

"Atom is free during the beta period." https://github.com/atom/welcome/commit/86790ef7cca263ca0943f...

pritambaral6• 12 years ago

Seems like they're going the ST route. I'm kinda disappointed Atom won't be open sourced.

hodgesmr4• 12 years ago

Maybe. https://github.com/atom/welcome/blob/master/LICENSE.md https://github.com/atom/welcome/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md

mattw1810• 12 years ago

It could also mean they are going the Cloud 9 route (unlimited free public editing, limited free private projects) for the web version, which would essentialy be the same as their current subscription model, while still open-sourcing the editor itself.

thecoffman2• 12 years ago

Apparently it collects usage information?

https://github.com/atom/welcome/pull/7

Thanks, but no thanks. I don't need my editor sending usage information anywhere.

hodgesmr4• 12 years ago

"If you do not want this information reported, disable this package from the Metrics section of the Settings view"

https://github.com/atom/metrics

thecoffman2• 12 years ago

I saw that as well, but opt-out is a crappy default. It should be opt-in.

emddudley• 12 years ago

That commit summary is "Be up front about collecting usage information." If a company can make a better product because they collect usage information, and if they are up front about it and allow you to disable the data collection, then I'm all for it.

brendanlim• 12 years ago

Atom IRC channel

https://github.com/atom/welcome/commit/6346bb8c2e7534ae0de5e...

rjsamson2• 12 years ago

Some interesting new info popping up in the repo: https://github.com/atom/welcome/blob/master/lib/welcome.md - they reference it as being "free during the beta period" - that coupled with a tweet from mojombo yesterday[1] makes it sound like a whole new line of business for them - sounds big!

[1] https://twitter.com/mojombo/status/438200146791129088

namuol2• 12 years ago

As the actual editor isn't publicly available in any form, this isn't exactly a "leak".

jophde• 12 years ago

And I will continue to use an Arch Linux VM, i3, vim, and dwb...

izazueta• 12 years ago

They open beta invites today

nakovet• 12 years ago

It looks like gitblime bought subhub, just kidding. :P

grandalf• 12 years ago

this is very cool. I think many people are underestimating the potential of something like this. There are 1000x as many people who can hack something cool for this than would do so in elisp.

* I'm a happy emacs user but have to admit this is very promising.

toddwahnish• 12 years ago

How is this a leak when THEY HAVE A WEBSITE with a signup form? http://atom.io

GitHub's new text editor leaked on Twitter

Related Stories