Atom

http://atom.io/

by hswolff • 12 years ago

1475 641 12 years ago

atom.io

spicyj6• 12 years ago

I can't tell from this page whether it's open source -- I hope it is.

donretag• 12 years ago

https://github.com/atom

spicyj6• 12 years ago

Yes, there are lots of packages but the editor core isn't posted there, as far as I can tell.

rmc3• 12 years ago

Just cause you can see the source, doesn't mean it's Open Source.

hswolff• 12 years ago

At the least seems like there will be a paid version: https://github.com/atom/welcome/blob/master/lib/welcome.md

pbreit• 12 years ago

"free during beta" doesn't always imply "paid on launch" and I'd be surprised if the basic editor was paid. Github certainly doesn't need the cash and usage is oxygen.

spicyj6• 12 years ago

From ##atom IRC:

<DouweM> kevinsawicki: is the actual core going to be OS?

<kevinsawicki> DouweM: not during the beta

<tyOverby> How is atom both invite-only and open source at the same time?

<avidal> tyOverby: the engine isn't open source (or at least yet)

Touche8• 12 years ago

Welp, makes that decision easy. Not making the most important tool in my toolbox one that I can't hack to my liking.

1qaz2wsx3edc2• 12 years ago

I'm really hoping they make it completely open source with service-optional business model, they core needs to be open or it will have the same problems as every other closed source editor.

krelian• 12 years ago

Usually if you don't see "free" or "open source" mentioned on the main page it means it's not going to be either of these two (or at least that it hasn't been decided yet).

ohhmaar• 12 years ago

I don't like how it looks like Sublime text... couldn't they have designed something new?

spicyj6• 12 years ago

The tabs are the thing that reminds me most of ST but they are practically just Chrome's tabs -- everything else isn't particularly distinctive and seems standard for a text editor.

amima• 12 years ago

But the very first thought is "wow, it's exactly the same look as Sublime Text", not JetBrains product, not Eclipse, not even Visual Studio, so they definitely were completely inspired by Sublime in particular.

redbad3• 12 years ago

Text editors appear to be approaching a design ideal. At least, for the ways we currently use them.

flyosity2• 12 years ago

As the designer who worked on the main interface for Sublime Text 2, it does irk me that it looks so similar. They had carte blanche to create a wonderful new interface and they mostly just copied Sublime Text. The go-to anything menu looks especially similar. https://t.co/5YxVbZcVcK

arthurcolle• 12 years ago

Just wondering, do you know how to code? What are your day to day tools as a designer?

xster3• 12 years ago

The find/replace panel seems xerox'ed too

ps4fanboy• 12 years ago

Sublime text looks a lot like textmate to me, just darker.

beefsack3• 12 years ago

As was speculated in the other thread the beta looks like it will be closed, there's a "request and invite" form on the page.

Others noted that the source mentioned "free during beta", I certainly hope that's not the case and it's truly FOSS. Sublime Text development has slowed significantly recently and the community can't continue to drive it since it's closed.

Funnily enough, Sublime Text was born out of Textmate development slowing, and I can't seem to shake that vibe here too.

chc2• 12 years ago

If you want an open-source text editor based on Node.js, Light Table might interest you.

(Light Table itself is written in ClojureScript, which is a bit idiosyncratic, but it's hardly worse than Elisp, and anyway you can write plugins in normal JavaScript.)

ytpete5• 12 years ago

Or Brackets: http://brackets.io

iambateman• 12 years ago

A competitor to Sublime is a great thing. Sublime is great and I love it, but we need more teams like Github building editors that make sense.

Thanks Github!

atmosx3• 12 years ago

How did you come to this conclusion?

angersock• 12 years ago

It's called vim.

ahuth7• 12 years ago

I think he means that we need editors that are powerful AND easy to use.

Seems like vim isn't really for someone like me (I haven't studied PhD level computer science and I don't write compilers and/or lisp interpreters in my spare time for fun).

timr• 12 years ago

you misspelled 'emacs'

hodgesmr• 12 years ago

Apparently this was almost 6 years in the making. https://twitter.com/defunkt/status/438791340222971904

bashcoder• 12 years ago

Wow - I didn't even think node.js was that old. It will be interesting to see its genesis. The first git commit for node appears to have been on Feb 16, 2009:

    commit 9d7895c567e8f38abfff35da1b6d6d6a0a06f9aa
    Author: Ryan <ry@tinyclouds.org>
    Date:   Mon Feb 16 01:02:00 2009 +0100

    add dependencies

highpixels• 12 years ago

I'm guessing the Atom project was WAY different back then, and has probably gone through several ground-up re-writes.

adamors8• 12 years ago

It probably started out as a Rails app, but then Node came along.

Gotta keep it relevant!

subsection1h3• 12 years ago

I wonder how long Atom has been usable. Chris stopped updating his Emacs packages in 2012.[1][2]

[1] https://github.com/defunkt/coffee-mode/commits/master?page=7

[2] https://github.com/defunkt/textmate.el/commits/master

lord_quas3• 12 years ago

4 months ago...

https://github.com/defunkt/gist.el

teraflop3• 12 years ago

No mention of supported platforms, but the documentation refers to keyboard shortcuts like "cmd-shift-P". This isn't Mac-only, is it?

fournm• 12 years ago

I'm certainly getting that feeling.

Touche8• 12 years ago

No, just normal developer monoculturalism. Same as showing only Mac screenshots that is common, or showing your website inside a Macbook, etc.

bsimpson2• 12 years ago

To be fair, would most people know what super-shift-P means?

That said, it would be fairly simple to have a variable for super that resolves to ctrl/cmd on other platforms, the same way that most download pages nowadays infer your platform and show you the binary you most likely want.

woah• 12 years ago

I've always wanted to show mockups in alternate non mac devices, but they tend to be ugly.

protomyth• 12 years ago

The most common cause of people showing websites inside a Macbook is that the graphic designer is using a Mac and Apple provides some pretty nice high resolution tiffs of all its products.

ecnahc515• 12 years ago

It's built on node-webkit and chromium, which technically works on Windows, OSX and Linux. Do you seriously think they would make an OSX only editor when there's already so many that work on all platforms?

Tloewald2• 12 years ago

No, it's a desktop app, presumably embedded inside node-webkit or something similar.

numo16• 12 years ago

Directly from the "Taking the web native" section on the page:

Atom is a desktop application based on web technologies.

thedaniel• 12 years ago

The download is only available for Mac today, but we are working on the Linux and Windows builds.

jallardice• 12 years ago

I just got an email inviting me to download the beta. The only download link in there is a button labelled "Download For Mac".

ateevchopra• 12 years ago

Can you share the file ?

victorhooi10• 12 years ago

Argh, I want an invite! =)

Any tricks for getting one?

rmc3• 12 years ago

Of course it's crossplatform. It works on OSX Mavericks and Snow Leapard!

1qaz2wsx3edc2• 12 years ago

Currently only OSX support, win32 is being worked on, I imagine cross platform will be achieved shortly.

shawnc• 12 years ago

And 5 years ago, everything was Windows centric. Things change.

gulbrandr2• 12 years ago

On the homepage, it says

Like other desktop apps, it has its own icon in the dock

it looks like it's osx oriented.

justizin3• 12 years ago

So it's light table without Chris Granger, for better or worse..

swah5• 12 years ago

LightTable has its own philosophy: http://www.chris-granger.com/2013/01/24/the-ide-as-data/ Sounds pretty different from Atom's modules... I guess.

TinyTimZamboni• 12 years ago

Light Table is a great project, but it's all in closurescript -.- This is a big obstacle to people wanting to edit/customize/write their own plugins

swah5• 12 years ago

And this one is all in Coffeescript... so there is still a niche for an editor in Javascript!

tensor• 12 years ago

It's really sad that learning a new language is considered "a big obstacle." An average programmer should be able to pick up nearly any new computing language quite easily.

Morgawr• 12 years ago

The language itself is actually very simple and writing plugins for lighttable is the opposite of complex, there are amazing tutorials floating around the web. The whole process is simply just manipulating sets of data, it's all about adding and removing triggers.

This said, you can also write lighttable plugins in javascript.

nicklovescode5• 12 years ago

Can I use it online? That would be the killer feature for me, being able to code on anyone's computer in a second. Currently it's basically the only thing stopping me from being able to pick up anyone's computer and use it as I use my own.

mmanfrin2• 12 years ago

I believe that's the point -- it's web based.

teraflop3• 12 years ago

Nope: "Atom is a desktop application based on web technologies." So it's using node.js internally, but it's not actually a webapp.

igul222• 12 years ago

Guessing no, because of the Node.js plugin architecture ("need to call into C or C++?", "full access to the filesystem"). Really only the UI seems to be done in WebKit.

rsamvit• 12 years ago

From a quick glance it looks like its architected the same as Light Table (Local node server that accesses the file system and a decoupled UI that connects over http and uses WebKit). If it works like that it could run in the browser. Not so easily from anywhere though

wetmore• 12 years ago

Try Codio: https://codio.com/

nicklovescode5• 12 years ago

Tried it a month or so ago. Couldn't get Vim keybindings working well. Hands don't work without it anymore :/

bjeanes3• 12 years ago

Nitrous.io is pretty decent...

atmosx3• 12 years ago

The more I see new editors floating around, the more I'm sticking to VIm. I am getting old, or it's a just a survival instinct.

On the other hand, the more the better, but we have already too many editors around.

ahuth7• 12 years ago

If vim works great for you, then rock on! We can't have too many editors, though. Bad ones will fail to gain traction, and it's always good to get new ideas and modern techniques out there.

izolate• 12 years ago

I've sworn by SublimeText until now. And Atom is getting released during a time when I'm increasingly learning to love console-only computing. I envision a day when I can travel the world with a cheap laptop/chromebook and do all my coding remotely via SSH.. and Vim is very much at the core of that dream.

Now I just have to master it.

adamors8• 12 years ago

Try using the Vim plugin (Vintage or the newer one, Vintageous) with Sublime. That way, you can gradually get used to modal editing.

I worked like that for 8-10 months then made the switch to Vim. I've gotten so used to modal editing (not to mention window management etc.) by then, that I didn't even skip a beat.

m_mueller• 12 years ago

I do that currently, but using the local graphical editor. I just mount the ssh path to my local FS using Expandrive. It's not free but I can recommend it.

mcovey2• 12 years ago

https://github.com/fatih/subvim - unfortunately "Linux version is on the todo list, I'll work on it asap"

Trufa• 12 years ago

I've never though about that! But it sounds great! A question though... I don't know how much though you actually have put into this, but I'm curious. What do you consider a cheap computer?

I do all my coding (though it mainly web, which arguably might need less resources than other languages) in a medium tier pc. It's a lenovo B590 with an i3, 8GB RAM. It's not exceedingly fast but with two windows of chrome, 20 tabs each, 5 or 6 instances of PHPStorm open, and all the usual programs (email clients, dropbox, chats, etc) it still feels quite snappy.

The cost here in Austria was around 650€ or so in total, maybe less (I'm not quite sure now because I upgraded it little by little).

My question is if your plans are set around a dirt cheap machine that you "wouldn't care at all" if it gets stolen, lost or broken... Or something more in the lower middle class where you'd have to be careful not to lose one per month, but you could still run most of the stuff you'd actually need for local development.

This question arises mainly for my concern is greater about not having a working reasonable internet connectivity hence making it difficult to work over ssh, rather than the laptop getting stolen or broken.

nathancahill• 12 years ago

Here's a really interesting post about that: http://yieldthought.com/post/12239282034/swapped-my-macbook-...

cmelbye2• 12 years ago

To be fair, an editor built on open web technologies could also be at the core of a dream to travel the world with a Chromebook.

schwuk2• 12 years ago

Don't dream it - be it.

I work this way most of the time now, regardless of which machine I am currently using: http://blog.schwuk.com/2014/01/15/chromebook-plus-digitaloce...

mrbogle3• 12 years ago

The blog post: http://blog.atom.io/2014/02/26/introducing-atom.html

lloeki• 12 years ago

we've open-sourced over 80 of the libraries

Some of them look quite interesting already.

rdtsc• 12 years ago

Does it have emacs emulation?

KhalilK• 12 years ago

What's the difference between this and Emacs?

Nikkau• 12 years ago

This is a text editor.

tptacek• 12 years ago

You can use Emacs to build a kind of text editor.

pseut• 12 years ago

butterfly mode

jmz92• 12 years ago

The big difference from my perspective is that Atom isn't currently FOSS. Other than that, the maturity of the emacs ecosystem is both one of its greatest features and a bit of a curse.

danudey• 12 years ago

40 years of legacy decisions can be a huge weight on a project, but reinventing a newer, rounder wheel has pitfalls as well. I'd love to say 'I want a modern version of emacs' (or, in my case, vim), but I'd be terrified that I'd end up with a TextMate2-style second system syndrome.

It looks like the GH guys have worked around this problem quite well, and I'm looking forward to begging, borrowing, and then just begging again if I get a chance to try it out.

doorhammer6• 12 years ago

The non-FOSS part is the part that bothers me the most. Maybe bothers is too strong a word. It's just hard for me to get into a text editor without knowing that the community could pick it up and run with it, if the originator dropped it.

Not sure if that's an unfounded fear, but I don't want to invest time customizing a platform and writing plugins when it could close shop in a second. I suppose I could say that about a lot of things I do customize, but it's hard when the FOSS text editor world is so rich.

jlas• 12 years ago

One reason I like using Emacs is that I can run it in a terminal - e.g. over ssh. I am skeptical I'll be able to do that with Atom (without using X forwarding).

On top of that I can be up and running with Emacs on a fresh install of just about any linux distro: install via the distro's package manager, drop in my configs, done.

rayiner• 12 years ago

Less features, less open source, probably slower, more Javascript.

jbeja10• 12 years ago

Agree.

chr1• 12 years ago

It doesn't lose selection when scrolling.

mmanfrin2• 12 years ago

This might make developing on chromebook viable.

akulbe2• 12 years ago

THIS.

akulbe2• 12 years ago

Wow. Lost karma because I'm enthusiastic about something? Neutral, I'd understand... but downvotes? Really? I've seen even more plain and simple comments get upvotes. You folks are a fickle bunch.

bovermyer3• 12 years ago

Nitrous.IO already did that.

kzahel• 12 years ago

You already can, just load up a crosh window and enter your chroot. Take your pick of vim or emacs or whatever other console editor. Or, if you're enterprising, you can run a window manager on the same X display and use any GUI editor, but the integration is a bit wacky.

schwuk2• 12 years ago

There's already many, many ways to do this and it works fine for me on (primarily) web development.

paperwork• 12 years ago

The editor looks good. I'm more excited about the fact that this is a good looking desktop app, built using, what are normally considered, web technologies.

josephschmoe• 12 years ago

I've been wanting, for a long time, to be able to have custom UIs to websites (just like how video games do it). If this is a step in that direction for github, I will be very, very happy.

brunoqc• 12 years ago

I wish it was open source. We need a modern, good looking, libre text editor.

jbeja10• 12 years ago

There is LightTable, also you can even make Emacs or Vim as "good looking" as this if you give them so tweak.

Narretz• 12 years ago

It could be really great. I wonder if Jon Skinner knew, and said to himself "Welp, I might as well stop with Sublime". However, Sublime is (mostly) blazingly fast. I don't expect this from a node based app, especially in Windows. And: I didn't see it under Features, but Atom definitely needs the command palette from Sublime baked into core. Only if it's core, plugin authors will set their hooks correctly from the beginning. Or even better, there might be a flexible command api that exposes each plugin's commands from the start and can be extended too. -> edit: the readme says it has Command Palette. Great! Also, since the term is identical with Sublime Text, I wonder if there's more to it than inspiration.

TheZenPsycho4• 12 years ago

You do know that v8 is generally much much much faster than cpython, don't you?

jordanthoms• 12 years ago

Although, most of the Sublime core is in C/C++ as far as I know. And it's using native drawing, not webkit. Will be interesting to see how the performance compares.

techdragon2• 12 years ago

and v8 has its ass handed to it vs the mozilla engine when running asm.js code... and there is pypy... and c extentions... and WHO CARES.

It is fast enough for every job I've ever thrown at it... Do you only want there to be one programming language or something.?

techdragon2• 12 years ago

I would pay for a $10 a month subscription/support contract to Sublime if it was Open Sourced... properly where the community can get involved in the development.

This coming along scares me that an already tenuous situation around the future of Sublime Text may implode due to this new editor... and it isnt even open source. I'd rather build my own highly customised GUI+CLI macvim/emacs with both python and JS plugin backends than switch from one closed source editor to another just because its new and uses Node... I dont normally swear on hacker news ... but fuck that shit.

TheZenPsycho4• 12 years ago

before you jump to writing your own text editor from scratch, consider contributing to textadept. it's about half the text editor that sublimetext is, but it's lua based, already exists, and it is totally open source.

8ig83• 12 years ago

Metrics is an interesting package. It reports usage stats to Google Analytics, referenced by a hash of the machine's MAC address:

http://atom.io/packages/metrics

Touche8• 12 years ago

Good catch. I really shouldn't have any more of a problem with a desktop app tracking me than I do a web app but for some reason I do. I guess because I can always use Disconnect in the browser and I can't with Atom. I guess the fact that it is open about it is a positive thing, though.

spicyj6• 12 years ago

It sounds like you can disable Metrics in the settings.

username223• 12 years ago

Why should I care about a Google key-logger with a bundled text editor? Also, if github were a real player, they would do their own user tracking rather than giving Google their data.

gre• 12 years ago

No thanks, I'll stick with jEdit.

msoad• 12 years ago

Bracket is built on top of Code Mirror. It never feels like a native editor. If Atom is using a Webkit renderer for core editor part, I'm not gonna switch from Sublime anytime soon

chc2• 12 years ago

Light Table is build on Node-Webkit and it feels pretty good most of the time. (Opening folders is the only spot I've found where it's like, "Wait, something is a little off here.")

nelmaven• 12 years ago

My experience with Light Table isn't that fortunate, even moving the cursor through some lines feels sluggish and not great.

natural219• 12 years ago

I am very excited about this, I love the Github team and this looks like a great tool.

My only question is -- why should I switch to this from Sublime Text? Are there specific use cases it handles better out of the box, or is it more of a modular base that will be expected to grow and outfeature ST2/3's seasoned plugin economy? I am very happy with Sublime Text now, but I would be willing to switch if either it gained a lot of traction, or could do stuff that I couldn't do with Sublime.

olegbl• 12 years ago

I believe the main benefit is that it is much easier to customize/change/tweak.

stormbrew3• 12 years ago

I don't see a reason to take that as a given. This uses node, ST uses python. Sublime plugins have a huge amount of power and python is certainly not terrible to work in.

scott_karana2• 12 years ago

It's also open source, so maybe we'll see some creative hacking to the core.

skizm• 12 years ago

This appears to be free. ST is free but makes me feel bad about not paying for it every few saves.

Jare• 12 years ago

That's because ST is not free.

atestu• 12 years ago

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

    Atom is free during the beta period.

kansface3• 12 years ago

In practice, the ST3 API is extremely limiting and poorly implemented. The docs are both lacking and dated (read incorrect). It is trivial to crash ST3 by making the incorrect sequence of correct API calls. It is also common to resort to polling the editor to make up for other deficiencies. The API also only allows for extremely limited UI choices forcing highly unintuitive interfaces on end users. The ST3 runtime also features such gems as not shipping the ssl module on linux (while ST2 stripped out even more stuff).

I also expect NPM to be much better in practice than the sublime package manager which frequently ships broken code. JS is a better choice than python for async code which will make writing plugins easier.

Furthermore, ST is 3 people who largely ignore all feedback from the community regarding bugs and features. It won't be hard to out compete ST in the long run.

chid• 12 years ago

What do you mean polling the editor? Are there any examples of plugins that do that?

wbond• 12 years ago

I don't know if I'd call it extremely limiting… there are some places I'd like to see more accessibility. However, I've built some pretty extensive stuff with it.

I would love to see ssl compiled in - I believe the reason Jon currently doesn't is that it would require building on at least 6 different machines to cover 0.9.8 and 1.0.0 (libssl.so.10 and libssl.so.1.0.0) for x86/x64 plus a customized version of ssl.py.

doorhammer6• 12 years ago

I've been using ST2 a lot recently and while I really like it, feature wise, I've had horrible issues with documentation. The big issue is that it doesn't seem to meaningfully exist, especially if you're looking to quickly start modifying things and creating new functionality. Maybe I missed the boat on it somewhere, but it's a nightmare to find anything out about it that isn't pretty simple. I've ended up doing a lot of digging through the keybindings, experimenting with random keywords, and reading other peoples code to get things to work. While that in and of itself is a learning experience (and there's something to be said about reading other code), it's hard to rftm when there's not really an m.

I guess it may be that my google-fu is just sucking lately, but the docs situation seems bad after a few weeks of using it. If I'm wrong and anyone has any suggestions, let me know and I'd really like to check them out.

AlwaysBCoding• 12 years ago

This is dead accurate. I'm a huge fan of Sublime, but their API/documentation is an atrocity. As much as I love my current Sublime setup, if there were an editor with a well documented API for writing custom plugins I would switch in an instant.

lobster_johnson2• 12 years ago

Indeed. I tried to implement a fast project switcher plugin at one point; ie., a plugin to quickly switch to another window by autocompleting its project name, like super+P (instead of having to cycle windows or use the window menu, both of which are poor UIs when you have anything more than two windows open). But the API doesn't support focusing windows. You can switch focus to a different buffer in an arbitrary window, but it won't make the window itself active. I reported the limitation in the forums. Never got a response. Didn't surprise me; I have reported a bunch of other problems, hardly any of which received Jon Skinner's attention.

pyoung2• 12 years ago

I like sublime, but my primary computer has an ARM processor and there is no sublime port. The sublime developers have stated that they don't have the bandwidth to handle an ARM port, and that's fair. But I find it difficult to justify paying for a license, when I can only use the editor ~25% of the time. An editor that is sublime-like and works everywhere would be awesome. I can't tell if atom has this, but a hosted version would also be cool, allowing users to hop on the service and do some quick work when on unfamiliar machines.

enscr• 12 years ago

'Primary computer is ARM' - and you are a developer? I'm genuinely curious about your setup & work.

alrs• 12 years ago

Gross.

The moment that their new editor provides some piece of Github functionality that isn't exposed to an open API is the moment that we need to bail, en masse.

We've already killed Freshmeat and Sourceforge for turning lame, this shouldn't be hard.

archagon4• 12 years ago

You know, I'm usually very skeptical of web apps, but building a text editor in WebKit actually seems like a really good idea. Everything a browser should be good at — text display, scripting, styling — also applies to text editors. You don't really have to worry about complex UI, animation, or user input. You also get remote access almost for free.

What other text-centric apps can be made better by a browser framework? Maybe the terminal?

mattmanser• 12 years ago

HTML's not good at windows, apps, doesn't have any sort of concept of a widget and has the kind of layout rules you'd have a tough time beating if you were sitting there trying to be deliberately malicious to future programmers.

It's not a good idea, but given the abysmal state that desktop apps seem to be in at the moment[1], it's probably the least bad idea.

[1] Been about 5 years since I did a desktop app, but if anything they look to be getting worse. WPF, flop. Flex, flop. GTK+ looks poo. If I had to do a cross platform desktop app, I wouldn't even know where to start.

archagon4• 12 years ago

I agree with you, but I don't think most of those things are really vital for a great text editor. For the most part, it's just a giant window with your text in it, maybe a sidebar or two. Most of the magic happens under the hood. That's why I think this is a good idea.

Dunno about cross-platform app development, but Cocoa on OSX is pretty nice. QT isn't bad either, from what I've tried.

pmr_• 12 years ago

So why is every text editor I have ever seen embedded in a website an abomination?

text display, scripting, styling

The only thing that really matters is scripting. Every serious editor has solved displaying text and styling since ages and those two points aren't even that important in programming languages. All you want is a syntax aware highlighting. Maybe underlines and a little bold here and there.

Scripting is the really hard part. There are many flavors, languages, APIs to chose from. Just because you now can script things in <hip-language-of-the-day>, the problem isn't solved. My editor uses a lisp dialect and I'm perfectly happy with it, not because of the language choice but the APIs and amount of integration.

One thing that is incredibly important for text editors is speed: something web engines are notoriously bad at.

archagon4• 12 years ago

  "Every serious editor has solved displaying text and styling since ages ago..."

Sure, but why reinvent the wheel? In this case, Github is leveraging a technology specifically optimized for text and styling. They don't have to maintain it, and they get a lot of cutting-edge optimizations for free. It also gives them the freedom to do some crazy things that would otherwise be very difficult — see Light Table.

  "...and those two points aren't even that important in programming languages."

I disagree. Efficient text display and presentation in a text editor are very important, at least for me. Not that scripting is any less important, but it looks like Github has that front covered as well. (Then again, I've never been a heavy vim or emacs user. I guess I'm what you might call a "filthy casual".)

  "One thing that is incredibly important for text editors is speed: something web engines are notoriously bad at."

I was under the impression that web engines are really good at text when there's not a lot of other crazy nonsense going on. Guess we'll see!

  "So why is every text editor I have ever seen embedded in a website an abomination?"

My guess is going (partially) native and using Node.js will make the experience a whole lot better.

bct• 12 years ago

So why is every text editor I have ever seen embedded in a website an abomination?

Because most websites use contenteditable for their rich text editors, which is horrible to deal with. It's not standardized, it gives developers very little control, and its output and capabilities vary a lot from browser to browser.

Web rich text editors that don't suck - e.g. Google Docs - bypass the browser's support for rich text editing entirely. This makes them usable, but it also means everything has to be implemented from scratch, so the code is complex. AFAIK there are no general purpose rich text editors built like this that are open source or even licensable.

There are some pretty good non-contenteditable code editors, though. Presumably Atom will be built in this style.

jbeja10• 12 years ago

So this it yet another web base text editor like Brackets and LT, one have it's "live-reload" feature the other his "live-code-evaluation", and which is the selling point for this?. Going throught the website it just give me the idea that is a what i mentioned before.

pcmonk• 12 years ago

For me, this might be the killer feature: http://atom.io/packages/vim-mode

jbeja10• 12 years ago

That is my only concern, and i hope that doesn't disappoint me :).

justizin3• 12 years ago

Light Table has it, as well as emacs - both using tools that are not specific to LT.

hexagonsun• 12 years ago

this looks fantastic! i've been wanting a reason to pick up a cheap chromebook.

teraflop3• 12 years ago

It won't run on a Chromebook.

pritambaral9• 12 years ago

Source?

camus2• 12 years ago

lol , since when ChromeOs can run desktop apps?

dragonwriter2• 12 years ago

If it is, as it appears, node + node-webkit, it might not be all that hard to build a web version, particularly one for Chrome/ChromeOS, since it would mostly be an app written to run on the same JS engine used in Chrome that already uses Chromium for its UI.

dmritard96• 12 years ago

looks cool, i really enjoy gedit with all the dev plugins and theme customization etc. Will def try this out to see how it compares

mikecarlton• 12 years ago

Will it have vim key bindings? My fingers have vim wired in and that's not going to change.

ranman• 12 years ago

Can this work at all without an internet connection? Can it work offline?

gjtorikian2• 12 years ago

It is a desktop app, so yes.

jasonpeacock• 12 years ago

Can you edit files while offline? Or do you need to be always-connected? (i.e. this is an actual web service)

I couldn't find mention anywhere about offline abilities.

mrbogle3• 12 years ago

There is no online component. So yes, you can edit offline.

cdata• 12 years ago

This sounds like a very promising tool. I'm really excited to hear all of the talk about extensibility.

One thing that is conspicuously absent is any mention of it being open source. I can certainly appreciate that Github is for-profit, but I would love to have a clearer idea of how free / not-free this tool will be when it is publicly available.

skennedy• 12 years ago

To help us improve the editor, Atom sends usage information to Google Analytics. See [atom/metrics](https://github.com/atom/metrics) for details.

More data going to Google without opting in first? Bummer.

zackboe• 12 years ago

From the page you link to: If you do not want this information reported, disable this package from the Metrics section of the Settings view (cmd-,).

phaer• 12 years ago

I suppose that's why skennedy writes "without opting in first". What you describe is called "opt out", it's the opposite of opt in.

ihuman2• 12 years ago

I know it's a stretch, but technically, you are opting in by downloading and running the program, and therefor accepting some sort of privacy policy or ToS.

mcovey2• 12 years ago

    echo '
    127.0.0.1 ssl.google-analytics.com
    127.0.0.1 www.google-analytics.com
    127.0.0.1 google-analytics.com' >> /etc/hosts

tuananh2• 12 years ago

and remove it whenever i want to access GA !?

victorhooi10• 12 years ago

See, I never get the tinfoil hat crowd.

Are any of us so self-important, that we think our usage stats for a text editor are some kind of top-secret data?

I mean, come on - it's a text editor - I edit my scratchpad and my coding projects on it.

If any of the stuff I had was that top-secret, I'd be doing it in a digital clean-room, with an airgap. And I'd actually have top-secret clearance.

How many of us here actually have top secret clearance? I'd bet very few...lol. And I doubt they'd be posting here, or admit it.

My list of text files I have open is quite frankly, is not that interesting. I don't really care if Google wants to mine it. Or if Github finds out I edit a document called "Lolcat images" fifteen times a day. I seriously doubt any Githubber is going to be sitting there, pouring through logs looking for salacious information about the documents I edit...

shittyanalogy5• 12 years ago

Some people with lives "not that interesting" don't want to give up their privacy. Some of us even understand that there is no such thing as "anonymous statistics".

It's not about a big government spying conspiracy. It's about basic privacy and not giving out data about yourself that you don't want to give out.

There are also enormous trust implications.

stormbrew3• 12 years ago

Obviously your life is more interesting than you think given that so many people eagerly want to track it.

yeukhon2• 12 years ago

I just don't understand why people downvote you. It's quite stupid to downvote someone who is merely pointing out facts.

Google analytic is everywhere. If you don't want Github to track you, then don't use it. So if people fear Google, then should Github do the tracking on its own? Then all the sudden Github is not evil anymore. But look: github has your repository, your code. If you have a private repo, github still owns the source code in their data store. So in the end, privacy on Github? Minimal.

And you know what? Github itself has been using Google analytic for years. And now we are complaining about Google collecting data?

If you care about privacy, you shouldn't even be using Github. If you care about your privacy, you should never give up your true IP, your true identity on the Internet.

neomech• 12 years ago

Hopefully this will run on arm, which is something SublimeText does not

thecrumb• 12 years ago

Sublime has 'limited extensibility'? Package Manager lists over 2000 packages. And what about Brackets? This looks very similar - editor built with web tech. http://brackets.io/

xster3• 12 years ago

Granted they started this effort a while ago but would be pretty boss if hypothetically they built this on Dart

jedireza• 12 years ago

I find it interesting that there is little to no conversation about the integration with git. In one of the the screenshots I saw a branch name and icon in the bottom status bar. I assume this is an important motivation for GitHub.

desireco42• 12 years ago

Last thing I need is another editor. Having said that, I will for sure examine and give a fair chance to anything you produce.

I am a vim user, I recently learned a lot of power moves in SublimeText and this is my go-to editor now. Making me use anything else would be super difficult but not impossible. Price is not the issue.

crazygringo3• 12 years ago

I was all ready to be skeptical and everything... but this could actually be amazing.

I currently use Chocolat for code editing, which is beautifully elegant and I love it, but there are 25 little tiny things that I really wish I could fix. I file issues, but the developers rightly have their own priorities. It's closed-source, but even if it were open source, I'm not about to learn how to use XCode and Objective C and figure out how to compile and whatnot.

But if Atom is ultimately just a big collection of straight-up node.js files, and anyone can go in at any time to change a line here or there -- and it's in JavaScript, so it couldn't be easier for programmers in general -- and there's no compilation step or anything -- then it's almost a fundamental paradigm shift for what desktop software could be.

It already makes me dream of a word processor I could hack like that, or a music player. Just by opening up a text editor. It's an inspiring thought.

adamors8• 12 years ago

and there's no compilation step or anything -- then it's almost a fundamental paradigm shift for what desktop software could be. It already makes me dream of a word processor I could hack like that, or a music player. Just by opening up a text editor. It's an inspiring thought.

Not to rain on your parade or anything, but you can already do this with Emacs, not to mention that Emacs is free, open source software. Atom is not only not open source but their readme says it won't even be free after the beta.

Emacs has been around for almost 40 years, and because it's FOSS it will be around for at least another 40. Editors like Atom come and go.

michaelmior• 12 years ago

Atom is free during the beta period.

Where does it say it won't be free after the beta period?

crazygringo3• 12 years ago

True, but it's a question of accessibility.

Far more people can program in JavaScript than Lisp, and far more people use GUI desktop software that follows traditional GUI user-interface paradigms, than do things inside their terminal. (Edit: or terminal-style buffers/frames.)

So that's why my statement was limited to what "desktop software" could be. :) I mean, I use LibreOffice, which is FOSS, but I am never going to touch its code in a million years. The cost-to-benefit ratio is too high. But Atom makes doing that sound almost trivial. That's the paradigm shift.

ibrahima2• 12 years ago

Oh what, it's not open source? The little interest I had in this just evaporated. I would definitely be interested in something like Emacs built on modern technologies, but Emacs is already there and quite good. I feel like something like this could be neat, just because far more people know HTML/JS than Elisp, but if it's not open source that kills my enthusiasm for the project.

cmelbye2• 12 years ago

  Atom is not only not open source but ...

Do you have a source for this? I'd be very disappointed to hear that if it were true.

EDIT: It appears that this isn't true. From a GitHub employee in freenode/##atom:

  <jonrohan> EvanDotPro: it will be open source, and other platforms, when it's out of beta
  <chance> jonrohan: where are you getting that information?
  <jonrohan> chance: i work at github

baddox3• 12 years ago

I'm with you. I'm an Emacs user, which ostensibly has a similar design philosophy (open source, with powerful extensibility from a full-blown programming language), but Emacs Lisp has a lot of baggage and is nowhere near as widely used as JavaScript. I also find the Emacs community disjointed and hard to navigate and participate in. Ultimately, assuming that the underlying design decisions of Atom are reasonable, its success will depend on the community that develops (double meaning intended) around it. It could be great.

davidw2• 12 years ago

Emacs Lisp has a lot of baggage and is nowhere near as widely used as JavaScript

Back in the 90ies, when I started using Emacs, Elisp had a lot of baggage and was nowhere near as widely used as Perl.

I'm still using Emacs.

nilsbunger• 12 years ago

Have you looked at Adobe Brackets? It's basically that, open-sourced today. Or look at node-webkit if you only want the app framework without the editor. The biggest downside I see right now is HUGE binaries (100+MB) because you're bundling a browser in your exe.

encoderer• 12 years ago

Browsers are 100+MB?

freshyill2• 12 years ago

You are so on-the-money about Chocolat. I love it except for the things that drive me crazy. I've been trying to love Sublime Text lately. Even though I see the benefits, I see the un-Mac-like-ness of it even more.

bluedino2• 12 years ago

It's a benefit if your team uses a mix of Mac/Linux/Windows.

adito• 12 years ago

But if Atom is ultimately just a big collection of straight-up node.js files, and anyone can go in at any time to change a line here or there -- and it's in JavaScript, so it couldn't be easier for programmers in general -- and there's no compilation step or anything -- then it's almost a fundamental paradigm shift for what desktop software could be.

http://discuss.atom.io/t/atom-is-so-powerful-that-it-blows-m...

How I felt after that? I felt awesome. I had only installed Atom minutes ago. I didn't even had to think to fix my problem. All the knowledge I needed was already in my head! It was simple as editing a webpage. TL;DR: Atom allowed me to fix one simple problem – that I still encounter in most text editors nowadays – in seconds. What about yours?

alextgordon• 12 years ago

It's funny you say that, because as the only full time-ish developer of Chocolat, I could really use a lot of help!

There's ~600 open issues, my personal todo list alone is several years' worth of work. Too much for one man.

---

People make too much of open vs closed source. The real distinction is individual-lead vs committee-written.

TextMate, Sublime and Vim are good editors. But they are also Allan, Jon and Bram. Writing an editor requires good taste, accumulated experience, and a certain disregard for users' feelings.

You need someone who cares about the editor. Without that, you get a program where everything is wrong, but nobody ever bothers to fix it.

This is however a blessing and a curse. If the author can't financially support themselves, the editor will die. If the author becomes a millionaire, the editor will die. Thankfully, I'm still poor.

---

What are the 25 little things, by the way?

crazygringo3• 12 years ago

Haha, too much work indeed. :) I'm not going to list all 25 here, but I'd say the biggest three are definitely issues #1157 (this is HUGE, add a pref option please!!), #1369 (please!), and #1451/1417 (constantly crashing).

But overall, it's still just the most beautiful and elegant editor. :) Thanks for it!

cormullion• 12 years ago

Never heard of Chocolat before - but it is a very attractive OS X app!

bruceboughton3• 12 years ago

> and it's in JavaScript, so it couldn't be easier for programmers in general

Because JavaScript is magically easier than any other programming language ever invented.

Even if this were true, it still wouldn't help an expert Objective C programmer with no JS experience hack on Atom.

Your bias is showing.

pdpi• 12 years ago

Adobe has been working on Brackets for a while, and it's essentially the exact same concept.

ricardobeat3• 12 years ago

That is also one of the ideas behind Light Table.

narrator• 12 years ago

Eclipse is massively modifiable but everyone hates it because of bloat. You see this kind of thing starts off with good intentions and then all the plugin madness gets going and suddenly everyone gets revolted and charges off to embrace the next great "lightweight" editor.

jbrooksuk4• 12 years ago

It's ironic that you're unable to commit code from within Atom. Apart from that there are a couple of things that I feel can be added.

- Soft undo for multiple selections.

- Search settings since the panel is overwhelming.

- Markdown preview should be updated live?

- I really miss Go To Anything from Sublime Text 3.

- You should be able to select the syntax highlighting from the status bar.

- Inline preview of audio, SVG (toggle?) and fonts? That would be rad.

- Syncing of settings using GitHub settings?

But other than that this is really good progress!

AhtiK• 12 years ago

Commit is not needed if the next version includes a dropbox-like sync to your github repo.

I'm pretty sure it's one of the reasons to come up with its own desktop editor (that later can be also used online) -- to bridge the gap.

malierdo2• 12 years ago

I think, in the long run -3 to 5 years-, Jon Skinner -Sublime Text- will be leading, like now. I can clearly see his passion and investment in his product.

People at GitHub are also great, well funded, but this is not their core product. Do they have a leader -I don't know if they have or not- who will be focusing only on this product and keep up with jskinner?

I am sure Atom will be around for long years, as well as Sublime Text. Thanks to GitHub, I am looking forward to give it a try.

jbrooksuk4• 12 years ago

I hope that this spurs Jon on to continue working on Sublime Text and start to be more transparent with what development is ongoing etc. See the forums for recent outcries.

zeckalpha3• 12 years ago

And fix the bus factor.

subsection1h3• 12 years ago

in the long run -3 to 5 years-, Jon Skinner -Sublime Text- will be leading

As an Emacs user, I find it funny to hear 3-5 years be referred to as "the long run".

Also, Sublime Text won't be leading until it has a package with more features than Org mode. ;-)

malierdo2• 12 years ago

actually I was expecting a comment on that one :) don't you think the time frame narrows on predicting the future on topics like these -web, desktop or mobile applications-?

I am not arguing that Sublime Text is the best -because I am not that pro-, but I can assure you it is hot right now, all around the world. It may be wrong, but all cs students and developers I personally know in 4-5 countries use it, like it. Most of the online courses tell their students to use it. It is highly recommended, all over the web.

The word is spreading.

http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=%2Fm%2F01yp0m%2C%20%2...

wildpeaks2• 12 years ago

It could be a matter of scratching your own itch: they're likely to write a lot of code and perhaps they were not satisfied with any of the existing one, and the instinctive solution for us devs it to make your dream software when none fit :)

jbeja10• 12 years ago

I hope that it doesn't suffer from the same text redering issuies that LT nad Brackets has.

_zen2• 12 years ago

I will switch to this if it is as good as Sublime Text, but with a more open API. Sublime Text's API is too restricted, and there's a ton of things I want in Sublime Text that IDEs have.. but I don't want a full-blown IDE.

Take the overall diff bar of most IDEs for example (Jetbrains, Netbeans, etc.). I want that in Sublime/Atom. There is a plug-in for Sublime to show diffs per line, but no way to manipulate the mini-map to show diffs at a glance.

http://blog.jetbrains.com/pycharm/files/2013/12/2.png

Edit:

See, this is inferior and what Sublime Text already has: http://atom.io/packages/git-diff

What's superior is a full-blown diff bar overview of the file.

lhnz4• 12 years ago

There's real opportunity here for Github and I hope they take it.

Why is the basic workflow of the modern-day programmer split over multiple tools and over multiple systems?

Aspects of Github could be modularised and added to the editor while still keeping the underlying tool simple and this could change our user experience for the better.

Imagine flipping through your pull requests in the text editor and then seeing your friends comments and code reviews appear on top.

Imagine an issue being created on Github and the file(s) referenced instantly glowing.

This opens doors to thinking about the engineering workflow in a new holistic manner.

techpeace• 12 years ago

IDEs, while they have fallen out of favor somewhat in the web development community, offer such a "holistic" development experience already - complete with deep integration into GitHub, in some instances.

lhnz4• 12 years ago

I think you miss the point.

Being modularised allows the basic user experience to be kept very simple. It does not need to grow into something like an IDE. Hell, according to Packages [0] even tools like find-and-replace have been modularised so I do not think it follows that Github would carelessly decide to create a big ball of mud!

And additionally this tool has removed barriers that previously existed before.

Since it was created by Github they will be able to expose APIs to create features which are currently not possible.

Likewise the UI being implemented with WebKit means that the user interface can tightly represent what a user is used to seeing at different stages of their development process.

You might have read "The Design of Everyday Things" [1] before. There are certain elements which you need to control to create a good user experience: (1) discoverability, (2) feedback, (3) the conceptual model, (4) affordances, (5) signifiers, and (6) mappings. Without ease in changing the UI, and the possibility that Github will have self-interest in exposing extra APIs, it would be a lot more difficult to control for each of these.

It's just an opportunity to try new ideas. I'm not suggesting that this would be preferable to everybody.

[0] http://atom.io/packages

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Donald-Norman/d...

theboywho2• 12 years ago

Why is seeing your friends comments and code reviews in the text editor any better than seeing them in the browser? Are we becoming this lazy? or this busy?

ibrahima2• 12 years ago

Potentially fewer context switches and interruptions? I know for me the browser is a potential landmine of distraction, it might be handy to be able to limit that.

basicallydan4• 12 years ago

Minimising context switching is a big part of improving programmer productivity, as I'm sure you're aware. This may not seem like much, but large increases in productivity can be achieved through small increases building up; every little helps.

Plus, it's cool.

rjzzleep3• 12 years ago

i see people saying less context switches. but isn't this the exact opposite? it's way more context switches?

isn't this the same as having our mails popup up notifications every so often or your gmail aggregating twitter and Facebook, because people thought it would make them more productive

calinet62• 12 years ago

This is pretty shortsighted. It's not the simple case of "what you can already do with two tools" that we should be thinking about. It's that stuff that you can't even imagine was possible until it integrated, in the same place, and with a good user experience.

You'll have information that's right in front of your eyes where before, the tiniest wall of separation was barrier enough to make it inaccessible or out of mind. Things will become the same, instead of just both being in the same place. This is the essence of good UX, and it has nothing to do with this specific case, but it will emerge from simple cases like this. First two things coexist, then they share, then they become one.

For a while, the iPhone was just a phone and a computer. People even said the same exact thing you just did: "why is having a phone and a palm pilot in one device any better than having them separate?" Then they started sharing features, the internet became pervasively accessible. Then everything started sharing data and features. And now we can't imagine them separate, and we have an entirely new class of thing that came out of it that basically enabled a revolution.

Eventually programming could be the same. Programmers probably have the highest tolerance I know of for compartmentalization of tasks and poor interaction design and data visualization: they are extremely intelligent and have the ability to tie things together in their heads and break down tasks and tools ad hoc. But when you don't have to do that, when programming becomes easier and more fluid, things will start happening that simply couldn't before.

We can only dream of the kinds of advancements in our tools that are yet to come.

wildpeaks2• 12 years ago

Same reason there exist plugins to integrate Git status & diff in Sublime: it's useful for some of us.

beefsack3• 12 years ago

My hope is that the core of Atom isn't so bloated with GitHub integration and that integration is optionally available through the plugin management system. I'm of the type who prefers to use the text editor just for code and other tools for source control and project management.

lhnz4• 12 years ago

> that integration is optionally available through the plugin management system

Given that even find-and-replace [0] exists as a module I think you have nothing to worry about.

[0] http://atom.io/packages/find-and-replace

curun1r• 12 years ago

There's real opportunity here for Github and I hope they take it.

I think the philosophy here is that there is a real opportunity and they hope that you take it (or someone in the community). They're creating a highly-hackable editor and their API allows access to everything you've asked for.

They're going to build a ton of add-ons too, but they want the community to build a lot of this stuff. The most creative product team in the world can't match millions of developers solving their own problems, so rather than try to build the perfect product for everyone, they're building the most flexible product for everyone to mold into what they need.

jcromartie• 12 years ago

Why is the basic workflow of the modern-day programmer split over multiple tools and over multiple systems?

I disagree that this is a problem.

Replace "programmer" with any other profession, and you'll see it's universally silly.

SSpeicher• 12 years ago

Aspects of Github could be modularised and added to the editor while still keeping the underlying tool simple and this could change our user experience for the better.

This is essentially what we've done with some Rational tools (such as Team Concert) using by defining a set of loose-coupled RESTful capabilities for tool-based integrated, called OSLC http://open-services.net It has the nice quality, if adopted, as being able to link to you own issue tracker hosted elsewhere (bugzilla, jira, etc), CI, end-user need management, etc.

Atom has some limitations, I could see where OSLC and ActivityStreams would be a bit more interesting.

isadeal• 12 years ago

What is web based core? Does it run on Chrome?

brianzelip• 12 years ago

wow, there are 2,078 lines of (unminified) css styling this page. Nice page though. Can't wait to try out the editor.

ucarion• 12 years ago

If you're looking for an invite, there are lots of people offering and requesting invites on IRC:

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

davexunit2• 12 years ago

A hackable text editor for the 21st century

I'll fix: A proprietary (unhackable) text editor that only runs on OS X.

I imagine that web developers will drool over this.

subsection1h3• 12 years ago

A proprietary (unhackable) text editor

I developed some packages for HomeSite in the 90s. When HomeSite was integrated into Dreamweaver and development ceased, I realized that I had wasted my time developing HomeSite packages and that I should never again devote my time to extending closed-source software. Emacs has served me well ever since.

kneath• 12 years ago

Lots of assumptions here.

pbiggar• 12 years ago

Where are you getting this from? I can see all the source at https://github.com/atom. Every repo I checked has the MIT license.

sheetjs• 12 years ago

Can you build a fully functional version of Atom just from those repos?

To compare, Apple releases source code for some components, but they definitely don't distribute "/System/Library/Extensions/Dont Steal Mac OS X.kext".

lobster_johnson2• 12 years ago

The source of the actual editor isn't public.

chimeracoder3• 12 years ago

From Tom Preston-Warner himself: http://discuss.atom.io/t/why-is-atom-closed-source/82/8

Atom won't be closed source, but it won't be open source either. It will be somewhere inbetween, making it easy for us to charge for Atom while still making the source available under a restrictive license so you can see how everything works. We haven't finalized exactly how this will work yet. We will have full details ready for the official launch.

However one tries to soften that language, that translates to a proprietary license of any standard definition of "proprietary"[0]

[0] It actually sounds rather similar to the old proprietary license that Microsoft used to use (not sure if they still do anymore).

fafner2• 12 years ago

And it reports data to Google... http://atom.io/packages/metrics

callumjones• 12 years ago

"If you do not want this information reported, disable this package from the Metrics section of the Settings view (cmd-,)."

toddmorey• 12 years ago

But in fairness, they've fully listed the data being collected. I'm actually very comfortable with them collecting these metrics (though I'm glad there's a way to turn it off just the same).

- A unique identifier that is generated by computing the SHA-1 of the machine's MAC address. - The screen width and height - The version of Atom being used - The name of each item opened in a pane such as EditorView, SettingsView, and MarkdownPreviewView - The amount of time the current window was open for - The amount of time the current window to took to load - The amount of time the app took to launch

jamesmoss2• 12 years ago

I've just had play around with the beta. It looks like it's using a version of CodeMirror 4 (as it has multiple ranges). Fairly fast but it doesn't match Sublime Text just yet

Initial impressions: it's early days but this thing is just oozing for customisation. The fact it's written in JS means writing packages is pretty simple compared to Python for ST; we're going to see TONNES of addons for it. I can already think of 2-3 I'd like to build.

The one thing that really excites me is how people getting into programming could start off with a pretty basic editor and add and write packages as they hone their skills, ending with something incredible powerful and tailored to them. In fact I'd really love to see a super customised starter version for children / beginners that acts as a learning aid as well as a text editor.

No doubt there's going to be haters in the vim / emacs / ST / insert favourite editor here camp but I really hope this works out for the Github guys (and I have a feeling it will).

_zen2• 12 years ago

Initial impressions: it's early days but this thing is just oozing for customisation. The fact it's written in JS means writing packages is pretty simple compared to Python for ST; we're going to see TONNES of addons for it. I can already think of 2-3 I'd like to build.

This isn't why it's going to be popular for plugin development though. Sublime plugins are Python, which isn't that hard to learn.

Atom's plugins are worth looking forward to if the API is more extensive than Sublime. There is too much you can't do in Sublime Text plugin authoring.

jamesmoss2• 12 years ago

This isn't why it's going to be popular for plugin development though. Sublime plugins are Python, which isn't that hard to learn.

Agreed, but Javascript has many more developers who know JS over Python. From my initial glance at the docs the learning curve for package development isn't too steep either.

ytpete5• 12 years ago

Fwiw, Brackets (http://brackets.io) supports a similar degree of customization since it's also written in JS/HTML, uses CodeMirror, and offers lots of extensibility APIs. And it's MIT-licensed. Writing an extension is as easy as this: https://github.com/adobe/brackets/wiki/Simple-"Hello-World"-...

greyskull3• 12 years ago

When I first saw Brackets, I was surprised to see it come out of Adobe. I had no idea that they did any open-source work, especially considering their product portfolio.

spyder• 12 years ago

Looks like in Atom you can just inspect elements of the editor and change them right there. In Brackets if you want to change the font of the editor then you have to write an extension or search for the CSS file of the editor which is barely editable with Brackets because it's slows down with the somewhat bigger CSS file, syntax highlight stops at the half of the file and searching was extremely slow for me in this big file.

marijn• 12 years ago

What makes you think it's using CodeMirror? My impression is that they implemented their own editor component from scratch.

gojomo• 12 years ago

The "space-pen" part of this deserves separate attention:

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

I bet this space-pen DOM DSL would mix well with the React virtual-DOM approach.

fisherprice• 12 years ago

Nice to see some innovate architecture for an editor but this product launch reminds me to product launches from Apple or Google: it doesn't matter what product or feature is shown, there is always tons of premature praise.

If an unknown third party came up with Atom it would have never gotten that attention.

ST3 is a very good product viewed from any angle and VIM either—it will be hard to beat these reference products. I love Node/npm and again the stack sounds great but I don't know if this stack will be much easier to extend than something like ST3 or VIM.

What I have seen from a product perspective on the Atom landing page does not blow me away, not at all. And it is wether free nor open source.

But it's from Github and that's reason enough to vote it up.

comice• 12 years ago

"Our goal is a zero-compromise combination of hackability and usability"

I can see a huge compromise in hackability - its core is closed source.

benched• 12 years ago

My Poe's Law detector is itching uncomfortably right now.

Really, was anybody asking for all this?

TuxLyn• 12 years ago

I exclusively use Sublime Text editor for some time now. But this Atom editor by GitHub is very interesting. Will definantly try it.

enahs• 12 years ago

how i feel about atom.io... http://desmond.yfrog.com/Himg876/scaled.php?tn=0&server=876&...

RA_Fisher• 12 years ago

It needs a LaTeX plugin!

tambourine_man• 12 years ago

Bespin, Skywriter, Ace, Brackets… now Atom. Everybody seems to be having the same idea: that browser based technologies are the future for code editors.

I for one am more enticed by the possibility of a WebKit frontend, with a NeoVim core and a libuv backend. Finally, Vim as an embeddable library.

donw• 12 years ago

Atom team, if you're reading this, I have a big feature request that would make this far, far greater than just another editor.

Pair editing.

Specifically, having the ability to pair two editors over a network and edit the same set of files.

Lots of other editors do this, but here's the key: Each editor keeps its own settings and environment.

I'm a vim guy. I can set up my Atom to be vimlike. My buddy, the Emacs (heretic!) guy, can set up his Atom the way he likes, and we can work in harmony.

That's all I want.

zeckalpha3• 12 years ago

Floobits.

roryokane• 12 years ago

That is to say, https://floobits.com/ appears to already do this.

mattattaque• 12 years ago

Looks like Sublime Text but with a ton of resource-consuming shit I'll never use, which itself is similar to the reason I stopped using Sublime Text. I'll sick with vim, thanks.

dreamdu5t• 12 years ago

So, they want people to contribute writing plugins so they can turn-around and make money off the plugin ecosystem by selling atom?

Seems transparently under-handed to me.

mkhattab2• 12 years ago

A common thread or line of argument that I find when reading about new editors is their out-of-the-box ease of use compared to Emacs and Vim. For example, a quote from the Atom blog:

Sublime and TextMate offer convenience but only limited extensibility. On the other end of the spectrum, Emacs and Vim offer extreme flexibility, but they aren't very approachable and can only be customized with special-purpose scripting languages.

It doesn't seem like they (and many others) are denying that Emacs and Vim are excellent editors. Why is ease of use such an important issue for text editors? Emacs isn't terribly difficult to use, but if my livelihood and the majority of my time is tied to what tools I use, then it's worth the investment of time. I don't think I've met an Emacs user who has put in the effort of learning Elisp and customizing Emacs to their liking ever deny the benefits of learning it in the first place. Yes, it's a pain in the ass initially. I quit Emacs twice before I became determined to stop whining and spend quality time learning about tooling.

There is no doubt that Emacs has a steep learning curve and perhaps that's because its developers have a higher expectation of its users. I would argue that these expectations are easily matched by the capabilities of a competent programmer.

redbad3• 12 years ago

There is no reason why "editing plain text" should be anything other than immediately intuitive. Advanced, time-saving features, like multi-cursors or regexp-based find-and-replace, can and should be progressively revealed through normal use of the software.

This ludditic reverence for user-hostile text editors is one of the more perplexing and frustrating things about our industry.

lord_quas3• 12 years ago

Editing plain text is in fact very easy. Structured text requires a little more logic, however. Ultimately, you could use emacs in the exact way one would use notepad++ and be none the wiser to the rich customizations under the hood. If thats your bag of tea, drink it.

prasoon22113• 12 years ago

There is no reason why "editing plain text" should be anything other than immediately intuitive.

Are you suggesting that it isn't in Emacs?

Well, I remember using Emacs for the first time. It opened up and I started editing the opened file. I saved the file from the file menu (which also showed me the shortcut for saving the file the next time I have to save something). Done. Now, this is exactly what a novice would do with notepad.

I found that many people 'demonize' Emacs just because they found it unfamiliar. Sure it's unfamiliar. For about a day. Then, it's just as familiar as any other user interface. I now used Emacs for, well, the shell, the dired and wdired, multiple cursors, keyboard macros, project-wide grepping and everything in between. Getting familiar with the editor was a great thing to have done, however unfamiliar it was in the beginning.

With the benefit of hindsight, I can truly say that learning how to properly use a text editor, especially one so powerful as Emacs, is the one thing the any programmer absolutely must do. So, even if the editor isn't "anything other than immediately intuitive", it's still a good idea to wrap your head around the non-intuitive things.

jasonwocky• 12 years ago

This ludditic reverence for user-hostile text editors is one of the more perplexing and frustrating things about our industry.

I feel the same way about our industry's enslavement to faddishness.

trekky1700• 12 years ago

This isn't the best thing since sliced bread. It's better than sliced bread.

akosednar• 12 years ago

Interesting, this has been in development since sometime in November of 2013

losvedir• 12 years ago

So how much is written in Javascript? Won't that performance pale in comparison to, say, Sublime which is written in C++?

Or are just the plugins/extensions written in Javascript while the core editor is in C or C++?

Obligatory: People who got a beta invite, anyone feeling generous and want to give me one? (As I understand it, when you're invited you get a few to hand out, too.)

scorpion0322• 12 years ago

Sublime is written in Python.

I'd imagine, all of this is written in Javascript and compiled/rendered with v8.

ChristianBundy2• 12 years ago

Sublime is written in C++, the plugins are written in Python.

marcamillion• 12 years ago

Is it just me or do most of the new IDEs tend to focus around front-end technology?

Would love to see some innovation on the Ruby editor front.

jbeja10• 12 years ago

Would be slower than this.

stephenr2• 12 years ago

I haven't used this but if it's comparable to text mate and sublime, you should stop calling it an IDE.

sochin• 12 years ago

sochinquixabeira@gmail.com

Yahivin• 12 years ago

I'm really sad to see that they totally blew it.

The performance of a webapp with the accessibility of a desktop app. Not to mention that it's closed source. This is a tremendous step backwards.

Looking at the implementation of the open sourced packages is discouraging as well. It looks like they are using a Backbone inspired jQuery infested nightmare of clientside MVC.

Maybe my bitterness comes from the fact that I've already been down that road and it leads to a bad place.

Here's an editor that has deep Github integration, runs in the browser, and self hosts: http://www.danielx.net/editor

Maybe I just live too far in the future.

wololo_• 12 years ago

I would wait until I actually try the product instead of calling quits. And jQuery/Backbone is not an infested nightmare MVC. It's beautiful modular javascript.

q3k3• 12 years ago

beautiful
javascript

Choose one.

vhost-• 12 years ago

Emacs and Vim offer extreme flexibility, but they aren't very approachable and can only be customized with special-purpose scripting languages.

Only? I can point to a large number of Python, Ruby and Perl plugins for Vim. Unless they are considering those special-purpose and nodejs is the only truly flexible scripting language.

jaimebuelta• 12 years ago

Seems like quite a weird priority for GitHub to dedicate resources into creating Yet Another Text Editor.

I don't know, I can't see how this is a priority for them...

pritambaral9• 12 years ago

Even if they don't commercially benefit from it, a better editor will help their devs.

As for how it could commercially benefit them: similar to how Chrome benefits Google.

jlangenauer• 12 years ago

Github has iPad-based robots that allow remote workers to wonder about their SF office. Obviously, that $100m VC money has to be spent on ~something~.

Compared to that, a text editor is a mere bagatelle.

watermarkcamera• 12 years ago

That's great things !

peterashford• 12 years ago

So... it's like Emacs but based on Javascript rather than Lisp?

tsax• 12 years ago

At first glance the UI seems 'inspired' by Sublime

tlongren• 12 years ago

Screenshot on front page of site made me think of Sublimetext immediately, which is not a bad thing at all.

beefsack3• 12 years ago

Mojombo[0] commented[1] that it won't be either closed or open source, but "somewhere inbetween" to make it easy for them to charge for it.

[0] https://github.com/mojombo

[1] http://discuss.atom.io/t/why-is-atom-closed-source/82/9

tcl16• 12 years ago

Apparently github will be charging for it and it will not be fully open source.

http://discuss.atom.io/t/why-is-atom-closed-source/82/9

gleenn• 12 years ago

Having used it for the past couple hours, it looks great! It is pretty intuitive, snappy, and looks great. I'm definitely looking forward to using it more.

maddy2get• 12 years ago

Can somebody tell me how to run/install the editor? Thanks.

nilved3• 12 years ago

It's in private beta right now.

ksec• 12 years ago

I was hoping Github will offer a one stop shop for Online Editor via Atom and Communication via Gitter.

Looks like i was wrong.

tzs2• 12 years ago

From "The Zen of Programming":

------

Hearing a disturbance, the master programmer went into the novice's cubicle.

"Curse these personal computers!" cried the novice in anger, "To make them do anything I must use three or even four editing programs. Sometimes I get so confused that I erase entire files. This is truly intolerable!"

The master programmer stared at the novice. "And what would you do to remedy this state of affairs?" he asked.

The novice thought for a moment. "I will design a new editing program," he said, "a program that will replace all these others."

Suddenly the master struck the novice on the side of his head. It was not a heavy blow, but the novice was nonetheless surprised. "What did you do that for?" exclaimed the novice.

"I have no wish to learn another editing program," said the master.

And suddenly the novice was enlightened.

Gracana• 12 years ago

I think the first assertion is simply untrue, and without it the rest is nonsense. You don't need to learn how to use multiple editors to do anything.

I suppose there are some languages/environments that are somewhat tied to certain editors (java and eclipse, C# and visual studio, objective-C and xcode), but that's not what is proposed here. It's a general purpose programmer's editor that anyone can use for anything. Are you really upset that it's being written? Why do you think you'll have to learn it?

greyskull3• 12 years ago

I think it's also worth mentioning that Atom, like Sublime, looks straight-forward out of the box. You don't need to learn much to be productive. It doesn't have the learning curve of vim/emacs, but it's more powerful than Sublime/Notepad++/Gedit etc.

Also, I don't think anyone needs more than one general purpose text editor like vim or Sublime or Notepad++, and possibly a full-featured IDE like IntelliJ or Visual Studio. If there's a counter-argument, I'd like to read it.

rjzzleep3• 12 years ago

tbh with you i've used both omnisharp and eclim with vim.

you get full IDE features as well as refactoring inside of vim. for most things you can use vim as a full featured IDE these days.

well for refactoring you might have a few issues on, say, c++ and objective-c

[] http://eclim.org

[] https://github.com/nosami/Omnisharp

dsilver• 12 years ago

The solution for n competing standards is n + 1 competing standards.[0]

[0] https://xkcd.com/927/

hnriot2• 12 years ago

I love learning new things! If it's better then I am more than happy to learn it, otherwise we'd all still be using EDT...

This "master programmer" need to stop abusing his novices, stop resting on his laurels and get back to some learning.

jshen2• 12 years ago

we all have far less time than it would require to learn all of the interesting things. Once you get good with an editor your time is much better spent learning a new data structure, algorithm, language paradigm, etc than learning a new editor.

bowlofpetunias• 12 years ago

It's interesting that people keep using the word "better" when it comes to new editors/languages/frameworks/etc, yet as an industry we have very little evidence to proof it.

I've been doing this programming thing since the 80's, and the only thing I've seen that has really made software development better have been better practices.

Maybe we should first review our definition of "better" before we label something with it. Too often it's used as a synonym for "ooh, shiny!".

Having said that, Atom looks nice and shiny.

beltex• 12 years ago

It's a fair point, but by this rationale no new DBs or PLs should be made. Most of these die off or become niche, the ones that really become fundamental are few and far between. This idea that we have to drop everything and go "learn" this new thing is bogus. Folks in tech often seem to buy into the hype of some new technology all too easily, riding the wave of excitement. So their shouldn't be any concerns, of "yet another editor”.

BTW, I'm not saying this won't be successful! It looks interesting and I am excited, GitHub does great work, but you keep it in perspective.

gavinpc• 12 years ago

Sometimes I get so confused that I erase entire files

OT, but just this week my wife did something that really got me thinking about how far computers haven't come in terms of usability.

I heard her say "O crap" from behind her macbook, and out of habit I came to assist.

For some reason unknown to both of us, she had pasted the text of an email into a document called "thesis.docx", and then saved it.

The text was completely unrelated to "thesis.docx", which of course was not backed up.

Now, I love my wife deeply. And she is no fool. On the contrary, she is a graduate student.

Moreover, I completely understand how something like this can happen. We have two small children, and it was the end of the day. It is just too much to expect of the human mind that one should not say something one doesn't mean.

I felt guilty on behalf of my profession that this was the best we had to offer. Microsoft word on a macbook, and your penultimate version of a file is not backed up. It truly is intolerable.

So, while I have had some of my greatest highs using emacs macros, I somehow feel that the brilliant tooling made by developers for developers never quite percolates into userland.

nhangen• 12 years ago

Cmd z?

avoutthere• 12 years ago

Time Machine is perhaps the most elegant, least intrusive backup software ever. And it's free with OS X. I can't recommend it highly enough, especially for someone in your wife's position.

benlarcey• 12 years ago

As mentioned time machine is a great feature, but doesn't OS X auto save files you're working on with its versions? You might want to double check that it hasn't got past versions saved.

jvm• 12 years ago

Vim persistent undo solves this problem:

http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/undo.html#undo-persist...

...I'm sure Word will catch up eventually.

fhars• 12 years ago

VMS file versions solved that problem in the late 70ies. We are not learning anything from out history as a profession.

sergeykish2• 12 years ago

It's not her fault. One should be able to undo file system changes. Bell Labs solved this long ago by storing every file version forever http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_(file_system) Storage is cheap

m_eiman• 12 years ago

Doesn't Word store old data in the .docx, for things like revision diffs and to make saving quicker? Unless the filesize is really small, there might be a way to extract the previous data... Maybe that was only in the old .doc format, though.

userulluipeste2• 12 years ago

"Microsoft word on a macbook, and your penultimate version of a file is not backed up."

Your comments makes me think that neither you nor your wife knew about tracking changes in office documents: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/word-help/track-changes-wh...

But then considering that the unfortunate loss of data happened after an already lengthy sequence of manual actions, I wouldn't be surprised if the "o crap" would come after a longer sequence that involves disabling whatever should have been prevented the unpleasant events. I'm sorry for the loss, but I don't find my profession responsible more than I would find a car designer/engineer responsible for a car accident caused by driver's deficient attention.

hrktb2• 12 years ago

Sometimes I am boiling a stew, and while I am preparing another dish on the side, for some unknown reason I put the raw eggs on the stew instead of the fry pan.

Pans have been there for centuries, and there is nothing preventing me from throwing stuff in the wrong place, nor undo the eggs in the stew. It's so intolerable, and I feel so ashamed and guilty on behalf of all the pan makers.

Not. We are in a field where we can prevent a lot more stuff to happen than in the real world (and the real world is soooo broken...). We should try our best to make the state of usability and fool-proofness advance as much as we can, and surely there must already be something that would help your wife's case. But we should also be more realistic when voicing expectations.

userbinator• 12 years ago

It is just too much to expect of the human mind that one should not say something one doesn't mean.

Careful, that is quite a slippery slope...

ams6110• 12 years ago

Even worse, Mac apps are trending towars the "save as you go" model of Google Docs, which has the one advantage of you don't lose your work if an app crashes but if you started editing the wrong document, or make some changes and then change your mind and want to revert back to the last saved version you are tearing your hair out. The latter happens to me much more often.

wehadfun• 12 years ago

I wrote software to handle this a long time ago never got off the ground www.foldertrack.com

jsilence• 12 years ago

"thesis.docx", which of course was not backed up.

Something I find hard to belive from a woman whose husband is reading hacker news.

'thesis' and 'not backed up' are forbidden to appear in the same sentense by "the Universe(tm)". This law is enforced by _always_ deleting the contents of 'thesis'.

theonewolf• 12 years ago

You'd need something like ElephantFS whose presmise was precisely this. Modern file systems still don't protect user's data the way they should.

http://shiftleft.com/mirrors/www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Alistai...

Why even give users control of the data? No, that should rest squarely with the file system and ait should never delete things unless it is running out of space.

gameshot911• 12 years ago

What did you do? Was her whole thesis gone??

tracker1• 12 years ago

Not sure if this will help regarding change tracking in MS Word...

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/word-help/track-changes-wh...

beernutz• 12 years ago

I would like to recommend http://crashplan.com. It is set and forget online backup that keeps versions!

Inexpensive and truly unlimited storage. Windows, OSX, and Linux too!

johw• 12 years ago

I'm using dropbox for document backups. Just edit your files inside your dropbox folder and your documents will be versioned.

NIL8• 12 years ago

"Now, I love my wife deeply. And she is no fool. On the contrary, she is a graduate student."

No offense, to you or your wife, but this statement is hilarious for several reasons!

novaleaf• 12 years ago

ummm.. if you didn't do it then, i suppose it's already too late, but ctrl-z (i guess that's option-z on a mac?)

vickytnz• 12 years ago

When I started working on my thesis, I immediately set up my entire document directory for it to be in Dropbox. At the time I paid extra for versioning but now I think it'd built into even the basic model. This also saved my friend when she was in writeup and someone stole her Macbook.

hobbes3002• 12 years ago

Why wasn't she using versions?

http://support.apple.com/kb/PH14378

ryanac• 12 years ago

Could that also be interpreted as:

------

Hearing a disturbance, the master programmer went into the novice's cubicle.

"Curse these search engines!" cried the novice in anger, "To find anything I must scroll through three or even four pages of results.

Sometimes I get so confused that I just give up. This is truly intolerable!"

The master programmer stared at the novice. "And what would you do to remedy this state of affairs?" he asked.

The novice thought for a moment. "I will design a new search engine," he said, "a search engine that will replace all these others."

Suddenly the master struck the novice on the side of his head. It was not a heavy blow, but the novice was nonetheless surprised.

"What did you do that for?" exclaimed the novice.

"I have no wish learn another search engine," said the master.

The novice packed his bags, left and went on to create Google, which gives him exactly the results he's looking for.

While his former master was left sifting through multiple pages of results on (insert other search engine here).

One day the master stumbled upon Google and the master was enlightened.

dijit• 12 years ago

learning the facets, quirks and customisations of a text editor can't really be likened to the 'pick-up and go' model like a search engine.

mempko2• 12 years ago

Google UI is basically the same as the rest. Can't compare learning a professional tool to that of lay infotainment service.

baby• 12 years ago

somewhate relevent: https://xkcd.com/927/

Wintamute2• 12 years ago

If the master thinks that the human race has reached the absolute pinnacle of human/machine interfacing for text editing after just a few short decades of trying then he needs to go away and have a little sit down and a think about where he went wrong in life.

Kluny• 12 years ago

Nah man, you're not enlightened. He's not saying don't build a new editor, just that you had better think long and hard before you decide to foist another learning curve on the world, and act like you're doing it a favor.

Also, https://xkcd.com/927/

piratebroadcast• 12 years ago

Someone explain Atom to me like I'm 5?

skeletonjelly2• 12 years ago

Yet Another File Editor. This one's made by Github which the kids love to use on their Macbook Pros hacking some Ruby.

alecsmart1• 12 years ago

Am lost. Where do I download it from? I do not see any link. Or is it an online based editor? Will it work on Windows?

skeletonjelly2• 12 years ago

Invite. Offline. Not yet.

jpmec• 12 years ago

Can it send email?

cgcardona• 12 years ago

First let me say that I've used only vim and emacs for the last 5+ years that I have been a daily coder.

I'm extremely comfortable with vim. I can cruise seemingly at light speed and have just never been able to find a text editor which offered the same level of productivity when jumping back and forth between the mouse/trackpad and keyboard.

However I just couldn't resist the urge to try out a new text editor that was created by github and thankfully I scored an invite from someone on twitter.

I've only had the thing open for about 10 minutes and already I'm impressed.

It allows me to write in markdown, save the file, render the markdown into markup, and then launch the webkit dev tools to inspect the rendered DOM.[0]

Do other modern text editors such as Sublime Text allow you to render the markup and then inspect the DOM with browser dev tools? If not that alone seems like a pretty good innovation.

More Info: [0] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BhdTeedCcAARgYV.jpg:large

itsnotvalid• 12 years ago

I'd think it's not a requirement for OSS (look at textmate, sublime) but as new comers hit the store it would be nice to know it beforehand and have an expectation of what would come. Since for people writing addons it would be a decision-maker.

What most people wouldn't like to see are yearly subscriptions of another editor or paid upgrade every 18-month. I could personally bear with textmate and sublime for their current licensing (personal => works on as many computers I have - which I have at least 4)

For OSS ones, we have the traditional ones like emacs, vim, eclipse, and newer ones like brackets (which also sold as paid editor as Edge Code CC), lighttable or google's half-baked collide.

sdegutis5• 12 years ago

I hate to say it, but honestly, I think Atom is probably going to be my next full-time editor. The purist in me hates the idea of running such a powerful rendering engine inside a desktop app, but all desktop GUI toolkits have proven that they really really suck at text editing (I've tried almost all of them). This is probably the best way forward.

sdegutis5• 12 years ago

Where's the emacs keybindings repo and the paredit-clone repo? Am I gonna have to write them?

sdegutis5• 12 years ago

Maybe it's not true of all JavaScript GUI apps, but almost all the ones I tried are hecka sluggish for things like drag+drop. I could see that being a problem with tabs in this case. Plus I'm concerned about the CPU on my poor little MBP, Chrome usually eats it all the way up, is that somehow mitigated in Atom?

sbornia• 12 years ago

http://discuss.atom.io/t/atom-is-so-powerful-that-it-blows-m... sounds great!

integricho• 12 years ago

I wonder if it will have similar performance issues like Brackets does.

prasoon22113• 12 years ago

I'm willing to bet anything that just like Sublime was FOSS cloned to Lime (https://github.com/limetext/lime), this as well will be cloned as FOSS, if it is any good, that is.

Subatom seems like a great project title :)

midas0072• 12 years ago

Turns out it's going to be payware, closed-source only while the rest of their community gets to build and support it. http://discuss.atom.io/t/why-is-atom-closed-source/82/9

But who's going to buy an editor that can't even open a 1 MiB file? http://discuss.atom.io/t/unable-to-open-files-more-than-1mb/...

Moreover, besides code posers and managers, who is going to throw away all their knowledge and time configuring the editor they were using?

pritambaral9• 12 years ago

beta.

Closed beta, that too.

victorhooi10• 12 years ago

I was the one who reported the 1 Mb file issue...

I mean, it looks nice - but I'm a bit undecided about the whole proprietary code project thing.

If it was open-source, we might actually be able to see if there was some silly hardcoded limit in there - heck, we could even submit a patch and do a pull request.

That, and the blatant ripping off of Sublime Text's interface.

It's bad enough they don't put the source itself on Github, but they aren't even using Github's issue tracker for the project - or heck, any other issue tracker as all.

So we're resorting to filing bug reports on a discussion forum...shakes head.

Hopefully Github will come through, and sort things out.

I have no objections to paying for an editor - heck, Sublime is $70 - but with this being closed source, and Brackets.io being more mature, and open-source, not sure what the attraction is.

pritambaral9• 12 years ago

Brackets is focussed on frontend webdev only. You might wanna try LightTable.

dinosaurs• 12 years ago

Looking forward to this. The fact that it's all JavaScript/Node based makes this particularly attracting for me. I haven't really been able to hack on ST2/3 because I'm not that proficient in Python and never found the time to properly dig into it. The repositories look great, really hope it'll live up to the expectations.

That being said, anyone with a spare invite? :) Ta.

MyNameIsMK• 12 years ago

Finally.

Dobbs• 12 years ago

I just played with atom for the last 2+ hours.

It is kinda cool, but holy shit is it slow. Editing a plugin requires a reload. A reload is a good 2-4 seconds on my 4 year old mbp.

The vim-mode is very incomplete and very buggy. Granted that should get a lot better in time.

babby3• 12 years ago

It may have to do what ST3 did and queue loading of plugins after startup, instead of all at once before the editor is "usable". If they do that it could start up nice and fast in theory, though we obviously don't know what else it's trying to do yet.

fs111• 12 years ago

Imagine Linus had used that sort of license for git. There would be no github, no nothing. I don't get it. Take for free, build a million dollar business and then make your own stuff closed...

odonnellryan• 12 years ago

Unfortunately, that's most companies.

scorpion0322• 12 years ago

Github folks are awesome mostly. I'd have imagined they would have made it a liberal license if they could.

But they are the venture invested company now. Need to show returns 10 to 100x the investment in a few years.

jbrooksuk4• 12 years ago

I've ported the Oblivion scheme across; https://atom.io/packages/Oblivion from https://github.com/jbrooksuk/Oblivion

ahuth7• 12 years ago

Guess I will have to break down and learn vim... no invite

rootuid• 12 years ago

so this is Brackets aka Bones on steroids ?

joeevans1000• 12 years ago

Atom is a cargo cult.

Atom is eventually a dead end. They are paying lip service to eventually partially opensourcing it.

It is the opposite direction of the magic of git, which enables easy sharing and collaboration.

Beware the promise of later opensourcing of projects. Without an early commitment, the developers of atom will invariably include proprietary software to ease development which will preclude later opensourcing.

You are better off taking the hard road and investing your time in tools that are not cargo cults.

corndoge• 12 years ago

When did web dev become the only dev?

q3k3• 12 years ago

When you started frequenting Hacker News ;).

(I really need a lobste.rs invite...)

iancarroll• 12 years ago

If anyone wants to spare me an invite - him {at} ian [d0t] sh

caniszczyk• 12 years ago

More online editors...

Check out Brackets (http://brackets.io/) and Eclipse Orion (http://eclipse.org/orion/) who both have been trying to build fully open editing experiences. There are more out there but those come to mind.

Would be nice if more people started working together on these things...

sdegutis5• 12 years ago

When I saw a screenshot, I was put off by the ugly tabs. So I made a theme for flat tabs[1]. You can install it by going to Install Themes in the app and searching for "flat". It's called "Atom Dark Flat UI".

[1] http://atom.io/packages/atom-dark-flat-ui

ihuman2• 12 years ago

Heads up: The image on the package page is broken

sdegutis5• 12 years ago

Thanks, should be fixed now. Seems like a caching issue on Atom's end (probably github-pages related).

ChristianBundy2• 12 years ago

You rock – those tabs were driving me crazy.

felipebueno• 12 years ago

Thanks to Atom not being really free software and people here suggesting it a lot I give LightTable a try. I'm an emacs user but I like experimenting different foss editors and LighTable + emacs keybindings plugin is a really nice and beautiful tool.

Couldn't get it to work on Debian Wheezy yet (GLIBC_2.15 not found)* but worked on a Windows machine at work so I'm testing it there. I'll get back to linux later. Looking forward for v1.0. :)

* It seems to be a known issue: https://github.com/LightTable/LightTable/issues/972

JabavuAdams• 12 years ago

Wait, so now I have to deal with all the shittiness of the web stack in order to develop a native app?

Kequc• 12 years ago

The new, dominant and universal front end/back end/desktop app all round programming language. JavaScript :(

babby3• 12 years ago

I've been observing the reactions to this over several communities and I find it all to be rather interesting! [ Warning; meta comment incoming ]

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1z0ykn/atom_lau...

Almost every single comment is negative, dismissive, one liners filled with half truths and very few child comments seek to rectify any misinformation or support a discussion.

The first and by far most-upvoted with a 700 point margin.

I must be out of touch with modern development. I don't understand the thought process that leads people to be excited about a closed source, node.js text editor that reports your usage to Google.

It suggests the user simply scanned over other comments, glanced at atom's site and proceeded to regurgitate karma bait. I suppose it says a lot about the attention span of these people as there are also highly voted "tl;dr" request comments.

A perfect example of misinformation:

[ unquietwiki 70 points] Isn't Brackets this already? Node.js/Chromium app with plugin support? --- [ MrSenorSan 67 points] yup, but atom is not open source yay! wait a min... --- [ kmeisthax 17 points ] Yes, but with Atom, you have the priviledge of paying GitHub money for a software product in a market with numerous competent free and Free Software options.

The supply of vitriol is unending.

It was the same with the /g/ thread, though surprisingly not quite as bad.

http://archive.rebeccablacktech.com/g/thread/S40550074

My point is, stay classy Hacker News. While you may even have similar opinions with these communities, the reception in this thread has been far more exciting and you put effort into your discussions. The contrast is massive, and especially interesting considering this is one the highest upvoted articles on HN, sitting alongside Neovim. suggesting we desperately want to replace our editors.

pettersolberg• 12 years ago

All right, but no invitation responses are coming back. Ho to download Atom?

kevinlangleyjr• 12 years ago

I see people saying they get into the beta within 15 minutes of signing up, but I still haven't gotten one and I signed up day 1. Anybody have an extra invite they're willing to spare? Email in profile. It'd be much appreciated!

angelohuang• 12 years ago

What framework is Atom using? chromiumembedded or appjs?

Morphling2• 12 years ago

I thought this was an open source project, but when I read FAQ beta version is only out for OSX and they talk about charging for it so it probably wont be open source.

commander_ahab• 12 years ago

I use github and do a fair amount of Ruby, but I can't say I find Atom to provide enough benefit to move from a native option. I would have to see it used in more example cases to make that leap.

Cless• 12 years ago

To try out Atom:

https://gist.github.com/anonymous/9265315

Then visit the resulting link output by curl. You're welcome.

slacko• 12 years ago

Has anyone got a spare invite? davfuc at gmail dot com Thanks

plg• 12 years ago

how is this not a blatant ripoff of sublime text??

Atom

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