Atom Is Now Open Source

http://blog.atom.io/2014/05/06/atom-is-now-open-source.html

by jordn • 12 years ago

914 295 12 years ago

blog.atom.io

gberger2• 12 years ago

Hopefully someone can package a Ubuntu build now.

probablycorey• 12 years ago

https://github.com/atom/atom/issues/1814

andyhmltn2• 12 years ago

Check the README: Apparently you can already do it yourself. I'm just in the process of building a version at the moment on 12.04LTS. Will update

andyhmltn2• 12 years ago

Yep, it worked. Took a lot of playing about with it and this:

https://github.com/atom/atom/issues/1931

but finally got it building on 12.04LTS

anjanb2• 12 years ago

Also, how about a RHEL package ?

foofoobar• 12 years ago

It's working under Ubuntu 13.10 here.

donaldguy2• 12 years ago

This is exciting, and bad news for Sublime Text. Though it will be interesting to see if Atom's performance actually gets up there

The Atom Shell open sourcing is also interesting ... I wonder if it will lead to a rash of other Chromium-fork-apps

swah2• 12 years ago

Can I run Atom-core on top of Atom-shell like any other app?

---

There are builds for atom-shell for Windows and it gives you something that looks like this: http://imgur.com/H0RcGc5

I haven't understood what you're supposed to do with it yet (I thought it was just a library).

OT: Fullscreen and windowing is nicer in Windows... In OSX (@home) everything feels sluggish with the overflow of animations...

xpaulbettsx• 12 years ago

Atom Shell is a runtime environment that you can write your own Node-in-a-web-browser apps against, yeah. Atom-shell is the C++y bits to provide some of the APIs that are available in JS.

The docs for Atom Shell are pretty good, have a look at https://github.com/atom/atom-shell/tree/master/docs to get started

tyleregeto2• 12 years ago

Its got a _long_ ways to go before sublime has anything to worry about. The plugins and language support Sublime has is its real asset. I'd be happy to make the switch when the feature parity is there, because I'm not too happy with the way Sublime 3 has played out, but that day is a ways off.

kipple2• 12 years ago

Just curious, why are you unhappy with the way ST3 has played out?

ihuman2• 12 years ago

For anyone who is curious (since there was a tad bit of concern about it in the past), here is a link to the core's license: https://github.com/atom/atom/blob/master/LICENSE.md

It looks pretty open to me. However, I don't speak legalese, so I may be misunderstanding it.

donaldguy2• 12 years ago

It seems to be a standard MIT License... like the blog entry says

ihuman2• 12 years ago

For some reason I accidentally skipped over the 1st sentence of the blog. Thanks for the clarification.

wging• 12 years ago

Seems to be a bug in the MIT License that it doesn't refer to its own name within its text. By contrast the GNU GPL is more easily recognizable.

unfletch• 12 years ago

Here's the page for this type of license on GitHub's own Choose a License site: http://choosealicense.com/licenses/mit/

The legalese is translated into bullet points in the right-hand column.

lukeholder• 12 years ago

look like regular MIT licence no?

Today, we're excited to announce that we are open-sourcing Atom under the MIT License

brlewis• 12 years ago

I am now way more interested in atom than I was previously. I think this is going to be a good thing for github.

pachydermic2• 12 years ago

I wonder why it wasn't this way from the get-go... Oh well, at least I'm actually interested in it now. Can't wait for the Linux version to try it out. Pumped that they did the right thing and open-sourced it so that it actually has a chance of becoming widespread, and more importantly, of sticking around for longer than a couple years.

Good on you, Atom.io devs

SmileyKeith• 12 years ago

The instructions for building the linux version are in the readme

pachydermic2• 12 years ago

Interesting, thanks for the heads up. Last I heard it was OSX only. I may try this when I get home.

scope2• 12 years ago

it would a LOT be better if there's a deb package available, you have to do a lot of tweaking to make node work as `node`, since it's named `nodejs` to avoid package name conflict in Linux

now that it's open sourced, am sure it'll take like a second for someone to release the deb package

rmrfrmrf• 12 years ago

At the risk of being too cynical, I suspect that they're open sourcing it because their analytics indicated an adoption rate that wouldn't justify active development. Not sure if this is still the case, but the Atom.io website, at one point, indicated that its price would not be free, but would be competitive with similar products in the market (I'm assuming Sublime Text).

holman• 12 years ago

Definitely not (the beta's been great!). We've been discussing this ad nauseam for years and years, with some good points on both sides. We were looking to make it a partially open, paid app when we launched the beta, but after continuing discussions internally the Atom team decided to go the fully open source route.

Phr34Ck• 12 years ago

You're not too cynical! I'm in the same thinking boat. The first thing that that I thought about is either they don't want to do it anymore or the adoption rate was not what they expected.

They made it perfectly clear that it will not be open source and it will cost money. I don't think they need 10 weeks to understand the benefits of open source.

teacup505• 12 years ago

The idea of analytics in a code editor is just depressing.

oddevan• 12 years ago

I wonder why it wasn't this way from the get-go

As I saw it, GitHub was trying to see if it could become a business. Developers will pay decent money (as in "desktop software" money, not "mobile app" money) for a quality text editor.

I wouldn't have blamed them for going commercial, but I'm happy to see them releasing this to the community. :)

laureny2• 12 years ago

Developers will pay decent money for a "code" editor (an IDE), not a "text" editor.

Text editors are dime a dozen and in that space, you are competing with much more than tools that are geared just toward developers.

AlexMax• 12 years ago

I paid for Sublime Text, and there were enough rough edges and bits I didn't like about both vim and Emacs that I felt justified in paying for it, but nevertheless seeing development slow to an absolute crawl on a product I paid for makes me nervous.

Touche• 12 years ago

It can be both commercial and open source, they are not mutually exclusive.

d0m• 12 years ago

Also, releasing something open-source isn't as straightforward as it may seem unless you've started that way. Think about all the internal libraries that developers might have used or all the security or licensing aspect of it. There are lots of stuff I would love to release open-source but I just don't have the time and I'm too much of a perfectionist anyway.

ecnahc5154• 12 years ago

You can build the Linux version right now. Same for Windows.

rhubarbquid• 12 years ago

I assumed they wanted to limit the amount of feedback/bug reports they got to a level they could usefully cope with. Any new release is potentially going to have tons of issues with real world situations that never happened for developers or in QA. Anything released by GitHub is going to get a lot of attention. By limiting the number of initial users, they can get some real world testing and not get millions of duplicate bug reports.

jwcrux• 12 years ago

This is fantastic news!

As Emacs and Vim have demonstrated over the past three decades, if you want to build a thriving, long-lasting community around a text editor, it has to be open source.

I agree whole-heartedly. In fact, I don't believe that editors like Sublime Text would have such a large following if not for the extended "free-trial" functionality.

It will be exciting to see where this project goes, and I think open-sourcing the rest of the editor was a great move.

1qaz2wsx3edc• 12 years ago

Agreed, amazing news. This is the announcement I've been waiting for. I've long been worried that with a closed source core, the editor would of fallen prey to the same issues that plague closed source editors. With that out of the way now, I'm excited for what atom will become.

pytrin• 12 years ago

You're confusing "free" in pricing with "free" in freedom. A free trial creates a completely different type of community than free and open code. GitHub could have just provided a closed binary for free if they wanted to go the Sublime route.

ubercow13• 12 years ago

I'm pretty sure he's not confusing anything

vitaluha• 12 years ago

How about translating it to other languages?

sergiotapia3• 12 years ago

I'd also like to donate time to translate Atom to spanish.

matthewmacleod• 12 years ago

Well, I'm thoroughly impressed and a little bit embarrassed about beating up on Atom only yesterday :)

jdmichal2• 12 years ago

You should only be embarrassed if you continue to beat up on it in light of the new information. Otherwise, if your arguments were correct and valid at the time, there's no reason to be embarrassed.

ChrisGaudreau• 12 years ago

Well said. This is an insight rarely realized.

fhinson• 12 years ago

Really great news for Atom.

Upon its initial launch, most of the criticism around it pertained to it not being open source. I think we can certainly expect to see its growth overtake that of Sublime Text, and I'm interested to see how the community interest will stack up against other open source editors like Light Table.

Hopefully Atom may join the legendary ranks of Vim and Emacs.

edwintorok• 12 years ago

Perhaps the blogpost should first mention what Atom is.

The first time I've heard about Atom was here: https://medium.com/p/433852f4b4d1

DanWaterworth• 12 years ago

Perhaps the blogpost should first mention what Atom is.

+1, an about page wouldn't go amiss either. I still don't know what it is.

[edit] Wow, downvoted. I just want to know what it is by visiting the website quickly. It's not a lot to ask.

Kequc• 12 years ago

It's strange how that blog post doesn't seem to link to Atom.

https://atom.io/

Fasebook• 12 years ago

Just Another Javascript Layer to Pharm data.

sergiotapia3• 12 years ago

Masivo props to Github. They just almost assuredly made this editor long-term. What was once a cool tech-demo is now probably going to go mainstream for everybody. Wow.

I just can't imagine a behemoth like Github not injecting itself into Atom for the better.

davexunit• 12 years ago

As Emacs and Vim have demonstrated over the past three decades, if you want to build a thriving, long-lasting community around a text editor, it has to be open source.

Using a free software license is a big improvement, but I wish that they used a copyleft license like the GNU GPLv3. Inevitably, we'll see proprietary extensions and "pro" versions. Strong copyleft is important for the freedom of end users.

poolpool• 12 years ago

God forbid people want to get paid for their hard work and effort bringing something new into the world.

p8952• 12 years ago

I forgot that the first line of the GPL reads "YOU MAY NOT SELL THIS FOR PROFIT". It's a shame there are no billion dollar companies based around the GPL... /s

callahad• 12 years ago

A copyleft license would not preclude this, as the Atom authors would still hold copyright, and could freely distribute a "Pro" version under a proprietary license.

A copyleft license would prevent someone else, who does not hold copyright on Atom, from doing that.

JetSpiegel• 12 years ago

Copyleft licenses just make sure that people that want to get paid for their work (a legitimate venture) don't just piggyback on the collective effort of open source projects.

mherrmann• 12 years ago

Amen.

pnathan• 12 years ago

The GPL does not preclude this in the least.

vezzy-fnord• 12 years ago

You would think people on HN would know better than to repeat such tired canards like this, but evidently not.

CamperBob2• 12 years ago

Which is a problem because...?

eq-2• 12 years ago

Perhaps we will. I strongly doubt any of those will be even a slight success, unless released by the Atom team (which the copyleft license wouldn't affect).

bryanlarsen2• 12 years ago

The GPL doesn't prevent the proprietary extensions and "pro" versions, it just prevents anybody but the original author from making those pro versions.

Therefore companies who want to make their money selling pro versions usually choose the GPL license. So in practice, we see more "commercial/pro" versions of GPL software than we do of MIT/BSD licensed software.

grayclhn2• 12 years ago

It prevents the "original" author from making those versions unless he or she requests a transfer of copyright for any outside code. If you have evidence of the second claim, I'd love to see it or see a link. (I mean this as non-confrontationally as possible; I don't have an opinion one way or the other on whether it's true, but now I'm curious.)

pervycreeper• 12 years ago

Yes, but in that case the "pro" versions, at least, are not parasitic on some other author's work

fab13n• 12 years ago

GPL [...] prevents anybody but the original author from making those pro versions.

This is only true as long as they accept no 3rd party contribution. In this case, accepting 3rd party modules is a crucial feature, so GPL+commercial wouldn't fly.

lucian1900• 12 years ago

That would be very sad.

It would preclude using so much code in extensions, for no particularly good reason.

tootie• 12 years ago

JetBrains would disagree.

thatthatis• 12 years ago

Well, I'm glad for the closer to public domain MIT licensing.

I believe that the ability to sell it if you hit a home run leads to a lot of big ideas getting tried and the base hits making their way back into the open codebase.

But I think it is a matter of taste/personal preference. For me, copy middle feels more free.

mempko2• 12 years ago

Congradulations to the github team for releasing atom with an open source license. I hope future projects are free software instead of open source.

EDIT: I fudge fingered this. I meant copy left license. MIT is a free software license.

icebraining• 12 years ago

MIT licensed software is free software. See https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#Expat

mempko2• 12 years ago

You are absolutely correct. I meant to say copy left license. I stayed up way to late and woke up way to early. They do say being tired is similar to being drunk... ugh.

jordn• 12 years ago

Interestingly, Tom Preston-Werner (former CEO of Github) said in February that Atom wouldn't be fully open-source:

“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.” - Tom Preston-Werner, 27 Feb 2014 http://discuss.atom.io/t/why-is-atom-closed-source/82/9

There was a HN discussion about this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7310017

jdmichal2• 12 years ago

Is there any chance this change of heart has to do with his departure? Perhaps the team always wanted to commit to being fully open-source, and he was the blocker.

tomp• 12 years ago

Or perhaps GitHub wants to salvage their reputation in the Tech circles by doing "something good" without too much business loss (selling text editors probably isn't very good business).

chimeracoder• 12 years ago

Please don't say 'fully open source', as it confuses the language.

"Open Source" is a well-defined term[0] . What Tom Preston-Warner describes there is basically the same as Microsoft's "Shared source[1] " licenses, which do not fit the definition of Open Source.

[0]http://opensource.org/osdhttp://opensource.org/osd

[1] http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_sourcehttp://en.m.wiki...

publicfig• 12 years ago

Notice he says that it wouldn't be fully open source.

cies• 12 years ago

[TPW] said in February that Atom wouldn't be fully open-source

That's under-promise/over-deliver in action my friend :)

pdknsk• 12 years ago

I followed the steps, but it didn't download.

    $ git clone git@github.com:atom/atom.git
    Cloning into 'atom'...
    The authenticity of host 'github.com (192.30.252.129)' can't be established.
    RSA key fingerprint is 16:27:ac:a5:76:28:2d:36:63:1b:56:4d:eb:df:a6:48.
    Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no)? y
    Please type 'yes' or 'no': yes
    Warning: Permanently added 'github.com,192.30.252.129' (RSA) to the list of known hosts.
    Permission denied (publickey).
    fatal: Could not read from remote repository.

This works.

    $ git clone https://github.com/atom/atom

prezjordan2• 12 years ago

Looks like their README reflects the fact that anyone who could see the repo could also push to it. You should submit a PR :)

EDIT: I am mistaken. I thought cloning git@ meant you could read/write from it (aka allowed to push). Turns out it's just a public key thing. Comment above me is correct.

meemo• 12 years ago

I think it assumes that you have a github account. I'm not sure if this is a bad thing considering who they are.

nandhp• 12 years ago

Permission denied (publickey).

You need to add your public key to your github account.

https://github.com/settings/ssh

bulatb• 12 years ago

Or clone with https.

krautsourced• 12 years ago

I wonder if this was partially because they considered the effort involved to develop a Windows and Linux version, plus the amount to get the performance where people would like it, and then decided it's not worth it? At least commercially.

rayiner• 12 years ago

I'm excited to see all these new IDE projects, but have we pretty much given up on having a good, integrated debugger?

wmil• 12 years ago

I think we have. Debuggers are highly language specific. It's just easier to have a separate debugger for each language.

I think it'd be nice if some of the IDEs gave up on forcing everything into their project structure. There's a real market for stand alone visual debuggers that don't try to manage your entire project.

saurik3• 12 years ago

But that was the whole point of an IDE: it integrated the development environment, piecing together the editor, the compiler, and the debugger, taking advantage of intimate knowledge of the specific targets. Why are we suddenly calling a text editor an "IDE"?

greggman2• 12 years ago

Slickedit integrates itself with lots of debuggers so I'd assume given enough interest Atom could be made to as well. Besides, given it's based partly based on chromium you could use the chromium devtools as a starting point and try to adapt them to multiple languages.

statictype• 12 years ago

Being hackable, I presume that integrating a remote debugger should be possible. Vim can already technically do it - just that most people who cared about integrated debugging were probably using emacs.

drothlis• 12 years ago

I found this concept quite neat: An "always on" debugger (for javascript) http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4945

prezjordan2• 12 years ago

I'm excited to compare atom-shell with node-webkit. I wonder if any big players will use it.

anjanb2• 12 years ago

I look forward to getting a RHEL/CentOS 6.x(6.3) package soon.

jhh2• 12 years ago

I wonder if the way that atom was built is or can turn into a good way to build modern cross platform desktop apps while employing web technologies. Does anyone have any input or actual experience with this?

mmgutz• 12 years ago

If you know node backend and web front-end, there are at least two options right now:

For a self-contained, deployable desktop application use `node-webkit`. It is basically chromium + embedded node.js. From what I'm reading, atom-shell is similar to node-webkit. There are a few other `node-webkit` like projects on github.

For lighter deployments, where your audience already has chrome and node.js installed, try `node-chrome`. It's a skeleton to run a chrome packaged app locally which communicates over websockets to a node.js service you build.

Both of these are good options if your UI, notifications can be contained in HTML. Challenges arise when you want to use OS specific integrated menus, growls/notifications, tooltips, etc. Node-webkit may have addressed most of these by now.

jhh2• 12 years ago

wow, node-webkit has +12k stars on github. I must have been living under a rock.

ruswick• 12 years ago

This is an interesting reversal for Github. The original FAQ implied that Github would try to market Atom commercially. I'm curious as to what made them change their mind.

jglovier• 12 years ago

The original FAQ implied that Github would try to market Atom commercially.

We were leaving all options open during the beta.

The adoption rate was incredible (contrary to suggestions to the contrary), and in the end the Atom team decided the best thing GitHub could do with Atom is give it to the community - not because of any sneaky reasons, just because that's how we believe it can do the most good in the world.

thejosh• 12 years ago

Running on Ubuntu 14.04, after following the instructions, running "atom" or /usr/local/bin/atom doesn't do anything.

gberger2• 12 years ago

Same.

Andys• 12 years ago

Be patient: after a while it segfaults

patrickg2• 12 years ago

    Uncaught Error: Atom can only handle files < 2MB, for now.

I'd love to use an opensource editor for working on large xml files.

SoftwareMaven• 12 years ago

I've never had a problem opening very large files in Emacs. I would imagine Vim is much the same. I have an 80MB JSON file open in emacs right now.

patrickg2• 12 years ago

That's true. I used to be an emacs fanboy (1) until one day came along textmate with snippets, tabs and "sub major modes" (don't know how to call 'em - take for example php inside html or such). Then I switched to sublime text. Now both editors are stalled... I might switch back to emacs.

(1) I've written lot's of elisp code, for example a norton commander clone called evening commander (https://github.com/pgundlach/evening-commander)

jussij4• 12 years ago

At 2MB that is hardly a large file.

laureny2• 12 years ago

It always makes me chuckle when I see companies trying to ship a product (free or not) and realize a few months later that it's not picking up adoption. Then they decide to open source it in an effort to make it popular but of course, they can't admit that, so they always come up with excuses like "We want the community to benefit from it" or "We really believe in open source", etc...

In the end, for most of these products, open sourcing is usually just the last step before the product dies.

cwyers• 12 years ago

That doesn't seem to make sense here, as Atom was still in open beta, and they haven't released the versions for roughly half of their user base yet.[1]

1) https://github.com/blog/69-what-os-do-you-use

eq-2• 12 years ago

Open sourcing is never the end of a good product.

bendersalt• 12 years ago

Yep.

-Posted From Linux

chrisabrams• 12 years ago

Does atom-shell allow for 64 bit node on OS X?

jbigelow76• 12 years ago

I don't need another editor but this interests me because of the Atom Shell and how that works.

pit4• 12 years ago

Kind of cool that you can view issues all the way back to the beginning:

https://github.com/atom/atom/issues/5

I realize this is inherent to the nature of version control, but it's neat to think about the history as a "Making-Of" Atom.

devcpp• 12 years ago

Also makes me much more trustful about the openness of Atom. Much better than the closed development processes that I usually see from big corporations (e.g Google, Apple, Samsung, EA, at their respective open-source websites).

uger• 12 years ago

I'm surprised how much memory it takes up.

pit4• 12 years ago

Well, it's a web browser after all.

k__• 12 years ago

Is it like brackets?

ing33k2• 12 years ago

nice, trying to install it on Ubuntu 14.04 .

desipenguin2• 12 years ago

How did it go ? Easy to build ?

daviddoran• 12 years ago

I'm delighted to see Atom open sourced. I tried it out a few weeks back and came across a bug where the editor would lock up when a few empty files were created. Then I couldn't dig into the code to fix the issue but now I can.

pwr• 12 years ago

I'm pretty excited about Atom Shell as it looks like they fixed the different js context problem that node-webkit had. The last time i tried node-webkit i was really annoyed by the sneaky bugs that pushing objects from one context to the other introduced.

Thumbs up, Github!

plg• 12 years ago

are there demos somewhere that show the value added over sublime text or emacs or vim?

JacksonGariety• 12 years ago

show the value added over emacs

never.

hxrts• 12 years ago

Can someone comment on whether it's feasible to port Atom to function in-browser? Seems like this + something like Codepen could potentially be an asset to frontend developers.

CaveTech• 12 years ago

It's written in coffee script and runs on webkit. I'd say it's possible but you'd lose some of the deeper OS integrations.

pavanky• 12 years ago

The cloned repo is ~238mb. I can't help but think some of it is not necessary.

jadeddrag• 12 years ago

It's not necessary. The code is under 6MB. Remove the top level .git directory if the size bothers you.

hamburglar• 12 years ago

A cloned Chromium repo is 11GB, last I checked. Not a particularly relevant metric.

hitlin37• 12 years ago

want, atom with python support for a simpler version of ipython notebook!

digerata2• 12 years ago

I'm still trying to find out why a great company like GitHub would shamelessly copy Sublime Text 2. It's one thing to say we need to build another text editor because nothing out there gives you what you need. But to say we need another text editor and then copy Sublime... What the heck is that?

I installed it today for the first time because this was the first time I didn't need to be in a special club to use it.

I opened a directory of source that ST opens instantly. This thing took 5 seconds to open. Then when I quit the app, I get an "Editor is not responding." message. Everything feels sluggish.

This is progress people!

georgemcbay• 12 years ago

Atom is no more a shameless copy of Sublime Text than Sublime Text is of TextMate.

Having said that, I do agree that the sluggishness of many of these "modern" editors (including Sublime Text, which even at ST3 is quite a bit slower at opening large files than it should be) really is quite a shame.

digerata2• 12 years ago

I wish we could post images so you could look at a blind comparison...

math0ne4• 12 years ago

Most text editors look almost exactly the same, my VIM and emacs look almost identical to sublime, and if i wanted i could make it identical.

greggman2• 12 years ago

This isn't a copy of sublime. The fact that it effectively runs in a browser opens up all kinds of possibilities. Insert an inline IMG, canvas, webgl, video, svg. I'm hoping to see some amazing extensions from this

CmonDev• 12 years ago

It's hard to avoid copying when implementing a basic notepad type of app with some syntax high-lighting and a trendy colour scheme.

math0ne4• 12 years ago

Ugh.. still mac only....

rok34• 12 years ago

Just follow the instructions in the README on GitHub. Builds and runs fine on Arch Linux. Haven't tried building on a Win machine yet.

https://github.com/atom/atom/blob/master/README.md

mediocregopher• 12 years ago

What steps did you take to get it running on Arch? I got as far as convincing it to use python2, but then realized I need gnome-keyring, and kind of stopped there. Which keyring package did you install?

DonPellegrino• 12 years ago

You should read the README before whining. Linux and Windows are also supported.

https://github.com/atom/atom

math0ne4• 12 years ago

I don't know if I would call those build instructions supported. I don't have all day just to try out a new text editor...

kabdib2• 12 years ago

I tried Atom, and it was glacial.

The editor I use now (Epsilon) was last significantly rev'd about 8 years ago. It's a fine editor, but I'm starting to look for a replacement (and, oddly, I cannot stand where modern Emacs went).

Sublime Text 2 is darned close. If only I could teach it proper bindings of C-U . . .

gaigepr• 12 years ago

I'm curious what about modern emacs you don't like. Not to argue with you but truly out of curiosity.

flyrain• 12 years ago

So am I.

kabdib2• 12 years ago

Many of the defaults are wrong.

- Toolbars suck

- Menus suck

- Having Emacs suspend the shell I'm working in sucks

- Getting names of files to actually appear as buffers, without extra gorp like a listener window that I don't care about at all is an exercise in frustration

... and more, but I need to find the last .emacs file that I spent half a day hacking up for details (and don't get me started on the geometry nonsense you need to control where Emacs starts up and how big its window is, and how well this plays with environments that have different monitor sizes and . . . oh bog, it can be better).

Inevitably someone's going to argue about how Emacs should be used ("you're supposed to get into it and never leave" and similar nonsense), or point out that I can customize away the things I hate. True. But I've been using Emacs since 1979 or so, and it just seems much worse in the last ten years.

Timmmmbob• 12 years ago

Not really surprising - the whole idea of web desktop apps is kind of crazy, especially for something that you want to have good performance like a text editor.

jussij4• 12 years ago

The editor I use now (Epsilon) was last significantly

FWIW the Zeus editor has an Epsilon keyboard mapping offer up by a Zeus user many years ago.

But as I'm a Brief keyboard user myself, I'll have to be honest and say I don't know how accurate it is :(

Also Zeus is shareware and is native to Windows, but several users have reported it does run on Linux using Wine.

Jussi Jumppanen

Author: Zeus IDE

billforsternz• 12 years ago

Pleased to read this comment. Reading Hacker News gives you the totally wrong impression that the text editor universe amounts to Emacs/Vim and Sublime/Textmate. There are a lot of other editors, many have a lot to recommend them. At least on Windows, Ultraedit for example seems a lot more polished and complete than Sublime.

albertzeyer• 12 years ago

Can you elaborate on why you think it is glacial or what you mean by that?

Is it too slow as your child comments suggest because of the used web technics?

Or are you missing important features? Couldn't they be added as plugins? Maybe such plugins were already made.

Or is it the overall design? What's bad about it?

sergiotapia3• 12 years ago

I open a folder using Sublime and it loads instantly. I open the same folder using Atom and it takes about 5 seconds to open.

rubyn00bie• 12 years ago

Maybe someone will implement the UI without a Node/CoffeeScript backend? Memory usage has been pretty abysmal in my trials (though we've got some very large repos).

I'm definitely with the group that they 'opensourced' this because they had to... I know my entire office went from 'fuck-yeah' to '.... meh' to 'what? yeah, I forgot about that' in about two weeks time.

I mean, it's still damn good of 'em I just hope it gets some love. I'd like to see more competition in the space, but right now I have a feeling it's just going to be abandoned before too long then I'll be knocking on the door of ST3 or Vim again.

danielweber• 12 years ago

The FAQ doesn't tell me what Atom is.

notatoad• 12 years ago

the homepage does. https://atom.io/

endijs2• 12 years ago

Installed on Linux Mint. Some minor UI problems here and there. But that's nothing compared to how bad autocomplete is. At least for PHP development it's unusable at all. Because of that even had no intention to check further. But for those who wonder - yes, it works on Linux.

sspiff• 12 years ago

Did you find or compose any kind of build instructions?

endijs2• 12 years ago

There are build instruction for Linux in README. https://github.com/atom/atom Plus I had to fix libudev problem with this https://github.com/atom/atom/issues/1814#issuecomment-423253... Other than that it had no problems to build or launch.

ing33k2• 12 years ago

Yeah, finally got in working on Ubuntu 14.04 , looks good and solid !

not working atm, looks like it makes a POST request to a server every times its launched and the server seems to be down .

ErikRogneby2• 12 years ago

I appreciate knowing the cost of opted in features: "This package added 66ms to startup time."

AceJohnny2• 12 years ago

Alright, now I need a comparison of how Atom compares to Sublime Text, Light Table and Emacs (and maybe even Vim, but its moded editing makes it a completely different beast).

allworknoplay• 12 years ago

slow, as far as I can tell.

undoware• 12 years ago

Everyone knows the rules by now. If something awesome comes out that's not FOSS or even only partially FOSS (dual license, etc) just ignore it until it's either cloned or fully opened.

Follow this algorithm for an open net. Profit margins get pretty tight tho

camus22• 12 years ago

SublimeText is not opensource,yet it's a success.

jonahx• 12 years ago

Could someone give the tldr; version of advantages atom has over vim?

avitzurel• 12 years ago

IMHO Tom (now gone from the company) always held a strong opinion to open-source ALMOST everything.

From the outside, looking at the conversations that took place on Twitter after the initial release, he seemed to have a strong opinion on Atom being the same way, core inside github and rest is open-source.

Now that he's gone, that limitation is off and it's open source as it should have been from the get-go.

There's absolutely no reason this product won't be open source to the core, the more people actively developing on it the better.

Me personally, I haven't used it and I don't see myself using it ever in the future, but it seems like a very nice concept project.

neil_s• 12 years ago

So still nothing on the homepage or anywhere else explaining why this is something useful compared to existing apps? I can't think of a single USP.

Sekhmet• 12 years ago

Thanks for sharing this. I received betz access, but I'm using linux. Have to try compile entire Atom to linux!

DigitalSea• 12 years ago

I am really stoked for a Windows version, which in turn will mean I will move on from Sublime Text Editor 2 onto Atom. Unless of course Sublime Text Editor 3 comes out before then. Tried Atom on a friends Mac, a really solid editor that I am excited to see what the future holds for it.

krick• 12 years ago

That + clojurescript and we can have better emacs… can we? I haven't tried it yet, honestly.

timthom2• 12 years ago

Love it

mckoder2• 12 years ago

I don't get why people keep creating new text editors. Emacs exists, people. And it is a great text editor. These new editors look pretty and do work, but they don't even come close to Emacs. Instead of re-inventing the wheel, why not just take Emacs and add a pretty face to it?

exadeci• 12 years ago

Well emacs last stable was March 11, 2013. I use emacs on my headless servers and it's perfect but if you really want to work with it you loose time. Take any big project you want to open a file from emacs you have to know the exact path, with atom (and sublime text) you just type the name and you get suggestions. Plus you can still use emacs shortcuts if you want. Yeah emacs is good and useful but it's almost 50 years old it's like telling us "why would you want a nexus when the 3310 already exists?".

mckoder2• 12 years ago

No, you take the core of emacs and add a pretty shell around it that adds these features you are talking about. Such as quick way to open files, and so on. There is no need to re-invent core text editing.

ohmygeek• 12 years ago

Emacs FTW!

vfclists• 12 years ago

When is this insanity going to end?

Javascript has been the biggest waste and diversion of programmer talent since computers were invented. Billions of dollars have been wasted trying to fit every square peg there is into a Javascript round hole, and the sh*t still continues.

Even after 20 years Javascript UIs can't match stuff done 20 years ago on native UIs.

Whatever happened to the notion of cost-benefit analysis?

Is there ever going to be some professionalism in the programing profession, if in its current state it can be called a profession?

How much effort is the industry going to put into implementing software on the Javascript/HTML combo which is, has been and will always be under-specified for what programmers want to use them for?

PS. It seems that every other article on HN relates to an attempt to hack some complicated stuff on top of an ill-suited Javascript/HTML combo. Is there some connection here?

johnchristopher2• 12 years ago

Does anybody have any success building it on Debian Wheezy ?

hoov• 12 years ago

Not exactly what you asked, but I got it working on Debian Jessie just now. I had to install npm from scratch, but other than that it was smooth.

johnchristopher2• 12 years ago

Ah, thank you. Unfortunately messing with npm is a bit of a show stopper for me at the moment.

adefa3• 12 years ago

If anyone is interested, I was able to build a copy of Atom for Windows:

http://work.strieber.org/Atom-0.95.0-61fff23be.zip

Guillaume86• 12 years ago

Thank you! Was waiting for a windows build to give it a go

PowerGuido87• 12 years ago

Thanks. Trying it right now.

adefa3• 12 years ago

As more fixes come in and until an official release comes out, I'll compile some updated versions.

adefa3• 12 years ago

New Unofficial Atom builds for Windows: http://atom.strieber.org

helpbygrace• 12 years ago

I wonder why almost every apps that was introduced at first don't support wide character type system such as CJK.

Atom's soft wrap doesn't works well. It seems to count character length in order to split the line.

munro• 12 years ago

Fun! A few days ago I mentioned I wish Sublime Text could have preview panes, but it only does text. [1] This editor does just that! Unfortunately it's very sluggish. Which also ties back to a comment about another HTML5 text editor. [2] I want to love this editor so bad, but I'll wait until the performance improves.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7696555 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7696593

Atom Is Now Open Source

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