From "The Zen of Programming":<p>------<p>Hearing a disturbance, the master programmer went into the novice's cubicle.<p>"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!"<p>The master programmer stared at the novice. "And what would you do to remedy this state of affairs?" he asked.<p>The novice thought for a moment. "I will design a new editing program," he said, "a program that will replace all these others."<p>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.<p>"I have no wish to learn another editing program," said the master.<p>And suddenly the novice was enlightened.
I was all ready to be skeptical and everything... but this could actually be amazing.<p>I currently use Chocolat for code editing, which is beautifully elegant and I love it, but there are 25 little tiny things that I <i>really</i> 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.<p>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 <i>JavaScript</i>, 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.<p>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.
> A hackable text editor for the 21st century<p>I'll fix: A proprietary (unhackable) text editor that only runs on OS X.<p>I imagine that web developers will drool over this.
There's real opportunity here for Github and I hope they take it.<p>Why is the basic workflow of the modern-day programmer split over multiple tools and over multiple systems?<p>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.<p>Imagine flipping through your pull requests in the text editor and then seeing your friends comments and code reviews appear on top.<p>Imagine an issue being created on Github and the file(s) referenced instantly glowing.<p>This opens doors to thinking about the engineering workflow in a new holistic manner.
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.<p>On the other hand, the more the better, but we have already too many editors around.
I am very excited about this, I love the Github team and this looks like a great tool.<p>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.
Metrics is an interesting package. It reports usage stats to Google Analytics, referenced by a hash of the machine's MAC address:<p><a href="http://atom.io/packages/metrics" rel="nofollow">http://atom.io/packages/metrics</a>
<i>To help us improve the editor, Atom sends usage information to Google Analytics. See [atom/metrics](<a href="https://github.com/atom/metrics" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/atom/metrics</a>) for details.</i><p>More data going to Google without opting in first? Bummer.
I'm really sad to see that they totally blew it.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Maybe my bitterness comes from the fact that I've already been down that road and it leads to a bad place.<p>Here's an editor that has deep Github integration, runs in the browser, and self hosts: <a href="http://www.danielx.net/editor" rel="nofollow">http://www.danielx.net/editor</a><p>Maybe I just live too far in the future.
Apparently this was almost 6 years in the making. <a href="https://twitter.com/defunkt/status/438791340222971904" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/defunkt/status/438791340222971904</a>
"Our goal is a zero-compromise combination of hackability and usability"<p>I can see a huge compromise in hackability - its core is closed source.
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...
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<p>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.<p>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.<p>No doubt there's going to be haters in the vim / emacs / ST / <i>insert favourite editor here</i> camp but I really hope this works out for the Github guys (and I have a feeling it will).
Turns out it's going to be payware, closed-source only while the rest of their community gets to build and support it. <a href="http://discuss.atom.io/t/why-is-atom-closed-source/82/9" rel="nofollow">http://discuss.atom.io/t/why-is-atom-closed-source/82/9</a><p>But who's going to buy an editor that can't even open a 1 MiB file? <a href="http://discuss.atom.io/t/unable-to-open-files-more-than-1mb/549" rel="nofollow">http://discuss.atom.io/t/unable-to-open-files-more-than-1mb/...</a><p>Moreover, besides code posers and managers, who is going to throw away all their knowledge and time configuring the editor they were using?
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:<p>>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.
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.<p>If an unknown third party came up with Atom it would have never gotten that attention.<p>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.<p>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.<p>But it's from Github and that's reason enough to vote it up.
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.<p>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.<p>Funnily enough, Sublime Text was born out of Textmate development slowing, and I can't seem to shake that vibe here too.
> Emacs and Vim offer extreme flexibility, but they aren't very approachable and can only be customized with special-purpose scripting languages.<p>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.
The blog post: <a href="http://blog.atom.io/2014/02/26/introducing-atom.html" rel="nofollow">http://blog.atom.io/2014/02/26/introducing-atom.html</a>
Atom is a cargo cult.<p>Atom is eventually a dead end. They are paying lip service to eventually partially opensourcing it.<p>It is the opposite direction of the magic of git, which enables easy sharing and collaboration.<p>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.<p>You are better off taking the hard road and investing your time in tools that are not cargo cults.
Apparently github will be charging for it and it will not be fully open source.<p><a href="http://discuss.atom.io/t/why-is-atom-closed-source/82/9" rel="nofollow">http://discuss.atom.io/t/why-is-atom-closed-source/82/9</a>
I've been observing the reactions to this over several communities and I find it all to be rather interesting! [ Warning; meta comment incoming ]<p><a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1z0ykn/atom_launched/" rel="nofollow">http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1z0ykn/atom_lau...</a><p>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.<p>The first and by far most-upvoted with a 700 point margin.<p>>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.<p>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.<p>A perfect example of misinformation:<p>>[ 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.<p>The supply of vitriol is unending.<p>It was the same with the /g/ thread, though surprisingly not quite as bad.<p><a href="http://archive.rebeccablacktech.com/g/thread/S40550074" rel="nofollow">http://archive.rebeccablacktech.com/g/thread/S40550074</a><p>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 <i>desperately</i> want to replace our editors.
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.
Seems like quite a weird priority for GitHub to dedicate resources into creating Yet Another Text Editor.<p>I don't know, I can't see how this is a priority for them...
The "space-pen" part of this deserves separate attention:<p><a href="http://atom.github.io/space-pen/" rel="nofollow">http://atom.github.io/space-pen/</a><p>I bet this space-pen DOM DSL would mix well with the React virtual-DOM approach.
So how much is written in Javascript? Won't that performance pale in comparison to, say, Sublime which is written in C++?<p>Or are just the plugins/extensions written in Javascript while the core editor is in C or C++?<p>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.)
So, they want people to contribute writing plugins so they can turn-around and make money off the plugin ecosystem by selling atom?<p>Seems transparently under-handed to me.
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.
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.<p>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. :)<p>* It seems to be a known issue: <a href="https://github.com/LightTable/LightTable/issues/972" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/LightTable/LightTable/issues/972</a>
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.
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.
Atom team, if you're reading this, I have a big feature request that would make this far, far greater than just another editor.<p>Pair editing.<p>Specifically, having the ability to pair two editors over a network and edit the same set of files.<p>Lots of other editors do this, but here's the key: Each editor keeps its own settings and environment.<p>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.<p>That's all I want.
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.<p>- Soft undo for multiple selections.<p>- Search settings since the panel is overwhelming.<p>- Markdown preview should be updated live?<p>- I really miss Go To Anything from Sublime Text 3.<p>- You should be able to select the syntax highlighting from the status bar.<p>- Inline preview of audio, SVG (toggle?) and fonts? That would be <i>rad</i>.<p>- Syncing of settings using GitHub settings?<p>But other than that this is really good progress!
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.<p>That being said, anyone with a spare invite? :) Ta.
First let me say that I've used only vim and emacs for the last 5+ years that I have been a daily coder.<p>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.<p>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.<p>I've only had the thing open for about 10 minutes and already I'm impressed.<p>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]<p>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.<p>More Info:
[0] <a href="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BhdTeedCcAARgYV.jpg:large" rel="nofollow">https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BhdTeedCcAARgYV.jpg:large</a>
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.<p>Thanks Github!
This sounds like a very promising tool. I'm really excited to hear all of the talk about extensibility.<p>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.
Maybe it's not true of all JavaScript GUI apps, but almost all the ones I tried are <i>hecka sluggish</i> 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?
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.<p>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.<p><a href="http://blog.jetbrains.com/pycharm/files/2013/12/2.png" rel="nofollow">http://blog.jetbrains.com/pycharm/files/2013/12/2.png</a><p>Edit:<p>See, this is inferior and what Sublime Text already has: <a href="http://atom.io/packages/git-diff" rel="nofollow">http://atom.io/packages/git-diff</a><p>What's superior is a full-blown diff bar overview of the file.
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.<p>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)<p>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.
Sublime has 'limited extensibility'? Package Manager lists over 2000 packages. And what about Brackets? This looks very similar - editor built with web tech. <a href="http://brackets.io/" rel="nofollow">http://brackets.io/</a>
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
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.<p>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?<p>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.
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.
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.<p>What other text-centric apps can be made better by a browser framework? Maybe the terminal?
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.
For me, this might be the killer feature: <a href="http://atom.io/packages/vim-mode" rel="nofollow">http://atom.io/packages/vim-mode</a>
Can you edit files while offline? Or do you need to be always-connected? (i.e. this is an actual web service)<p>I couldn't find mention anywhere about offline abilities.
More online editors...<p>Check out Brackets (<a href="http://brackets.io/" rel="nofollow">http://brackets.io/</a>) and Eclipse Orion (<a href="http://eclipse.org/orion/" rel="nofollow">http://eclipse.org/orion/</a>) who both have been trying to build fully open editing experiences. There are more out there but those come to mind.<p>Would be nice if more people started working together on these things...
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.<p>[0] <a href="https://github.com/mojombo" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/mojombo</a><p>[1] <a href="http://discuss.atom.io/t/why-is-atom-closed-source/82/9" rel="nofollow">http://discuss.atom.io/t/why-is-atom-closed-source/82/9</a>
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.
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".<p>[1]: <a href="http://atom.io/packages/atom-dark-flat-ui" rel="nofollow">http://atom.io/packages/atom-dark-flat-ui</a>
Last thing I need is another editor. Having said that, I will for sure examine and give a fair chance to anything you produce.<p>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.
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.
I'm willing to bet anything that just like Sublime was FOSS cloned to Lime (<a href="https://github.com/limetext/lime" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/limetext/lime</a>), this as well will be cloned as FOSS, if it is any good, that is.<p>Subatom seems like a great project title :)
Bespin, Skywriter, Ace, Brackets… now Atom. Everybody seems to be having the same idea: that browser based technologies are the future for code editors.<p>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.
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!
I just played with atom for the last 2+ hours.<p>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.<p>The vim-mode is very incomplete and very buggy. Granted that should get a lot better in time.
If you're looking for an invite, there are lots of people offering and requesting invites on IRC:<p><a href="http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=##atom" rel="nofollow">http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=##atom</a>
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.
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.
To try out Atom:<p><a href="https://gist.github.com/anonymous/9265315" rel="nofollow">https://gist.github.com/anonymous/9265315</a><p>Then visit the resulting link output by curl. You're welcome.
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.
Gross.<p>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.<p>We've already killed Freshmeat and Sourceforge for turning lame, this shouldn't be hard.
how i feel about atom.io...
<a href="http://desmond.yfrog.com/Himg876/scaled.php?tn=0&server=876&filename=79jka.jpg&xsize=480&ysize=480" rel="nofollow">http://desmond.yfrog.com/Himg876/scaled.php?tn=0&server=876&...</a>