GitHub's new text editor leaked on Twitter

I really can&#x27;t wait for this to be released. I am a little pessimistic about the Vim mode. There are countless 80 or 90% complete Vim modes in various modern editors. But the absence of a truly native feeling Vim (that last 10%) is a deal breaker for many. I&#x27;d rather see more editor developers spend time finding a solution that provides a <i>truly</i> authentic Vim mode instead of spending countless hours merely approaching 90% compatibility. For the people who you&#x27;re selling on that Vim mode (the people who would care that your editor provides it) 90% isn&#x27;t good enough. There are other ways to integrate Vim modes in your editor such as using the (inappropriately named) &quot;Netbeans interface&quot; which actually allows Vim to run in the background while you integrate your UI on top of it across a serializable bridge. This allows a perfect recreation of Vim while letting you customize the application experience on top of it.<p>Aside from that approach, there are a few faithful Vim recreations that I&#x27;ve discovered out of the dozens that I&#x27;ve tried.<p><a href="https://github.com/vicoapp/vico" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;vicoapp&#x2F;vico</a> (Excellent project) <a href="http://www.viemu.com/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.viemu.com&#x2F;</a> (Solid experience in Visual Studio) <a href="https://github.com/guillermooo/Vintageous" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;guillermooo&#x2F;Vintageous</a> (fairly close and getting better every day)<p>But I don&#x27;t mean to sound like such a pessimist. The progress so far looks excellent and I can&#x27;t wait to try it out. Keep it up!<p>Edit: I also notice that the logo looks like an iOS7 version of React&#x27;s logo: <a href="http://facebook.github.io/react/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;facebook.github.io&#x2F;react&#x2F;</a>

There&#x27;s a bunch of lovely gems scattered through the Atom repos. Some of my favorites from a first quick glance:<p>Biscotto — A CoffeeScript API documentation generator based on TomDoc notation:<p><a href="http://atom.github.io/biscotto/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;atom.github.io&#x2F;biscotto&#x2F;</a><p>React-Coffee — A little glue that makes Facebook&#x27;s React easy to use from CoffeeScript without having to resort to JSX:<p><a href="https://github.com/atom/react-coffee" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;atom&#x2F;react-coffee</a><p>SpacePen: A minimalist view library for jQuery, allowing custom methods, super calls, HTML-building, subviews, and easy event binding:<p><a href="http://atom.github.io/space-pen/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;atom.github.io&#x2F;space-pen&#x2F;</a><p>... and the best bit about this bonanza is that everything is really quite readable. Keep up the good work, Kevin.

holy cow this thing has like 70 repositories!<p>And I found a screenshot... looks very much like sublime text: <a href="https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/1424/1228569/cce6eb26-27a6-11e3-8675-a6905e50a9a6.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;f.cloud.github.com&#x2F;assets&#x2F;1424&#x2F;1228569&#x2F;cce6eb26-27a6...</a><p>edit: based on this[1], it looks like this is a GitHub-aware&#x2F;integrated text editor that targets <i>both</i> desktop (Mac, at least) <i>and</i> web<p>[1] <a href="https://gist.github.com/elcuervo/eb68883f233baf5a46c8" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;elcuervo&#x2F;eb68883f233baf5a46c8</a>

Haha. <a href="https://twitter.com/shit_hn_says/status/278710645644484609" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;shit_hn_says&#x2F;status&#x2F;278710645644484609</a>

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

<a href="http://blog.atom.io/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.atom.io&#x2F;</a> seems to be WIP, the meta tags are quite revealing :<p>At GitHub, we’re building the text editor we’ve always wanted: hackable to the core, but approachable on the first day without ever touching a config file. We can’t wait to see what you build with it.

Pretty crazy! Here are a few interesting plugins in there already:<p><pre><code> - vim-mode - fuzzy-finder - emmet (aka Zen Coding) - solarized-dark-syntax (heh) - snippets (check) - language-* (check; so many; awesome) - timecop (tracking where time is spent in the editor) - editor-stats (graph your mouse &#x2F; keyboard activitiy) - ...</code></pre>

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

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

FYI <a href="https://atom.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;atom.io</a> is leaking assets. Here is an album of the images found in the css <a href="http://imgur.com/a/KG4MX#0" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;KG4MX#0</a> the css <a href="http://pastebin.com/FgN3g448" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;pastebin.com&#x2F;FgN3g448</a> the js <a href="http://pastebin.com/p1nBmGki" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;pastebin.com&#x2F;p1nBmGki</a>

Looks good and all... but I&#x27;m interested in the story on how it leaked on Twitter. The link just goes to the Github repo now.

<a href="https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/1424/1228569/cce6eb26-27a6-11e3-8675-a6905e50a9a6.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;f.cloud.github.com&#x2F;assets&#x2F;1424&#x2F;1228569&#x2F;cce6eb26-27a6...</a><p>&quot;Collaboration is now working (and accepts 2FA logins).&quot;

What sets this apart from the other WebKit-based text editors, LightTable and Brackets? In general it seems like there&#x27;s been an explosion of new text editors with this style since TextMate went into hibernation around 2008. It&#x27;s great to have options, but there&#x27;s lots of these TextMate clones now.

&quot;Atom is free during the beta period.&quot; <a href="https://github.com/atom/welcome/commit/86790ef7cca263ca0943f64effc771e2339a2754" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;atom&#x2F;welcome&#x2F;commit&#x2F;86790ef7cca263ca0943f...</a>

They&#x27;re on Twitter: <a href="https://twitter.com/AtomEditor" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;AtomEditor</a> found the link in the Source Code of: <a href="http://blog.atom.io/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.atom.io&#x2F;</a><p>It also has the line: &quot;At GitHub, we’re building the text editor we’ve always wanted: hackable to the core, but approachable on the first day without ever touching a config file. We can’t wait to see what you build with it.&quot;

Never thought I&#x27;d be excited for a text editor, but damn I can&#x27;t wait for this to come out.

It seems that Holman has already used it 5 months ago. <a href="https://github.com/holman/feedback/issues/432" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;holman&#x2F;feedback&#x2F;issues&#x2F;432</a>

A text editor in a browser? There seems a lot of excitement about it but I can&#x27;t work out why - can anyone explain? I&#x27;m not trying to be argumentative; I really am curious! It&#x27;s for editing text and there appears to be massive excitement about it....?

whois atom.io =&gt;<p>Domain : atom.io<p>Status : Client Updt+Delt Lock<p>Owner : GitHub Hostmaster<p>Owner : GitHub, Inc.<p>Owner : 88 Colin P Kelly Jr St<p>Owner : San Francisco<p>Owner : CA<p>Owner : US

Dig the feed URL: <a href="https://github.com/atom.atom" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;atom.atom</a>

Website now says &quot;SOON&quot;. Response from #atom irc channel:<p>&gt; Would the editor itself be open-source?<p>&gt; yes<p>&gt; a non-opensource editor from GitHub would be ludicrous<p>&gt; seems like the source code will be up today

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

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

I saw this. I have a lot of respect for Githubbers and Github but is Node really the language for a text editor? My text editor that&#x27;s built natively to my OS often struggles, let alone if it&#x27;s Node. Seems like they&#x27;re shoehorning the wrong technology.

Apparently it collects usage information?<p><a href="https://github.com/atom/welcome/pull/7" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;atom&#x2F;welcome&#x2F;pull&#x2F;7</a><p>Thanks, but no thanks. I don&#x27;t need my editor sending usage information anywhere.

Any ideas if all the code behind the editor will be released as open source?<p>Edit: To be clear, I am not talking about all the supplementary repositories that are already open source, but rather I am wondering if the core application will be OS.

Some interesting new info popping up in the repo: <a href="https://github.com/atom/welcome/blob/master/lib/welcome.md" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;atom&#x2F;welcome&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;lib&#x2F;welcome.md</a> - they reference it as being &quot;free during the beta period&quot; - that coupled with a tweet from mojombo yesterday[1] makes it sound like a whole new line of business for them - sounds big!<p>[1] <a href="https://twitter.com/mojombo/status/438200146791129088" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;mojombo&#x2F;status&#x2F;438200146791129088</a>

The way I code (and I&#x27;m surprised I seem to be the first person to state this here), is that I can run my class file in Sublime and it automatically runs its unit test within like a second. Instantly, I can know whether I broke anything or whether I satisfied a new assertion successfully without breaking anything else.<p>Unless this editor can do something similar, this is pretty much useless for any non-html non-css code developer who has already learned that unit test suites are the way, the truth and the life.

Looking good and this only helps confirm that web IDE&#x27;s are going to be the big thing in the next couple of years.<p>I&#x27;ve been predicting&#x2F;preaching about this for 2+ years now and been building my own browser code editor in that time (<a href="http://icecoder.net" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;icecoder.net</a>).<p>So, CodeAnywhere gets $600k in funding, Adobe is releasing Brackets to the browser soon, GitHub is launching Atom as a web based offering.<p>Need much more reason to leave the desktop behind?

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

I was excited until I saw it was WebKit based. My confidence level that it won&#x27;t be slow and buggy is next to zero. I would, of course, love to be wrong.

IRC channel here: <a href="http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=##atom" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;webchat.freenode.net&#x2F;?channels=##atom</a>

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

<a href="http://whois.domaintools.com/atom.io" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;whois.domaintools.com&#x2F;atom.io</a><p><pre><code> Domain : atom.io Status : Client Updt+Delt Lock Owner : GitHub Hostmaster Owner : GitHub, Inc. Owner : 88 Colin P Kelly Jr St Owner : San Francisco Owner : CA Owner : US</code></pre>

Glad to see there&#x27;s an Atom plugin[0] named after the Jean-Claude Van Damme movie <i>Timecop</i>[1]<p>[0] <a href="https://github.com/atom/timecop" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;atom&#x2F;timecop</a><p>[1] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timecop" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Timecop</a>

If you go to <a href="https://atom.io/docs" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;atom.io&#x2F;docs</a> you can authorize the app with your github account. You still get the &#x27;soon&#x27; page afterwards, but at least you&#x27;re now something like an early atom.io beta user ;)

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

I like that they are already prepared(&#x2F;preparing) for Node 0.11, (<a href="https://github.com/atom/node-vm-compatibility-layer" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;atom&#x2F;node-vm-compatibility-layer</a>)

This looks great! I&#x27;d be more than happy with an open source, modern editor to replace the current myriad of specialized-language editors (QtCreator, Brackets, ...), Sublime Text and Komodo Edit I&#x27;m using.

Atom IRC channel<p><a href="https://github.com/atom/welcome/commit/6346bb8c2e7534ae0de5e9495018f611d99f56f1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;atom&#x2F;welcome&#x2F;commit&#x2F;6346bb8c2e7534ae0de5e...</a>

<a href="https://github.com/atom/welcome/blob/master/lib/welcome.md" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;atom&#x2F;welcome&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;lib&#x2F;welcome.md</a>

Looks 1000x times better than a project I just started based on Ace.js. Should save me a lot of trouble!<p>I just hope it&#x27;s not tightly coupled to the backend so I can replace it with a custom one.

Was worth a try...<p><a href="https://twitter.com/s10wen/status/438637833981820929" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;s10wen&#x2F;status&#x2F;438637833981820929</a>

Looks like this is going to be released today <a href="http://minus.com/i/8HXqEh53LTsB" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;minus.com&#x2F;i&#x2F;8HXqEh53LTsB</a>

How is this a leak when THEY HAVE A WEBSITE with a signup form? <a href="http://atom.io" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;atom.io</a><p>:)

Very likely that Github bought SublimeText.

As the <i>actual editor</i> isn&#x27;t publicly available in any form, this isn&#x27;t exactly a &quot;leak&quot;.

Any word on how to get in on the beta?

this is very cool. I think many people are underestimating the potential of something like this. There are 1000x as many people who can hack something cool for this than would do so in elisp.<p>* I&#x27;m a happy emacs user but have to admit this is very promising.

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

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

the next big thing for devs. I love sublime and will, but can&#x27;t figure why is it taking them so long, to launch it on mac appstore.

Is this a replacement for gist?

Guess, github bought sublime.

They open beta invites today

Looks amazing, but why CoffeeScript?

If it doesn&#x27;t come with a vim-mode or that vim-mode is slow and painful to customize, then this will be useless.