Atom Is Now Open Source

I wonder why it wasn&#x27;t this way from the get-go... Oh well, at least I&#x27;m actually interested in it now. Can&#x27;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.<p>Good on you, Atom.io devs

This is fantastic news!<p>&gt; 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.<p>I agree whole-heartedly. In fact, I don&#x27;t believe that editors like Sublime Text would have such a large following if not for the extended &quot;free-trial&quot; functionality.<p>It will be exciting to see where this project goes, and I think open-sourcing the rest of the editor was a great move.

Interestingly, Tom Preston-Werner (former CEO of Github) said in February that Atom wouldn&#x27;t be fully open-source:<p><i>“Atom won&#x27;t be closed source, but it won&#x27;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&#x27;t finalized exactly how this will work yet. We will have full details ready for the official launch.”</i> - Tom Preston-Werner, 27 Feb 2014 <a href="http://discuss.atom.io/t/why-is-atom-closed-source/82/9" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;discuss.atom.io&#x2F;t&#x2F;why-is-atom-closed-source&#x2F;82&#x2F;9</a><p>There was a HN discussion about this here: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7310017" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=7310017</a>

Kind of cool that you can view issues all the way back to the beginning:<p><a href="https://github.com/atom/atom/issues/5" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;atom&#x2F;atom&#x2F;issues&#x2F;5</a><p>I realize this is inherent to the nature of version control, but it&#x27;s neat to think about the history as a &quot;Making-Of&quot; Atom.

&gt; 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.<p>Using a free software license is a big improvement, but I wish that they used a copyleft license like the GNU GPLv3. Inevitably, we&#x27;ll see proprietary extensions and &quot;pro&quot; versions. Strong copyleft is important for the freedom of end users.

I tried Atom, and it was glacial.<p>The editor I use now (Epsilon) was last significantly rev&#x27;d about 8 years ago. It&#x27;s a fine editor, but I&#x27;m starting to look for a replacement (and, oddly, I cannot <i>stand</i> where modern Emacs went).<p>Sublime Text 2 is darned close. If only I could teach it proper bindings of C-U . . .

I&#x27;m excited to see all these new IDE projects, but have we pretty much given up on having a good, integrated debugger?

When is this insanity going to end?<p>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.<p>Even after 20 years Javascript UIs can&#x27;t match stuff done 20 years ago on native UIs.<p>Whatever happened to the notion of cost-benefit analysis?<p>Is there ever going to be some professionalism in the programing profession, if in its current state it can be called a profession?<p>How much effort is the industry going to put into implementing software on the Javascript&#x2F;HTML combo which is, has been and will always be under-specified for what programmers want to use them for?<p>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&#x2F;HTML combo. Is there some connection here?

Perhaps the blogpost should first mention what Atom is.<p>The first time I&#x27;ve heard about Atom was here: <a href="https://medium.com/p/433852f4b4d1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;433852f4b4d1</a>

Well, I&#x27;m thoroughly impressed and a little bit embarrassed about beating up on Atom only yesterday :)

This is exciting, and bad news for Sublime Text. Though it will be interesting to see if Atom&#x27;s performance actually gets up there<p>The Atom Shell open sourcing is also interesting ... I wonder if it will lead to a rash of other Chromium-fork-apps

<p><pre><code> Uncaught Error: Atom can only handle files &lt; 2MB, for now. </code></pre> I&#x27;d love to use an opensource editor for working on large xml files.

If anyone is interested, I was able to build a copy of Atom for Windows:<p><a href="http://work.strieber.org/Atom-0.95.0-61fff23be.zip" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;work.strieber.org&#x2F;Atom-0.95.0-61fff23be.zip</a>

This is an interesting reversal for Github. The original FAQ implied that Github would try to market Atom commercially. I&#x27;m curious as to what made them change their mind.

Installed on Linux Mint. Some minor UI problems here and there. But that&#x27;s nothing compared to how bad autocomplete is. At least for PHP development it&#x27;s unusable at all. Because of that even had no intention to check further. But for those who wonder - yes, it works on Linux.

I&#x27;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.<p>Thumbs up, Github!

Maybe someone will implement the UI without a Node&#x2F;CoffeeScript backend? Memory usage has been pretty abysmal in my trials (though we&#x27;ve got some very large repos).<p>I&#x27;m definitely with the group that they &#x27;opensourced&#x27; this because they had to... I know my entire office went from &#x27;fuck-yeah&#x27; to &#x27;.... meh&#x27; to &#x27;what? yeah, I forgot about that&#x27; in about two weeks time.<p>I mean, it&#x27;s still damn good of &#x27;em I just hope it gets some love. I&#x27;d like to see more competition in the space, but right now I have a feeling it&#x27;s just going to be abandoned before too long then I&#x27;ll be knocking on the door of ST3 or Vim again.

IMHO Tom (now gone from the company) always held a strong opinion to open-source ALMOST everything.<p>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.<p>Now that he&#x27;s gone, that limitation is off and it&#x27;s open source as it should have been from the get-go.<p>There&#x27;s absolutely no reason this product won&#x27;t be open source to the core, the more people actively developing on it the better.<p>Me personally, I haven&#x27;t used it and I don&#x27;t see myself using it ever in the future, but it seems like a very nice concept project.

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

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

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

Can someone comment on whether it&#x27;s feasible to port Atom to function in-browser? Seems like this + something like Codepen could potentially be an asset to frontend developers.

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).

I&#x27;m excited to compare atom-shell with node-webkit. I wonder if any big players will use it.

Running on Ubuntu 14.04, after following the instructions, running &quot;atom&quot; or &#x2F;usr&#x2F;local&#x2F;bin&#x2F;atom doesn&#x27;t do anything.

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&#x27;s license: <a href="https://github.com/atom/atom/blob/master/LICENSE.md" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;atom&#x2F;atom&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;LICENSE.md</a><p>It looks pretty open to me. However, I don&#x27;t speak legalese, so I may be misunderstanding it.

Hopefully someone can package a Ubuntu build now.

Really great news for Atom.<p>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&#x27;m interested to see how the community interest will stack up against other open source editors like Light Table.<p>Hopefully Atom may join the legendary ranks of Vim and Emacs.

I followed the steps, but it didn&#x27;t download.<p><pre><code> $ git clone git@github.com:atom&#x2F;atom.git Cloning into &#x27;atom&#x27;... The authenticity of host &#x27;github.com (192.30.252.129)&#x27; can&#x27;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&#x2F;no)? y Please type &#x27;yes&#x27; or &#x27;no&#x27;: yes Warning: Permanently added &#x27;github.com,192.30.252.129&#x27; (RSA) to the list of known hosts. Permission denied (publickey). fatal: Could not read from remote repository. </code></pre> This works.<p><pre><code> $ git clone https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;atom&#x2F;atom</code></pre>

Everyone knows the rules by now. If something awesome comes out that&#x27;s not FOSS or even only partially FOSS (dual license, etc) just ignore it until it&#x27;s either cloned or fully opened.<p>Follow this algorithm for an open net. Profit margins get pretty tight tho

The cloned repo is ~238mb. I can&#x27;t help but think some of it is not necessary.

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&#x27;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&#x27;ll wait until the performance improves.<p>[1] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7696555" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=7696555</a> [2] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7696593" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=7696593</a>

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

How about translating it to other languages?

I don&#x27;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&#x27;t even come close to Emacs. Instead of re-inventing the wheel, why not just take Emacs and add a pretty face to it?

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.

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.<p>I just can&#x27;t imagine a behemoth like Github not injecting itself into Atom for the better.

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&#x27;s not worth it? At least commercially.

I&#x27;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&#x27;t dig into the code to fix the issue but now I can.

I wonder why almost every apps that was introduced at first don&#x27;t support wide character type system such as CJK.<p>Atom&#x27;s soft wrap doesn&#x27;t works well. It seems to count character length in order to split the line.

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?

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

Yeah, finally got in working on Ubuntu 14.04 , looks good and solid !<p>not working atm, looks like it makes a POST request to a server every times its launched and the server seems to be down .

So still nothing on the homepage or anywhere else explaining why this is something useful compared to existing apps? I can&#x27;t think of a single USP.

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&#x27;s not picking up adoption. Then they decide to open source it in an effort to make it popular but of course, they can&#x27;t admit that, so they always come up with excuses like &quot;We want the community to benefit from it&quot; or &quot;We really believe in open source&quot;, etc...<p>In the end, for most of these products, open sourcing is usually just the last step before the product dies.

I&#x27;m surprised how much memory it takes up.

Thanks for sharing this. I received betz access, but I&#x27;m using linux. Have to try compile entire Atom to linux!

The FAQ doesn&#x27;t tell me what Atom is.

I don&#x27;t need another editor but this interests me because of the Atom Shell and how that works.

That + clojurescript and we can have better emacs… can we? I haven&#x27;t tried it yet, honestly.

I look forward to getting a RHEL&#x2F;CentOS 6.x(6.3) package soon.

Ugh.. still mac only....

Does anybody have any success building it on Debian Wheezy ?

nice, trying to install it on Ubuntu 14.04 .

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

Emacs FTW!

Love it

Congradulations to the github team for releasing atom with an open source license. I hope future projects are free software instead of open source.<p>EDIT: I fudge fingered this. I meant copy left license. MIT is a free software license.

I&#x27;m still trying to find out why a great company like GitHub would shamelessly copy Sublime Text 2. It&#x27;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?<p>I installed it today for the first time because this was the first time I didn&#x27;t need to be in a special club to use it.<p>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 &quot;Editor is not responding.&quot; message. Everything feels sluggish.<p>This is progress people!