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Github Rolls Out New Text Editor Atom
hypnosec writes "Github has introduced Atom, its new 'web native' code editor which has been in development for more than six years. Atom is available as a part of an invite-only beta program. GitHub describes Atom as an attempt to create an editor 'that will be welcoming to an elementary school student on their first day learning to code, but also a tool they won't outgrow as they develop into seasoned hackers.'"
You can request an invite on atom.io. The source to supporting libraries has already been released, but it looks like Atom itself might not be released (although it is a "specialized variant of Chromium designed to be a text editor rather than a web browser."). The editor is extensible in Javascript instead of "special-purpose scripting languages" like Emacs and VIM (is Javascript really any less messy than Emacs-Lisp though?). A preliminary user guide and customization guide are available to all.
Who cares if it's "less messy" or not? The point is that it's a common, widely understood scripting language, not some obscure bullshit like emac-lisp.
Looks like Sublime Text as a web browser. Now when you screw up, you're tab will show a frowny face.
The editor can not be downloaded anywhere. They don't even tell you what platforms it supports – although someone on Reddit mentioned it only supports Macintosh. I am not signing up to their marketing e-mails before they actually tell me what I am even getting in return.
How does this compare to Brackets?
Nano is still a fav of mine.
"is Javascript really any less messy than Emacs-Lisp though"
It is going to be supported on OS X, Linux, and Windows. It is in beta right now so only the OS X binaries are available.
I'm always amazed that someone will take the time to type in a comment telling us they don't know something and how they didn't use the same amount of time to look for it instead...
...that even the source code editor is invite only. This is the future of "cloud"-based design.
No, this is not how I want a new generation to learn to code.
Javascript is the special-purpose scripting language du jour - for active web pages - whereas LISP has many applications.
And it still stands that every new language becomes a re-implementation of LISP.
Stick to what you do well, Github.
Looks like it's perfect for OS X hipsters who are disrupting entrenched industries by writing rails web cloud apps San Francisco coffee shops. Oops, did I say rails? I meant node.js.
Vim isn't approachable? WTF? Whatever happened to reading the docs? Doing anything useful on Linux isn't really approachable either... maybe that's why Atom looks OS X specific right now.
A grave site has been reserved for yet another text editor right next to yet another compiler compiler
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
On the other end of the spectrum, Emacs and Vim offer extreme flexibility, but they [...] can only be customized with special-purpose scripting languages.
So, what, Python is a special-purpose scripting language now? What special purpose might that be? Pissing off whitespace fanatics? Confounding Javscript programmers with sensible behaviour?
When confronted with one problem, some think "I'll use recursion". Now they are confronted with one problem.
If using web technologies to build a native application is the answer, then we've asked the wrong question.
Javascript, DOM, CSS etc are a bastardised mish-mash of technologies that lack elegance and coherence; they've come about from the legacy need to display static pages in a browser. To gain functionality more and more features have been added like throwing crap against a wall in the hope something will stick. Using this spaghetti system to drive a text editor makes little sense from a technology point of view.
Lack elegance and coherence, and yet somehow are the underlying fabric of the most widely used applications on the planet.
Windows mouse click "programmer" detected
Nano? NANO?! Eat flaming death heathen, vim for life!
Used nano when it was pico, and built into pine.
When pico became available as a stand alone editor I quickly discovered that it was worthless for dealing with complex text files like source code. So I went back to vi. It was pretty funny watching CS students try to write code with it. Only to say: use "vi".
Shouldn't that be enough?
...instead of "special-purpose scripting languages" like Emacs ...
One of the least informed statements I've ever read on /.
Ignoring the fact that Emacs is an editor, not a scripting language, one can do just about anything in LISP (and Emacs LISP), and LISP itself has been around since 1958. I even got paid as a research assistant in college in 1985 to work in LISP on a Xerox 1108 graphical workstation using InterLISP-D (still have the manual). The whole OS was written in LISP and the system had ethernet, mouse and 19" gray-scale monitor. It was fucking awesome.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I get that it's ~*BeTa*~ but it's been "in development for more than six years" and they don't have any love for Windows or Linux?
Bravo!
There's a similar project, Adobe Brackets, which is code editor for web languages written in HTML/Javascript and using the Chromium runtime with a node process for extensions. It's MIT licensed and has been available for more than a year.
and your point is what?
Windows is the most widely used OS on the planet and yet... no-one says its the best either. Like the girl who puts out with anyone, you can be really popular yet still rather pathetic.
It's not quite that misinformed. Emacs lisp is a special purpose language. It's implemented in the Emacs core and is not implemented any where else. It's in the same family as the 1958 lisp, but is none-the-less as different language from all the others.
It's actually quite a nice language; it has some nice data types good for editors. And being a lisp, you can layer anything you want on top of it.
No, but when you're coding/scripting for the web with this editor, you probably know how to use javascript (or are learning it)... learning a new language just to extend your editor is a waste of time ....
Javascript, DOM, CSS etc are a bastardised mish-mash of technologies that lack elegance and coherence; they've come about from the legacy need to display static pages in a browser. To gain functionality more and more features have been added like throwing crap against a wall in the hope something will stick. Using this spaghetti system to drive a text editor makes little sense from a technology point of view.
Web technologies today are a toy. Very true. PHP is a silly mess (Sidenote: ATM I develop PHP/HTML/CSS/JS for a living) and clientside Flash was eons ahead of everything else. That's 'was' as in 'has passed'. Adobe and Macromedia sought to that.
Devs will settle for the lowest common demoninator and will backtrack 2-3 generations of technology if it's open and free. It was the same with the PC. It was a toy. But it was open and free and you could dabble with it without a giant megacorporation sueing you into next wednesday. Now x86 rules the planet, and Amiga and GEOS Works are faint history.
That's the way things go. Nature finds the absurdest ways around obsticles, but it's true.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
The only semi-serious complain against PHP I've ever heard is that the function names and parameters order aren't uniform. MOTHER. OF. GOD.
So I'm stuck here in Visual Studio 2012, a nice env for C# (apparently crappy for C++, but whatever..) and the fuckers no longer support emacs key bindings. I could give a shit about Emacs LISP, but give my my key bindings or give me death, or maybe retirement would be nice. Oh yeah, get off my lawn you script kiddies!