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.

Comments

yeah for dumb posts on slashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:yeah for dumb posts on slashdot

[master5o1]

More importantly, it's common to all those who are the target users of Atom: Web developers.

Re:yeah for dumb posts on slashdot

[Slashcrunch]

The GP likes to reinvent every wheel that exists before touching the code for the actual app. Some people call that real coding. It isn't very productive though.

Re:yeah for dumb posts on slashdot

[exomondo]

which to me says 'we're all rather incompetent and need another juggler in there to do the hard work for us".

That's just an example of NIH syndrome, do you also re-implement all of your own collections in C++ instead of using the STL or Boost libraries? It isn't about having the hard work done for you, it's about not re-inventing the wheel just for the sake of it.

Re:yeah for dumb posts on slashdot

[markkezner]

You're not a real coder unless you write your own OS, processor microcode, support libraries, network architecture and programming language before you make your application. Otherwise, you're just letting other people do the hard work for you!

Do see what a bad place this line of thinking takes you? If you want to get anything done, you have to reinvent the world. Imagine if everybody did that... how slow development would be and how slightly incompatible everything would be.

Go ahead and proceed with your elitist worldview. If you need me, I'll be over here, being productive and shipping actual products.

looks like ...

[danomatika]

Looks like Sublime Text as a web browser. Now when you screw up, you're tab will show a frowny face.

Roll out?

[hydrofix]

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.

Atom Versus Brackets

[Anonymous Coward]

How does this compare to Brackets?

Re:Atom Versus Brackets

[Anonymous Coward]

You get the privilege of paying GitHub for a proprietary mess whose source code will be just open enough for you to do work for them but not open enough for you to avoid paying for a license or fork the project if GitHub decides to do something evil.

Re:Atom Versus Brackets

[Jane Q. Public]

"How does this compare to Brackets?"

Brackets is designed for editing HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. And its preview only works with Chrome.

Atom is more of a general-purpose editor. Although the internals of Atom are done with Webkit, and things like syntax highlighting is configured in simple CSS (LESS) files.

Blah.

[DeTech]

Nano is still a fav of mine.

Re:Blah.

[fisted]

because it is entirely featureless?

Re:Blah.

[teh dave]

Before I was introduced to the wonderful world of *nix, the fact that nano has essentially no features would probably have drawn my criticism in a similar manner.

However, the first text editor I learned to use on Linux has changed my perspective somewhat. We all know which one it is most likely to be. There is one feature it had missing, that nano does have, and I consider it the most important feature of all - it's not completely batshit fucking insane.

Re:Blah.

[Barefoot Monkey]

However, the first text editor I learned to use on Linux has changed my perspective somewhat. We all know which one it is most likely to be.

ed?

It is cross-platform

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

"Special purpose"

[Volguus Zildrohar]

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?

Really?

[agm]

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.

Wait, what?

[fahrbot-bot]

...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.

Or not so misinformed

[Phillip2]

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.

Re:Modern development: so lacking in control...

[serviscope_minor]

And it still stands that every new language becomes a re-implementation of LISP.

Try saying that to a Haskell programmer: you'll get a well deserved kick in the monads.