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GitHub Open Sources Atom, Their Text Editor Based On Chromium

Posted by Unknown on from the emacs-does-it-better dept.

First time accepted submitter aojensen (1503269) writes "GitHub has made good on promises to open source Atom, a programmer's text editor based on Chromium. Atom is released under the MIT license (source repository). GitHub announced the following on their blog: 'Because we spend most of our day in a text editor, the single most important feature we wanted in an editor was extensibility. Atom is built with the same open source technologies used by modern web browsers. ... But more importantly, extending Atom is as simple as writing JavaScript and CSS, two languages used by millions of developers each day.'

Apart from being extensible via HTML, JavaScript, and CSS, Atom also offers out-of-the-box Node.js integration, a modular design with a built-in package manager (apm), and extensive features such as file system browser, themes, project-wide search and replace, panes, snippets, code folding, and more. Launched only 10 weeks ago, Atom seems to have a well-established ecosystem of packages and extensions already." The editor is based on atom-shell, a more general framework for building desktop apps using JavaScript/HTML. Beware: according to the FAQ, by default it sends "usage data" to Google Analytics (which can be disabled at least).

5 of 121 comments (clear)

  1. Re:100 year language by TheRaven64 · · Score: 4, Informative

    As for Dart, it's really just JS rebranded under Google afaik.

    The only part of this that's correct is the Google part. Dart is StrongTalk with curly braces. The object model, type system, and core functionality are exactly like StrongTalk, the lead developer on both projects is the same, and the VM is based on the StrongTalk VM (open sourced under a BSD license by Sun).

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  2. Komodo Anybody? by ilikenwf · · Score: 4, Informative

    I'm here at work using it right now...anyway, Komodo runs on Linux, Mac, Windows and is based on Mozilla...it has also been free and around for quite a while...extensibility? Yep...

    I don't get why everyone reinvents the wheel when they could instead make something that already exists, but is more complete better.

  3. Re:mac only? by ilikenwf · · Score: 4, Informative

    Just use Komodo...it's less likely to spy on you by default, as it's based on Mozilla...more mature, too.

  4. Re:Google Analytics? by MightyYar · · Score: 5, Informative

    By the way, the data they are collecting:

    A unique identifier that is generated by computing the SHA-1 of the machine's MAC address.
    The screen width and height
    The version of Atom being used
    The name of each item opened in a pane such as EditorView, SettingsView, and MarkdownPreviewView
    The amount of time the current window was open for
    The amount of time the current window took to load
    The amount of time the app took to launch

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  5. Re:But does it have... by erapert · · Score: 3, Informative

    It does, actually: http://blog.atom.io/