GitHub Open Sources Atom, Their Text Editor Based On Chromium

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).

Comments

Re:Google Analytics?

[MightyYar]

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