Atom 1.1 Is Out, With Lots of Graphic Improvements (blog.atom.io)

yathosho writes with some good news for GitHub developers: GitHub's new Atom editor sees a first big update in version 1.1. Character measurement has been improved, fonts with ligatures and variable width fonts are now supported. The biggest new feature is probably live Markdown preview, matching the current theme. There's also a 1.2.0 beta available, for those who want to have a look into Atom's future.

Comments

Have they improved Vim emulation?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because as long as I can pretend that I'm still on a 16bit terminal, I can code in peace.

Re:Have they improved Vim emulation?

[spauldo]

What does "16 bit" have to do with terminals?

Re:Have they improved Vim emulation?

[Lisias]

The first UNIX machines were 16 bits, and TTY terminals were the main interface to them.

Re:Have they improved Vim emulation?

[spauldo]

Well, yeah, the PDP-11 was 16 bits. The terminals weren't, though.

Given that vi was developed on a PDP-11, I'll grant you the point.

Re:Have they improved Vim emulation?

[radarskiy]

Except the early terminals weren't even 8-bit. Only 6 bits were needed for upper-case only ASCII.

Re:Have they improved Vim emulation?

[cardpuncher]

Well, Unix (or Unics. initially) was developed on a PDP-7, which was an 18-bit processor. However, 18-bit processors would typicaly pack 3 6-bit characters to a word. Teletypes, which were an early form of interface used a 5-bit code. Common VDU-style terminals used 7- or 8-bit codes. I'm not aware of any (western) devices that used more than 8 bits.

Re:Have they improved Vim emulation?

[greenfruitsalad]

hmm i'm trying to do :wq but no command line appears. thus no search and replace either. no proper visual block selection. yeah, this vim emulation isn't for me.

Re:Have they improved Vim emulation?

[Anonymous Coward]

ASCII A-Z is 41H to 5AH (65 to 90 decimal). 6 bits only goes up to 3FH (63 decimal).

In short, if you represent the A-Z with 6 bits, it ain't ASCII.

Re:Have they improved Vim emulation?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody claimed the terminals were ASCII. In fact, they didn't use ASCII. They used... a 6-bit character encoding. (Remember, these were based on 1920s tech and standards). The TTY driver (within Unix) handled ascii conversion.

Re:Have they improved Vim emulation?

[Anonymous Coward]

> Nobody claimed the terminals were ASCII.

Except radarskiy above, who wrote "only 6 bits were needed for upper-case only ASCII." He should have just said "upper-case only text."

Re:Have they improved Vim emulation?

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you all clueless as to how hardware mappings work?

Shit, whatever...read up fellas:

Unicode Explained

Not really open source

[BringMyShuttle]

GitHub co-founder Tom Preston-Werner specifies, only "Atom core" code will be closed source, while "all the existing MIT-licensed repos under the Atom org will remain so forever." The reasons are purely commercial, as he notes: "Atom won't be closed source, but it won't be open source either. It will be somewhere in-between, 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."

Keep your wallets handy, peeps.

Re:Not really open source

[phantomfive]

Yeah, lame product that's not open source. Here are some the features they are touting for the latest release, see which ones of these make you want to pay for a closed-source editor:

* Reduced GC Pauses When Scrolling Editor
* Using Variable Width Fonts
* New Approach to Character Measurement
* Several Find and Replace Fixes
* Settings Have Nice Descriptions

They're not really selling me on it. Incidentally, when I read the headline, I thought it meant that Intel's Atom processor had been given a GPU.

Re:Not really open source

[Anonymous Coward]

Ahh, so it's open source like AIX. I sure it will be just as popular.

Re:Not really open source

[Anonymous Coward]

GitHub co-founder Tom Preston-Werner specifies, only "Atom core" code will be closed source, while "all the existing MIT-licensed repos under the Atom org will remain so forever." The reasons are purely commercial, as he notes: "Atom won't be closed source, but it won't be open source either. It will be somewhere in-between, 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."

Keep your wallets handy, peeps.

The whole was open-sourced in May 2014!
See http://developers.slashdot.org/story/14/05/07/1245259/github-open-sources-atom-their-text-editor-based-on-chromium or http://blog.atom.io/2014/05/06/atom-is-now-open-source.html

Re:Not really open source

[ArylAkamov]

Incidentally, when I read the headline, I thought it meant that Intel's Atom processor had been given a GPU.

Same, the only reason I clicked was to see how terrible of an onboard GPU they crammed into atom.

Re:Not really open source

[Lennie]

Seems your information from 2014 is not relevant any more, supposedly they open sourced all of it in May this year:

http://blog.atom.io/2014/05/06...

Re:Not really open source

[sanf780]

I thought it was Atom RSS, that by the way, is still at v1.0.

Re:Not really open source

[flipperdo]

May of 2014, actually (the blog entry you linked to is dated May 6, 2014)

Re:Not really open source

[TheRaven64]

* Using Variable Width Fonts

I would actually be interested in this, if it comes along with smart tabs. I was initially sceptical of Stroustrup's claims in his book that code (like everything else) is more readable in a proportional font, but I checked the research and he is correct (in objectively measurable ways). I'd love to have an editor that:

• Allowed my fingers to think that they were still using vim (the vim UI sucks by most objective measures, but motor memory is real and I'm too lazy to abandon it and retrain my fingers).
• Had good syntax highlighting (not just lexical highlighting: I want variables declared in different scopes to be different colours)
• Had context-aware autocomplete (of the kind that libclang can provide for [Objective-]C[++]).
• Fully supported proportional fonts, with tabs correctly jumping to the next tabulator and allowing tabs in between non-whitespace characters to be saved as spaces that would preserve the tabulator alignment in fixed-width editors.
• Had a client-server architecture, so I could easily use it to edit files on machines that I'm SSH'd into, without having to do X forwarding and getting an unresponsive UI.
• Had a decent scripting interfaces with support for multiple languages.

Atom, Vim, and EMACS all support some overlapping subset of these. I've not yet found an editor that supports all of them.

Re:Not really open source

[Anonymous Coward]

I want to make money from open source, as long as it is YOUR SOURCE. Fuck GitHub.

Re:Not really open source

[Lennie]

My mistake.

Re:Not really open source

[Anonymous Coward]

You sound like you've got a stick up your ass dude...

Re:Not really open source

[Anonymous Coward]

Variable-width fonts are a nightmare to edit in column mode.

Re: Not really open source

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the problem with blogs and announcements. The date is not easy to find, and it's on the internet forever. I can't count the number of times I read something, only to find it outdated.

Re: Not really open source

[Anonymous Coward]

I've often had to feed blog URLs into the Web Archive to see when it was published. Which kind of works, provided that it was indexed not too long after it was published, or that Web Archive indexed it at all.

Re:Not really open source

[phantomfive]

I was initially sceptical of Stroustrup's claims in his book that code (like everything else) is more readable in a proportional font, but I checked the research and he is correct (in objectively measurable ways).

I don't have trouble reading code because of the font, so that is a non-issue for me. When was the last time you had trouble reading code because it was fixed-width? However, a proportional width font makes things extremely difficult to line up vertically. Tabs help a little, but often I want to line things up on a non-tab-stop point.

Re: Not really open source

[fluffernutter]

If it's anything that is actively developed, I don't read anything unless I can see a date somewhere in the google search blurb.

Re:Not really open source

[Anonymous Coward]

omg closed source means terrible eeeek

Re:Not really open source

[TheRaven64]

I don't have trouble reading code because of the font, so that is a non-issue for me

Define 'trouble'. Comprehension is not a binary thing. It's relatively easy to measure reading speed and retention. There's a lot of research showing that proportional fonts (and syntax highlighting) increase both, for all test subjects, including the ones that claim before the study that fixed-width single-coloured text is the best for them. Most of these apply equally to natural language, yet programmers insist that code is special and magical. This is even true of syntax highlighting - tagging different parts of speech in natural language has improves both reading speed and retention by 5-10%.

However, a proportional width font makes things extremely difficult to line up vertically

Nonsense. Tabulators exist for precisely this purpose. Oh, and read the rest of the post that you're replying to.

Re:Not really open source

[Anonymous Coward]

Just for the record, Tom Preston-Warner was fired from Github after raping a github employee. Apparently, his wife (she watched and videotaped it) and him were into some real sick shit. Anyhow, he was fired and github turned SJW (look at their suggested conduct rules) to hush it up.

Re:Not really open source

[phantomfive]

omg closed source means terrible eeeek

Actually, it means not free. Obviously freedom isn't something you value.

Re:Not really open source

[phantomfive]

Define 'trouble'.

Meaning, being able to read faster would not help me in any noticeable way. When it comes to understanding code, deciphering character shapes is not the bottleneck. I solve that problem in milliseconds, then can spend minutes or hours or days trying to understand it.

Re:Not really open source

[angel'o'sphere]

Meahnwhile I switched most of the syntax highliting in Java/Groovy/C++ off.
At least the colours I switch off.
I find 'modern' syntax highliting more causing eye cancer to me than helping in any way.
Regarding reading speed: I doubt you can make me read faster by any swich in fonts etc.
You can make me read slower perhaps, e.g. while I can read Fraktur, I prefer ordinary letters, and especially I prefer sans serif above seriv fonts.
The only colour highlighting I did not switch off yet is the 'desert' theme in vim for Shell scripts.
But I'm working on that ;)

I would assume if tests show better reading and better retention even, the test subjects are 'relatively' bsd readers?

Re:Not really open source

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree and disagree with most of everything you've said at varying degrees.

But the one I have the most trouble with:

"Nonsense. Tabulators exist for precisely this purpose. Oh, and read the rest of the post that you're replying to."

As a conscripter who has designed many fonts, tabulators don't solve any of the uniformity issues that plague natural scripts.

Re:Not really open source

[bhiestand]

I use Atom (and TextMate before that). It works fine with rmate, just have to do port forwarding on ssh. I use the rmate bash script so I don't have to install anything else on remote servers.

Re:Not really open source

[Anonymous Coward]

Some Atom processors *do* have Intel's integrated GPUs.

wtf..

[Anonymous Coward]

wtf is atom?

Re:wtf..

[jetkust]

That's classified information.

Re:wtf..

[Air-conditioned cowh]

That's classified information.

You know too much....

Re:wtf..

[arglebargle_xiv]

wtf is atom?

A somewhat rudimentary slashvertised text editor that reports what you're doing back to Google.

Re:wtf..

[Anonymous Coward]

It is a project where github spends their development resources on. Fixing bugs or missing features is not their priority as the service is sold by shiny powerpoint slides. If only they made pull requests editable (eg. able to change the base branch), or made the source review window width dynamic, added a way to hide the changes in whitespace, removed the lag on commenting (one usually press the comment button and receives no indication anything happened so she presses the sen button again, and again), etc.. Clearly the github people do not use their own service, or they would have fixed the issues already.

Re:wtf..

[unixisc]

It's the most basic particle that constitutes all matter, and is composed of protons, neutrons and electrons.

It is also the name of an entry level CPU line from Intel. In fact, seeing this headline, I was under the impression that Intel had tossed in new GPU functionality into the Atom

Re:wtf..

[Anonymous Coward]

Well then just block the outbound traffic if you disagree with it.

Re:wtf..

[Anonymous Coward]

"It is also the name of an entry level CPU line from Intel."

Not that it deserves the advertisement, but Atom is a little bit more than "entry level". Specifically it is supposed to be a "low power" platform. It is supposed to compete against Arm, while still being x86 compatible. It is supposed to be a good choice for a home media PC, or a kiosk.

In practice, it's never been able to reach the power savings of Arm, so Atom deserves the title "piece of shit" a lot more than "entry level".

Can it debug?

[Anonymous Coward]

On "UNIX", I eventually became accustomed to using Xcode. Can Atom provide a similar experience for developing C++ on Linux?

I don't contribute to OSS because I don't respect it. But I use it because it's free. Consequently, I could use Atom on Linux if it meets my needs since everything else is crap.

Re:Can it debug?

[spauldo]

I can't comment on Atom (or Xcode, for that matter).

I can comment on UNIX-based editors and IDEs, though.

There's Eclipse's C/C++ module. It runs fine on Linux.

Emacs might suit your needs as well, but getting it set up with all the bells and whistles of an IDE is a bit of a pain. There are projects that help with that, however, like spacemacs (defaults to vi keybindings, but supports emacs keybindings as well). I use emacs with a custom config, but I haven't done much C++ since I switched from vim. What I have done has worked OK, but I'm sure my config has room for improvement.

QT Creator is cross platform and supports C++. It can do non-QT projects just fine.

There's Anjuta and KDevelop as well, but I haven't used either of those in quite some time and have no idea what the status is. KDevelop used to be used quite a bit for KDE development, which is C++.

Re:Can it debug?

[fph il quozientatore]

Emacs with vi keybindings? Clearly they just like to watch people argue...

Re:Can it debug?

[Greyfox]

Getting Emacs set up is a good bit better since they added package support. You can mostly just package install a bunch of packages and they seem to work sensibly. Stuff like vi style paran matching in edit mode takes a bit more work, but there's a function you can bind to a key on the Emacs Wilki.

Re:Can it debug?

[spauldo]

I'm sure it's better (I didn't use emacs before packages), but going from vanilla emacs to working IDE still takes a quite a bit of research and work.

Company or ac? Ido or Helm? Built-in CEDET, development version of CEDET (hope you don't do scheme development, 'cause semantic shits on it), or clang-based autocomplete? CEDET project management or projectile? Don't forget flymake - oops, that's outdated, now use flycheck, but wait, that's not compatible with...

Emacs is great, but for someone like OP who is used to "install xcode and run with it," roll-your-own probably isn't the way to go. That's why I mentioned spacemacs.

Re:Can it debug?

[spauldo]

Ever heard that saying, "Emacs is a great OS but it lacks a decent text editor?" Well, thanks to evil-mode, now it has one.

I haven't seen much argument about evil-mode vs vanilla emacs. I think the consensus is pretty much, "it's all emacs." Emacs users generally customize their keybindings anyway - evil-mode is just a bit more extreme than most.

As for me, I like vim. I instinctively use vi keys when editing. However, I need custom scripts for some of the work I do, and I hate vimscript. Emacs gives me an editor that uses vi keys but lets me do customizations in elisp. It also has some other kick ass features I've come to like (org-mode is amazing). I still use vim for quick editing and sysadmin type stuff, but I write code and documents in emacs.

Re:Can it debug?

[angel'o'sphere]

I met with some friends yesterday, to either found a new company, or work as a team of contractors for a potential customer.
That customer is is notorious for having a multiple choice/written test about computer science topics.
The story goes that the typical 'high flyer' manages to answer 20 - 25%?of the questions correctly in the alotted time.
A russian guy answered everything, correctly!, in half the time and was asked if he need help (as it was assumed his german was to bad)
Anyway this morning, I thought to myself: when the mandatory VI vs Emacs question comes up, I could make a joke: Emacs with a Vim mode.
A few hours later it pained me, and I googled for Vim mode for Emacs, and figured it was not a good joke, considering the amount of hits.
Alas, I use Vim only for Unix stuff, and an IDE for 'real programming' ... Emacs? I tried it a few weeks, because I did not know about VI. Some retarded teacher thought Emacs is the best thing. But I could not stand to have to write all key-board-short-cuts on a piece of paper and look them up every few minutes *again* because they are completely unmemorizeable.
Anyway ... I have to relearn vim/vi every time I start working as admin/devops again because I use it to rarely on my macs.
However it is quite fun as everything is so 'round' and 'wholesome' thought out in it.

Re:Can it debug?

[spauldo]

Emacs and vi are mostly useful to people who have to edit a lot of text. If you're only editing occasionally, or you usually use a "normal" editor, you'll never learn them.

I learned vi because I was a sysadmin and worked with UNIX all day. Every UNIX machine has vi, and it used to be common for it to be the only visual editor on the system (especially if you were working with commercial UNIX like HP-UX or Solaris, like I was). I would never have put in the time to learn it otherwise - I was happily editing files with pico before I learned vi.

I only learned emacs because of vi - I needed something with the power of an IDE, a good macro or scripting system, and vi keybindings (my fingers have hit the escape key three times so far while editing this comment - it's burned into my brain). Editing text was the primary part of my job. Emacs with evil-mode does that for me. Of course, I had to learn elisp, but I'll take that over vimscript any day. I find I actually enjoy the language.

Re:Can it debug?

[angel'o'sphere]

Yeah, understandable. Neither vim script nor the vim rc file really looks easy, that is an area I never will really dig into.
Under those circumstances I understand why people write new editors that are scriptable with java script.
Nice on unix however is that you simply pipe some part of your edit buffer through external commands ... regardless what language.
Standard Emacs is incomprehensible to me. I can't get what sick mind desided on the keyboard short cuts.
In vi/vim however as soon as you have learned the basics, you easy discover new commands yourself.

Re:Can it debug?

[spauldo]

Standard Emacs is incomprehensible to me. I can't get what sick mind desided on the keyboard short cuts.

The same sick mind that used to spend a lot of time working with Symbolics LISP machines. Look up the "space cadet" keyboard sometime.

The tutorial really tries to get you to ignore the special keys on your keyboard. Page Up/Down, the arrow keys, Home, and End all work fine in Emacs, but the tutorial will have you doing C-v, C-n, etc. That makes sense if you're working with antique terminals. It doesn't make much sense today. Except for the glaringly obvious cut-and-paste commands, for normal use it acts more or less like any "normal" text editor.

There is some semblance of sense in the default keybindings. C-x is full of (usually) global functions. C-c is for mode-specific keybindings. Very common things have their own single combination keybindings (movement, saving, cut/paste, etc.). There's also some really confusing ones that require you to understand how Emacs works (like C-u for "prefix argument" that does different things to different commands). And of course, C-g, which stops Emacs from doing whatever it's doing to piss you off at the moment.

Honestly, I don't bother with most of the Emacs keybindings. I've memorized the ones I need (like C-c C-e l o to export an org-mode document to pdf) and use the vim equivalents for regular editing. I've got evil-leader installed, which will let me bind functions to the comma (as in, ",e" to export to pdf), but I never get around to actually setting it up.

I'm excited to learn *another* editor!

[Anonymous Coward]

I already have a great editor that I know how to use. I can manipulate text as fast as I can think because I'm skilled with all the hot keys, macros, etc.. Why would I want to learn yet another editor? It seems like so many websites think that your existing editor just isn't good enough and it needs to be replace by some WYSIWYG editor built into the web page.

Atlassian - you're one of the evil doers - I'm never using your products again.

Re: I'm excited to learn *another* editor!

[Anonymous Coward]

Atom isn't a WYSIWYG ide. And wtf does Atlassian have anything to do with Atom?

Looks interesting

[spauldo]

It looks like a javascript emacs. Anyone know how it compares in "hackability?" Are there github sites full of javascript mods for it like the elisp ones for emacs?

I'm not a fan of javascript, but I can see this being handy for someone who is.

Re:Looks interesting

[Lisias]

The thing is useless except by the eventual coder. As long as you need something really sturdy, it fails

I could not even load 1 megabyte sized files (logs from a system I was analysing).

The UI is fancy, I give it to them. But even Eclipse is more useful for real life work.

Caught up with vi yet?

[Billly Gates]

Large files were a problem with atom

No interactive subshells

[munch117]

Looks like vi to me.

Why Atom?

[mwvdlee]

I'm still wonder why I'd ever want to use Atom.
Sure, it has some nice things in it, but it's still nowhere even remotely close to other programmers' editors.
Nor does it seem to offer anything that could significantly improve on those editors or that would be in any way harder to implement on those editors.
What is so special about Atom and why are Github pushing it so much?

Re:Why Atom?

[sanf780]

I find it odd that Atom, the text editor, is built on top of Chromium! As such, it is a 90MB installer under Windows.

Re:Why Atom?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why notepad?
Why pluma?
Why word?
Why Vi?
Why Notepad++?
Why Atom?

Because it utilizes modern design principles and does away with all of the archaic nonsense that plague most if not all text editors and many other applications.

Re:Why Atom?

[Anonymous Coward]

EMACS is build on top of a LISP interpreter, it's about a fifth the size of this Javascript based thing

Re:Why Atom?

[mwvdlee]

Notepad: because the OS has to come with some text editor, and tiny Notepad is sufficient for editing OS text files.
Pluma I've never heard of.
Word because WordPerfect was lagging with support for the then-new Windows OS.
Vi because people wanted an terminal-based text-editor with a different user interface paradigm.
Notepad++ because Notepad had too few features and there weren't many good Notepad replacements at the time.

What is that archaic nonsense you speak of. Can you give an example?

Re:Why Atom?

[DrXym]

Atom is basically a clone of Sublime and Brackets. So if you like those other editors you'll probably like Atom.

I use it occasionally because I work on a very mixed project with lots of file types which it handles fairly well. But I don't see the attraction of these editors otherwise. If you edit code all day you should probably be using a proper IDE and if you're just casually editing some random file there are more lightweight editors around.

Re:Why Atom?

[Anonymous Coward]

You must be talking really ancient, because all those principles were all part of the original Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines

Re:Why Atom?

[Austerity Empowers]

Yet a lot of us get work done in Vi or Emacs. I think the UI guys spend more time marketing and justifying their existence than they bring value in. Examples: Windows 8, Unity, Office with "ribbons"

All shit that should never have existed, based on the UI principle of fixing what isn't actually broke.

Re:Why Atom?

[Anonymous Coward]

So it's just more UX word salad bingo. Thanks for making it quite clear we can ignore you.

Re: Why Atom?

[spongman]

And notepad2, because your notepad replacement shouldn't need an installer (like notepad++)

Re:Why Atom?

[Anonymous Coward]

How so?

Re: Why Atom?

[Anonymous Coward]

"e fact is, Atom's ui is a spitting example of how to do things right."

That was a statement you made that didn't even have anything to back it up. The reply asked for another statement of how you came to that conclusion. And you wave it away. The onus is on you to clarify what you meant. The person who asked for clarification could spend hours researching and still wouldn't be able to find out what you meant.

Tldr: stop being a dick.

Re:Why Atom?

[Anonymous Coward]

What...are you claiming to be an expert?

Do enlighten us dimwits...

Re:Why Atom?

[Anonymous Coward]

At least ribbon is very functional under touch input

Reinventing

[jemmyw]

Atom is but the latest in a chain of editors that do the same thing. It adds nothing new over the last cool. I try them all, then switch back to vim, which has all the same, if not more, capabilities and is installed everywhere.

If they want to reinvent the wheel why not a modern wrapper around Vim?

Re:Reinventing

[rocqua]

Unlike any modern editor, one cannot open Vim and start typing. Moreover, one cannot explore menus to see what you can do and what the shortcuts for that are. This makes it much harder to learn than modern GUI editors / IDEs.

Re:Reinventing

[Anonymous Coward]

Which part of the chain utilizes modern design principles?

Not to mention, Vim is just fine the way it is.

Re:Reinventing

[new_01]

GVim has existed for years.

Re:Reinventing

[Anonymous Coward]

Check out https://github.com/carlosdcastillo/vim-mode

Re:Reinventing

[hey!]

I think the selling point is extensibility. I've been playing around with it and I detect a great deal of Emacs influence in the editor's features. I think the idea is to provide emacs-like power user features with a basic text editor-like entry level experience.

Stupid name

[Anonymous Coward]

Why call an editor the same as an unrelated web standard? Especially since the Atom publishing format is at version 1.0. I thought there was a new version of Atom feeds with more embedded graphics formats.

Re:Stupid name

[Anonymous Coward]

So let's call it Atomio.

Can't wait to see how electrons look like in this

[Anonymous Coward]

Man, and to think my whole school life I only learned about the 1.0 version

I sure hope neutrons and protons got a well deserved facelift

Botched release

[hilather]

A lot of Windows users woke up yesterday unable to work on their code because some projects would open and immediately crash. Their github is full of reports.

Re:Botched release

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe stop using windows?

Does it start

[Anonymous Coward]

in less than 30 seconds? It's a great editor, but it's also the very definition of bloat. Will it get leaner in future versions?

Why a desktop application?

[Laguerre]

Atom is completely built upon web technologies -- javascript, chromium, etc. It even phones home to Google analytics. It seems bizarre to have it solely as a desktop application -- why wouldn't this be implemented as a web app, or at least as a Chrome extension?

Re:Why a desktop application?

[hey!]

I think the primary reason is that they want the editor to be extensible using javascript, which of course is possible with a browser based app but then the people doing the customization have to work around browser security policies like single origin which complicate scripting for reasons that don't apply to a native editor.

Re:Why a desktop application?

[Anonymous Coward]

It actually uses coffeescript, because javascript is too mainstream.

Re:Why a desktop application?

[hey!]

More mainstream than elisp, though.

Re:Why a desktop application?

[Anonymous Coward]

The issue is that everyone now has readiliy available and standardized platform in the form of web browsers where one can just develop with notepad and used the browser's dev tools, but someone decides that's not good and that you need nodejs + tens of megabytes of dependencies + build system to replace some whitespace with curly braces that still needs to be debugged in a browser.

Re:Why a desktop application?

[nnull]

notepad++ 3.9mb Atom 84mb

Re:Atomic wheel

[fyngyrz]

Yes, except for the "more roundness" part. Lots of better editors out there, plus they don't have the downside of being on the other side of a WAN connection.

Too bad Github doesn't find it worthy to improve their markup handling. Markdown is really, really limited, and their mechanism for supporting other markup comes with designed-in inertia that makes it impossible to use for markup-projects. You can't change fonts, the <TT> tag is bedeviled by a visual style that changes its backdrop color, you can't use different fonts, you can't use different font colors, (imagine trying to document examples of font color change and font face changes with those limitations), you can't do image captioning worth a darn, much less embed them sanely in the context of the paragraph that references them...

I understand why they want to limit scripting on site; but fonts??? FFS.

I did one fairly large set of docs in Markdown so as to get familiar with the territory, as it were. It was a huge waste of time. The more I learned, the more limits I ran into. And Github... they were... less than helpful.

I don't mind posting my open source stuff up there, but I won't be putting any more documentation for same on the site in a "you-can-read-here" format unless they step up to the plate and handle custom markup schemes on a per-repo basis.

In a Nutshell

[hey!]

It's a text editor, built with web-based technologies and packaged as an app-specific browser that looks like a native desktop app, which offers a user experience similar to most desktop programmer's editors but with emacs-like extensibility (only in javascript rather than elisp).

Javascript

[Anonymous Coward]

Can it load a file larger than 2Mb now?

Is it lighter and more efficient?

[bigsexyjoe]

I don't know if this can be fixed, seeing as how it's based on Electron and therefore a Chrome Browser, but I would hope that it would use less RAM and take up less room on the hard drive.