GitHub Open Sources Atom, Their Text Editor Based On Chromium 121
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).
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).
Prime Example of Software Bloat (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:EMACS 2.0 (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not so much that it can't, but that it won't. I got a beta invite, so one of the first things I tried to do was open a 6MB CSV file to see what would happen. It pops up a cryptic error message which you can decode using the developer tools: files larger then 2MB aren't allowed.
The reason is simple. Atom is slow. Really, really, really slow. Now granted the MacBook Pro (remember, it's also Mac-only) is a couple years old, which in Apple terms means it's time to be replaced (can't wait to stop receiving updates for it and getting yelled at by IT for that), but it absolutely and noticeably drags editing text.
Scrolling is slow. Editing is slow. Searching is slow. Everything is just - slow.
In a text editor. In 2014.
Re:mac only? (Score:4, Interesting)
A replacement for Sublime Text (Score:4, Interesting)
A lot of the reason behind developing Atom is that Sublime Text has become very popular in the last few years with people wanting something between a text editor and an IDE, however Sublime Text is not open source, has a pretty poor extension API, has basically no documentation at all, and the developer ignores 99.9% of attempts to communicate with him. This situation isn't ideal, hence the development of Atom as an open source alternative - when it gets up to spec I'll probably switch over myself.