Atom 1.1 Is Out, With Lots of Graphic Improvements (blog.atom.io) 103
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.
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What does "16 bit" have to do with terminals?
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The first UNIX machines were 16 bits, and TTY terminals were the main interface to them.
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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.
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Except the early terminals weren't even 8-bit. Only 6 bits were needed for upper-case only ASCII.
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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:Not really open source (Score:4, Informative)
* 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.
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* 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:
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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.
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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 diffe
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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.
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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 v
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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 [github.com] so I don't have to install anything else on remote servers.
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omg closed source means terrible eeeek
Actually, it means not free. Obviously freedom isn't something you value.
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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 [readwrite.com], 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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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... [blog.atom.io]
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My mistake.
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That's classified information.
You know too much....
Re:wtf.. (Score:4, Informative)
wtf is atom?
A somewhat rudimentary slashvertised text editor that reports what you're doing back to Google.
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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
In a Nutshell (Score:3)
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).
Re:Can it debug? (Score:4, Informative)
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 [eclipse.org]. 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 [github.com] (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 [www.qt.io] 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++.
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Ever heard that saying, "Emacs is a great OS but it lacks a decent text editor?" Well, thanks to evil-mode [bitbucket.org], 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 m
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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 t
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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 editi
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Yeah, understandable. Neither vim script nor the vim rc file really looks easy, that is an area I never will really dig into. ... regardless what language.
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
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 th
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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'
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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
Looks interesting (Score:2)
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.
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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.
No interactive subshells (Score:2)
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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
Caught up with vi yet? (Score:2)
Large files were a problem with atom
Why Atom? (Score:4, Interesting)
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?
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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?
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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? (Score:2)
And notepad2, because your notepad replacement shouldn't need an installer (like notepad++)
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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.
Reinventing (Score:2)
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?
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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.
Botched release (Score:2)
Why a desktop application? (Score:1)
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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.
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More mainstream than elisp, though.
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Is it lighter and more efficient? (Score:2)
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.