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).

EMACS 2.0

[serviscope_minor]

Remember back when EMACS stood for Eight Megs and Constantly Swapping. It seemed quite funny to build an OS and language first and then turn it into an editor. With all the jokes about how it's a great OS shame it has no decent editor etc etc.

Well this is just EMACS circa 2014. But instead of elisp we have Javascript. And instead of the emacs-platfrom-which-has-no-name we have a browser.

Anyway, here's a few lines from my top window:
13226 user 20 0 902280 187184 27300 S 0.0 18.3 57:49.63 firefox
26114 user 20 0 35532 8680 4344 S 0.0 0.9 0:12.53 gvim

see the difference?

(but hey it's in a browser so it's officially cloud and webscale and at least web 3.1.0-RC2)

Re:Google Analytics?

[MightyYar]

I disagree. It can be helpful to authors of software to see how their product is being used. As long as they are up-front about it, I have no issue.

When they try to pull the wool over your eyes, then it gets into "scummy" territory.

"web-based"

[Anonymous Coward]

if it runs in a browser, why is it OS X only? someone missed the point.

Re:"web-based"

[Evardsson]

Or you could download the source (https://github.com/atom/atom) and build it locally. (I can verify that it builds and runs in Ubuntu 12.04 LTS). I think maybe the package managers for various *nix have gotten too simple, too many of us have forgotten how to do the configure, make, make test, make install dance.