Atom, GitHub's code editor based on web tech, goes open source Code-sharing site GitHub has announced that Atom, its highly customizable code editor, has left beta and its full source code is now available to world+dog under the MIT open source license. Why another text editor? In an interview, GitHub developer Nathan Sobo told The Reg that he and the other developers wanted a powerful …
So it's a desktop/cmd-line application using HTML5/JS?
Yes - not sure on the HTML, but it uses CSS, so probably.
Presumably they are also planning an actual web version... because that would actually be more useful to me?
Does everyone usually plan to do what is useful to you? Wish I could be you.
And no. This is a standalone application, not a web application. It's written in JS instead of C - that is as webby as it gets (actually it has a .io domain, webby+=1, and when you use the program it constantly sends analytics to google, webby+=100000).
"The real sell of Atom is the synthesis of a lot of different things that no one editor does well."
Marches back to the Church of Emacs in a huff
I know.
The obvious point I was making was that these are all web technologies so should really run on any modern "standards compliant" browser. Where's the advantage is taking all these "run anywhere" components and bundling them into an OS X specific executable? How much extra effort went into bundling them that could have been spent delivering a genuine cross platform app?
Github used to go on about how they were treading the line between "open source" and "non-open source", that the core would be non-free but "open source" etc and other nonsense in order to enforce a charge for the editor.
They've changed their mind, I suspect that after coming under some serious fire from many quarters.
It'll now be proper free software using an MIT style licence.
Congratulations Github. You know it was the right thing to do.
Uncompressed, the app occupies a svelt-like 217MB
Interestingly, my GNU Emacs install in total occupies about 175M ( I got both 23 and 24 versions installed now):
me@lmde ~$ dpkg-query -f '${Installed-size}\t${Package}\n' -W '*emacs*' | awk '/^[0-9]+/{s+=$1;print $0}END{printf "------------------\n Total: %.2f\n",s/1024}'
25 emacs
3507 emacs-goodies-el
13103 emacs23
544 emacs23-bin-common
58165 emacs23-common
16871 emacs24
531 emacs24-bin-common
63091 emacs24-common
4581 emacs24-common-non-dfsg
135 emacsen-common
14493 emacspeak
533 maxima-emacs
------------------
Total: 171.46M
However, Emacs contains much more, it got a lot of features, most IDE's lack, plus it's more than just a text editor or another IDE, it's a self-sufficient operating system of some sort. ( Btw, where is the Emacs icon ?)
So, it's like Sublime. Except it's free and open source. And it's got web goo under the hood instead of python. And releases will happen more frequently (how long has ST3 been in beta?) Emacs and vim bindings are already there. I think this is going to be huge.
@JDX, when I first heard of a "github editor" I thought it was going to be web-based as well. Seems like the time is right for something like that, and having it tightly integrated with the Github site (as an option for small tasks, of course) could make for a really interesting workflow.
At least this editor has the minimal functionality you'd expect from *any* that would try to get your attention in this busy world.
When there was a recent _splash_ in the tech world about 'brackets', an open! source! editor! from Adobe, I went and checked it out. Then I ended up asking in their mailing list how I could enable/find the bracket bouncing feature. Without any sort of embarrassment, the brackets people said they don't do brackets 'yet'. Along with apparently a barge-full of other features they don't do 'yet'.
Don't even try to get people interested in software that isn't somehow *better* than average. You're wasting people's time and no one appreciates that when they have no spare time and were hoping from the PR that you would _save_ them time with your whizbango snazzola beaming-proud-papa software.
Calling it 'beta' won't save your reputation. And calling it 'free' when it's costing me time I don't have ... I have something for you to indent about 13 tab stops!
Why would anyone *use* an editor made with technologies and bloated dependencies that only a modern i7 (with a OS that uses a GUI) can handle using an absurdly high amount of ram, when editors made in C/C++ are available that can even be used on ancient hardwares.
All I can see is another "I did it because I can" project with little to no thought put into it's actual usability and efficiencies.
If we're on the subject of green computing. Using Atom will probably burn 100x more carbon than an equivalent in C++.
If this used web technologies properly the answer to your "why would anyone use this" question would be "because it runs on any platform that has a modern browser on".
As this comes bundled in an OS specific executable I'm forced to agree with you, a C/C++ implementation would've been more efficient. Not so easy to bolt in all the new js frameworks that a text editor so obviously needs though....
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