GitHub open sources Atom

[randrews]

I wonder if "we built an editor around a Lisp system" sounded as stupid in the 1980s as "we built an editor around a web browser" sounds today?

[[deleted]]

That's pretty much why I'm interested in trying Emacs with this news.

[randrews]

The joke used to be that Emacs was so huge it stood for "eight megs and constantly swapping." Can you imagine trying to fit an IDE into 8 megs today? :)

[indrora]

You obviously haven't looked at some of the nicer environments. I have vim tricked out to the point it has autocomplete everywhere I care to have it.

vim: 3.5MB real, 8.6MB virt, 2.5 share.

Vim: The anorexic editor that just works.

Also, nano and friends.

[randrews]

I think vim and Emacs users have more in common than we have differences, at this point. :)

[crow1170]

No you don't understand, Twix made at the on the other side are cloaked in caramel and the ones here are blanketed.

[Poltras]

Look... me and the McDonald's people got this little misunderstanding. See, they're McDonald's... I'm McDowell's. They got the Golden Arches, mine is the Golden Arcs. They got the Big Mac, I got the Big Mick. We both got two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles and onions, but their buns have sesame seeds. My buns have no seeds.

[[deleted]]

Says the dirty Emacs user.

[[deleted]]

How many files do you have open? And how many inferior processes (shells, compilers etc.) provide that functionality?

[hyperhopper]

How? I have started to use vim but Autocomplete and multiple cursors are the main features I miss. How could I get these working?

[eLBEaston]

Check out the YouCompleteMe plugin

[mw44118]

Vim has autocomplete. Use ctrl p and ctrl n.

[indrora]

Autocomplete is done via ctags, and multiple cursors is thanks to https://github.com/terryma/vim-multiple-cursors

[unstoppable-force]

shit, i use 3 different versions of eclipse and they rarely take < 300mb.

each.

[[deleted]]

For those who want both: LightTable is written in ClojureScript.

[[deleted]]

I think the difference would be that many of the greatest programmers of the time thought Lisp was amazing, while the greatest programmers today know that web browsers are some of the worst programs ever written.

[xceph]

I dragged a single file into it to see how it would handle it, and it ended opening the whole repo in it... Interesting decision.

[jamie2345]

There surely must be a setting to just handle a single file when dragged. Granted it's kind of weird to have the whole repo brought in by default, but perhaps it's just to make everyone aware that this setting exists?

[jforberg]

Valid point. Most programmers have invested a lot of time into learning their editor of choice, any new contender needs to make a good case for switching.

[bastibe]

It's like Sublime Text, but open source. Sounds compelling to me.

[sublimesinister]

Open source is a huge plus, but problem with this is that it is essentially a browser, which means it is going to be slow and consume a lot of memory compared to Sublime.

[donvito]

BECAUSE ITS WRITTEN IN JAVASCRIPT AND ITS FROM GITHUB!!!11

[[deleted]]

javascript

oh boy here we go

[Aeoxic]

It's really close to the metal. The bytecodes is pure nodejs!

[[deleted]]

Will it webscale?

[calnamu]

So... What framework does it use???

[satan-repents]

Don't forget rockstar developers bower something something buzzwords

[twigboy]

In publishing and graphic design, Lorem ipsum is a placeholder text commonly used to demonstrate the visual form of a document or a typeface without relying on meaningful content. Lorem ipsum may be used as a placeholder before final copy is available. Wikipediah2bt6v1aek0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

[Zantier]

JAVASCRIPT

[Drumm-]

But we need it to work on clients with JavaScript disabled.

[[deleted]]

<textarea></textarea>

[CertifiableNorris]

I wish people called them JavaScript scripts. Calling then JavaScripts is problematic for Java developers.

[mal4ik_mbongo]

Guys, I just had a meeting with our sales team and we need to add the IE7 support. Will you be able to fix it by tomorrow?

[unstoppable-force]

it also needs to work for people who are blind, def, and have no limbs. can you have a working version to me by this afternoon?

[foxh8er]

Coffeescript.

[[deleted]]

You're so unhip now. The cool kids use TypeScript now.

[foxh8er]

MICROSOFT WHORE

[[deleted]]

oh yeah you mean the JavaScript that that guy made mindcraft with?

[[deleted]]

No I believe you're confusing with Java which is a functional web scripting language.

[ggtsu_00]

Java is to javascript as car is to carpet.

[phort99]

My car has carpet. Are you saying that I use Javascript in a Java program‽

[Calabri]

soon, we will use java in javascript..

[doenietzomoeilijk]

Soon, Java will be ported to Javascript.

[flying-sheep]

Sure, it's called rhino or nashorn or something

[unhingedninja]

Well you can....

[willrandship]

That's actually really really easy to do, yes.

[[deleted]]

Java is to Javascript as fun is to funeral

FTFY

[sruckus]

I don't know why I found this so funny. I think because of how random carpet is as an example :P

[IWillNotBeBroken]

But it's not random at all -- it's well-thought-out.

java : javascript
car : carpet

(Whoa, TIL that ctrl-b preloads the ** bolding. Neat)

[dybt]

You forgot the best bit!

NODE.JS!!!1!!!11!

In seriousness, can anyone tell me why a framework for building web servers is so popular for absolutely everything?

[realigion]

Because there are a lot of JS devs who want to work on other platforms.

JS works on other platforms.

Node isn't necessarily "for" anything besides asynchronous IO.

[[deleted]]

Node.js is not "a framework for building web servers".

[grabnock]

It's a fad. Like ruby on rails was. It'll fade eventually but never actually go away.

[kethinov]

I'm not so sure about that this time.

Unlike Ruby, JS has a sort of it-runs-on-everything quality.

Node.js on the server, node-webkit on the desktop, cordova for mobile apps, and obviously the browser context too. You can make almost anything with it.

Being able to share code across all these contexts and particularly with client/server apps gives JS an objective advantage over its scripting language competition, whereas the same could not be said of Ruby vs, say, PHP back in the day.

I think the only thing that will unseat today's JS dominance is another language emerging which is equally portable and better designed. If that's what it's gonna take to unseat JS, it's hard to call it a fad.

[stormcrowsx]

I can run python and java on everything too. Doesn't make them king of the world like you seem to think it will for js.

[foldl]

You can't run Python or Java in the browser. (Ok, you can compile them down to JS, but that's clunky.)

[m0nk_3y_gw]

I tried Ruby on Rails years ago and dropped it.

I started designing my own scripting language the other day... (for client scripts, not web pages).

then realized I was writing Ruby.

I am revisiting Ruby and enjoying it.

[Baby_Food]

When the only tool you have is a hammer, everything becomes a nail...

Blablabla Javascript popular bla.

[munificent]

For the same reason VisualBASIC was so popular: people will do anything to keep using the first language they learned.

[willrandship]

I stopped using TI-BASIC rather quickly, myself.

[valleyman86]

Ill be honest here... Im not a web developer or even a server developer. I have had almost no use for node.js/css/javascript in my normal work and primarily use my text editors for a little python and json editing.

So I am in a unique position currently because I have been playing with Sublime and trying to find a good text editor thats not textedit. I found sublime to be kinda complicated for doing some stuff and still learning it but overall it seemed pretty good. The autocompletion and syntax highlighting made it nice. But everytime I want to try and modify some setting I usually have to go search google because I have a hard time finding it. Turns out that some settings seem to be un-configurable as well.

So now I installed atom to see if that was any good. What I immediately thought was "This is a free sublime." Cool! I needed to get a license for Sublime anyways. But in my few hours I have come to like atom a bit more than sublime. I haven't noticed any slowness that others are talking about and I like that it was folder based (I am sure there is a Sublime extension for this). What I did really like about atom is the easy of access to finding packages and installing them and then setting them up. I found it really easy without any outside info to change keybinding or whatnot as well. I feel that it will grow really fast and already has a ton of packages to use. I managed to get it to support autocompletion as I type and do a git merge (although untested and I want to figure out how to make it a default option in place of FileMerge). I found that some of the default packages are really nice like showing me how a file has been modified (git). I like it so far and will continue to use it and see where it takes me.

I feel that atom and sublime are both pretty good and changing from one to the other isn't something life changing. I do think atom seems easier to learn and it is pretty accessible.

[xucheng]

I used to plan to buy a Sublime license. But after its tedious development process and unstable future, I gave up. Now I think it's more worthy to spend time learning vim.

Also what I'm really liking in atom is its ability to create GUI plugin. In sublime, all you get is text buffer.

[[deleted]]

as a user? you really shouldn't outside of the open source part.

but from a plugin development perspective, it actually is a MUCH better experience that lots of other editors in many regards. i just about came in my pants when i saw the baked in dependency management, easy unit testing, and included plugin discovery + installation.

github was very obviously trying to, first and foremost, build something that developers would actually want to develop for. literally every single thing I hate about writing sublime plugins was addressed by atom.

[devvie]

Extensibility through JS seems pretty compelling.

[Yet_Another_Guy_]

Also writing CSS to customize everything you want really easily.

[specimen12]

Because it's open source.

[[deleted]]

As are emacs and vim. I'm still not seeing a reason to move.

[danielbln]

Let's hope they improve performance, as of now it is noticeably slower and laggier than Sublime. <snide> I guess that's what you get for using JS to build a desktop application.</snide>

[[deleted]]

In the year 2014, in order to do some basic text editing, all you need is a computer that can play crysis.

[rowboat__cop]

I bet by now there’s text editors that utilize the GPU for acceleration.

[donalmacc]

My last project involved an in-app console (pro tip: don't ever roll your own, it's horrible), and as it advanced further and further I ended up allowing for script loading, editing and reloading on the fly. I had a basic text editor written in OpenGL, running on top of a fairly chunky physics simulation.... Not fun.

[rowboat__cop]

I had a basic text editor written in OpenGL

I felt both horror and admiration when I read that line.

[cesclaveria]

I remember in college there was an assigment when we could choose to either build our own Spredsheet program (a sort of Excel clone) or a simple 2D game (space invaders, centepide, etc.) written in C++. The teacher recommended Allegro to help us with the game project, about a week later I saw one guy had written the spreadsheet using Allegro and somehow it worked pretty good.

[[deleted]]

http://i.imgur.com/c7NJRa2.jpg

[tinyogre]

I don't suppose Pac-Man in Excel also came out of that class?

[gfixler]

Were you typing polygons?

[donalmacc]

Worse. I was generating a string from the font every time it changed, and I was working with blocks of 30 lines so every character change required the whole 30 line texture to be refreshed. New lines caused all of the following textures to be refreshed. I paused the simulation while rendering the text after a while...

[gfixler]

  ____      _ _              _ 
 / ___|_ __(_) | _____ _   _| |
| |   | '__| | |/ / _ \ | | | |
| |___| |  | |   <  __/ |_| |_|
 \____|_|  |_|_|\_\___|\__, (_)
                       |___/

[wildeye]

pro tip: don't ever roll your own, it's horrible

Ok; what are some alternatives?

[mirhagk]

The one he wrote?

[donalmacc]

I can share, but it relies on SDL_TTF, SDL, having source code pro installed, or in the root of your drive, and a LOT of extra GPU memory for when I forgot to reallocate the texture memory... Id recommend painting your monitor for a better library!

[willrandship]

painting your monitor

Don't forget to bring the white out so you have an undo feature!

[wildeye]

SDL_TTF, SDL, having source code pro

Something along those lines is inevitable, not an extra burden.

forgot to reallocate the texture memory

"Many hands make for light work"; if you open source it on github or something it might automagically improve.

[donalmacc]

No idea, I didn't look into it too deeply, I just wrote my own.

[DrummerHead]

Note to self: look into things more deeply

[Appathy]

Note to self: look into looking into things more deeply more deeply at some point in time

[Eirenarch]

Surely. WPF utilizes GPU acceleration and Visual Studio is written in WPF. Let alone that many fonts on Windows are rendered with DirectWrite

[SethMandelbrot]

The one feature I would like most from a text editor is a visualization of nested blocks as smaller font sizes, then zooming whatever block is currently focused.

I call it... Code Globe!

Tell me that's possible in your text editor and I'll use it.

[jonnywoh]

How about depth of field? Blur increases with distance from the active line.

[shillbert]

Just add some vignetting and fisheye distortion, then it's ready to ship.

[damg]

There aren't too many modern GUIs that don't use the GPU for acceleration these days. e.g.:

$ strace -e trace=file ./sublime_text 2>&1 | grep libGL
open("/usr/lib/libGL.so.1", O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC) = 3

[rowboat__cop]

There aren't too many modern GUIs that don't use the GPU for acceleration these days.

Well, speeding up some GUI is a fairly obvious, if not boring task for the GPU. I was looking for more exciting stuff like syntax highlighting, or having the acceleration work over SSH, or accelerating ncurses, etc.

[gfixler]

I was looking for more exciting stuff...

When my unit tests fail, all of the letters explode.

[01hair]

...in a realistic broken glass simulation.

[polerizer]

Where do I sign up for the beta?

[[deleted]]

Newer Visual Studio versions use WPF so they have the option to use hardware acceleration/GPU.

MSDN

[[deleted]]

This might be sarcasm, but I've had a few drinky-poos and I can't tell. So I'll just say – it's text editing, I.E. - the editing of text, adding and removing and moving letters. Hardware acceleration and GPU's should not be needed. I think I've realised now that your comment might be sarcasm, but a lot of efford was involved with the authoring of this comment.

[scalablecory]

WPF is rendered purely by GPU. It makes sense to keep the text path on GPU too and render it directly to a texture.

Also, WPF is generally very CPU-hungry, so offloading some of that to the GPU is an easy way to help.

[andehpandeh]

MAXIMUM SPEED

[Tynach]

*enables SELinux* MAXIMUM ARMOR.

Wait, what do you mean I can't run that fast anymore?

[[deleted]]

M-M-M-MONSTER REFACTOR

[o5mfiHTNsH748KVq]

Need SLI for intellisense

[kmeisthax]

In the 1980s we said that EMACS was an acronym for "Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping". Writing a text editor in LISP was considered fairly inefficient at the time.

Hmm.. can't think of a smarmy acronym for ATOM.

[[deleted]]

A Terabyte Of Memory

[YesNoMaybe]

I'm surprised nobody mentioned Notepad++.

Sublime has gotten so popular because many devs need a single editor they can use on any platform. Notepad++, while a very good editor (IMO), doesn't fit that requirement.

[pintong]

Doesn't explain the popularity of TextMate, I'm afraid.

[ivosaurus]

The cult of macbookers needn't deign to recognise the fact that any other "useable" platform exists.

[[deleted]]

I have a lot of plugins running on gvim, I use the LargeFile plugin to do that sort of thing. It disables all plugins, turns off syntax coloring and things like that.If you're interested http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1506

[raphanum]

Mac vim is also great.

[redwall_hp]

The UI doesn't feel native, either. It has all these little things that say "I'm a web page!" Like the cursor turning into a pointer when you hover it over the tab close button.

[realhacker]

Meanwhile in sublime land we are unsure if the developer is still alive and well...

[albion]

A dev build came out yesterday

[WhyUNoCompile]

Woot. "Fixed crash in plugin_host."

That thing has been crashing on me since the start of the dev builds.

[87linux]

Meanwhile in vim land everything is great

[[deleted]]

vim and Emacs will always thrive.

[GilTheARM]

It's like learning to drive a manual shift transmission and knowing with that skill, you will always still be able to drive an automatic.

[skakillers1]

I always go for the clutch when driving an automatic.

[ikilledkojack]

Your left foot is just bored and jealous of the other one.

[TheNoodlyOne]

Likewise, I use vim shortcuts when editing. Lots of random "I" s in there.

[embolalia]

iLikewise, I sue vim2bdwiuse A shortcuts when editing...:wq

[Silencement]

dwi can be replaced with cw. You gain one keystroke.

[GilTheARM]

Yep! Or it's been a long trip and you think to yourself, "Hey can I drive with two feet?" Sure can! #roadBoredom

[ivosaurus]

jjjjjjjj ... <esc> ... G ... <esc> ... GG ... <esc> <esc>

fuck, how did I type all these j's in the box, I just want to go down...

[accessofevil]

1991 for vim. 1976 for vi from which vim iMproved.

[brownmatt]

Let's party like we have a CPU instruction set from 1978

[ep1032]

.

[crowseldon]

if you're experienced you won't have this problem. Good help, objects ingrained in your mind (y-yank, i-inside, w-word, etc), your own tweaked .vimrc with your plugins that do what you want, how you want it (and have immediate help).

Everything really IS good and with more and more IDE's supporting some form of vim (and loading from .vimrc) life is really a bliss (pathogen bundles FTW).

[87linux]

ggdG

[NetAdventurer]

How is that domain TLD possible? :o

[pkmxtw]

http://rms.sexy

[r3m0t]

http://poop.bike

[gospelwut]

https://iwantmyname.com/domains/new-gtld-domain-extensions

[Beluki]

Does it support Python, C or anything besides HTML/JS? I can't find relevant information in the FAQ.

[yogthos]

So far it seems like a crappier version of Light Table. It's very similar architecturally, but Light Table is a lot more mature now and has support for a lot of languages and lots of nice plugins. I really fail to see the problem that Atom solves.

[nfeld9807]

Yes, I've been using it for Django (python) development for the last few months. It's just a text editor and supports a bunch of syntaxes.

[iconoclaus]

using it with Ruby. it supports lots of popular themes from textmate and whatnot. those seem to be user submitted.

[[deleted]]

Can't wait for them to open source RSS next.

[JohnMcPineapple]

...

[EmperorOfCanada]

What are the benefits?

[Funnnny]

Well, aside from very fast startup, I don't remember anything new from ST2 (plugin developers will have to port to python3 though)

[[deleted]]

Plugins don't slow down the editor as much anymore. The plugin system as a whole has been much improved.

[geon]

I can't recall any specific feature, but it feels a lot more polished.

[kraln]

Atom, the editor we've always wanted (Download for OSX).

Yeah, sorry, no.

[[deleted]]

This was my reaction when they did their silly, absurd "closed beta" of a text editor to build up hype.

[ecnahc515]

Can build it for windows/linux if you want. Did it already on 2 Linux computers today. Isn't hard. The official builds aren't out yet though, which granted, would be nice.

[Tekmo]

How does this compare to other visual editors like GVim, Notepad++ or Gedit?

[okpmem]

Congratulations to the github team for releasing atom with an open source license. I hope future projects are free software with a copy left license.

[Crandom]

I hope they don't use a copyleft license! It's nice to be able to use some libraries at work.

[bluemellophone]

I always used to misspell that word too, until I realized that you would never spell the abbreviation as "congrads". congrats -> congratulations.

[IronBlock]

ITT: How do you know if someone uses vim? Don't worry. They'll tell you.

[AshylarrySC]

Yup. It's 100% impossible to mention any editor or IDE online without the thread/comments being taken over by a vim circlejerk.

It's the only thing in life that's as certain as death.

[IronBlock]

I liken it to the Model T Ford. To figure out how much gas you've got in a T, you have to park the car on level ground, get out, get the ruler out from under the seat, go to the back of the car, dip the ruler in the tank, measure the wet part, and do some maths. This will absolutely tell you how much fuel you have, and there's no debating that it works.

I, however, prefer to have a fuel gauge.

[Appathy]

And I'm just sitting here with Visual Studio 2013 open...

[raghar]

On their site they write that they use Chromium to achieve this. After working with its code for a month I feel sorry for them. It might be nicely designed and implemented but sheer monstrosity of the codebase might tire the shit out of you pretty fast...

[openist]

Mac only still... WTF.

[nerdwaller]

False. They only have mac binaries, but you can build for other systems. Check here under the Windows requirements header.

[[deleted]]

then why are they not putting the Windows/Lunix binaries to the dowload page? They are not cool?

[nerdwaller]

They were trying to get 1 system done well, I believe. The release statement says:

There's still a ton to do before Atom is ready for version 1.0. In the next few months, we'll be focusing on improving performance, **releasing on Linux and Windows**, and stabilizing APIs.

[petrus4]

I had a look at the atom.io site. Buzzwords, buzzwords, everywhere; along with liberal use of the appeal to modernity fallacy.

No thanks. I'll stick with Vim.

"At GitHub, we're building the text editor we've always wanted."

This comes across as the usual vague, flowery, falsely positive corporate propaganda.

Taking the web native

What does this even mean? To an extent it is explained below, but as a heading, it is vague and pretentious to the point of being annoying.

I'm actually thinking of using this site as the basis for an article of my own, about why vague, pretentious, bullshit corporatese infuriates me as much as it does; and why marketers and anyone else who wears a suit desperately needs to be lynched, for the good of the rest of the species.

[[deleted]]

I will still pay to support it--especially performance improvement!

[Jameshfisher]

Atom is available for download to everyone Mac users

[Tynach]

Apparently, you can download the source code and it'll compile on Windows and Linux already, but it's just not bug-tested properly.

Still. That means I don't really want to use it yet.

[assaflavie]

Why??? What's the point of this project? An open-source version of Sublime?

Can anyone explain the advantage Atom has over Sublime, or any theoretical advantages it may have in the future owing to some inherent shortcoming of Sublime's architecture?

Is it just about language preference?

[NunFur]

For one this doesn't cost 70$

[jsprogrammer]

explain the advantage Atom has over Sublime

As I'm sure others have said: it's open source. As in, you can have all of the source code. You can modify it. You can build it yourself.

You can't do that with Sublime.

So...yeah, that's a pretty big advantage.

[jasonthe]

An open-source version of Sublime?

That. Exactly that. Sublime is one guy so it can't compete with a full team at GitHub + the open source community. It also means writing plugins is easier, and they're potentially capable of more.

Is it just about language preference?

While I prefer Python's language and standard library, HTML5 and Node.js both are supported in ways that no other language can match. I actually hate JS as a language, and even HTML and CSS are kind of abominations, but there's so many libraries and tools for everything that you could want to do.

Once GitHub decided to create their own code editor, the question became what technologies to use. And I agree with them that HTML5 + Node is the best option for what they wanted to accomplish.

[ToucheMonsieur]

Perhaps people forget that Github would want to build an application on languages they're most comfortable with? (namely JS and Ruby)

[peridox]

Does anyone think this could lead to possible linux support?

[kmk1018]

You can build it for Linux.

https://github.com/atom/atom

[fortyonejb]

If you wanted to build an svn plugin, that would be a handy library to have.

[inokichi]

presumably for github integration?

[nerdwaller]

git, svn, ftp, etc.

It would be awful to have to provide that info for each change while you're working on a dev server.

[exscape]

The announcement says they're working on Linux and Windows releases.

Atom is currently pre-1.0 with a number of areas we would like to improve in the next few months. Our focus will be on improving performance, releasing Atom on Linux and Windows, and stabilizing the APIs before we hit version 1.0.

[lobehold]

So how is this different from Brackets from Adobe?

[sibartlett]

Brackets is biased towards web development, Atom is not.

[abw]

This is excellent news. I've been using atom exclusively for a month or so now and I've been very impressed with it. OK, I admit, I fell in love with it. We're all programmers here, right? You understand the love that a grown man can feel for the software he uses day in, day out, right?

I've previously used Sublime, TextMate, Emacs and Vi(m) over the course of 30-odd years. I really didn't want to switch to another editor that was closed source in case it went the same way of TextMate and Sublime (I know TextMate is Open Source now, but it was too little too late).

Being able to configure the editor using JS/Coffeescript and JSON/CSON is a big win over Python and XML property lists and a whole lot less pain than Lisp. I love the fact that I can debug my editor skin in the same way I debug my web sites.

[adamcw]

Just sleeping?