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posted by n1 on Wednesday May 07 2014, @06:46PM   Printer-friendly
from the code-wants-to-be-free dept.

GitHub announced today that the editor it has been working on is now open source.

Today, we're excited to announce that we are open-sourcing Atom under the MIT License. We see Atom as a perfect complement to GitHub's primary mission of building better software by working together. Atom is a long-term investment, and GitHub will continue to support its development with a dedicated team going forward. But we also know that we can't achieve our vision for Atom alone. As Emacs and Vim have demonstrated over the past three decades, if you want to build a thriving, long-lasting community around a text editor, it has to be open source.

I have been using the Atom beta as my primary editor for the past few weeks and have been very happy with it.

It is currently only available for the mac, but it is based on Chromium and Node, and "Windows and Linux releases are on the roadmap."

 
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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 07 2014, @06:53PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 07 2014, @06:53PM (#40628)

    Let me lead off with this https://xkcd.com/927/ [xkcd.com]

    Having not used this editor before. How is it better/worse/feature wise to the hundreds of other text editors I can get? Of which a non insignificant portion are open source. Is it worth a try? Does anyone have any exp with it?

    • (Score: 4, Funny) by bob_super on Wednesday May 07 2014, @07:07PM

      by bob_super (1357) on Wednesday May 07 2014, @07:07PM (#40635)

      It's better because it still only works on a Mac.
      What else could you ask for?

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by useless on Wednesday May 07 2014, @07:14PM

      by useless (426) on Wednesday May 07 2014, @07:14PM (#40638)

      Depends. Do you think having Google Analytics build into a text editor is a good or bad thing?

    • (Score: 2) by Tork on Wednesday May 07 2014, @07:28PM

      by Tork (3914) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday May 07 2014, @07:28PM (#40644)
      Small nitpick: Products and standards are not the thing, your XKCD cartoon is not relevant to your point.
      --
      🏳️‍🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️‍🌈
      • (Score: 2) by forsythe on Wednesday May 07 2014, @07:30PM

        by forsythe (831) on Wednesday May 07 2014, @07:30PM (#40645)

        There's no need to resort to XKCD. This exact scenario is a well-accepted koan.

        A UNIX wizard hears cries of torment from his apprentice's computer room where the apprentice is studying, and goes to investigate.

        He finds the apprentice in obvious distress, nearly on the verge of tears. "What's the problem?" he asks. "Why did you cry out?"

        "It's terrible using this system. I must use four editors each day to get my studies done, because not one of them does everything."

        The wizard nods sagely, and asks, "And what would you propose that will solve this obvious dilemma?"

        The student thinks carefully for several minutes, and his face then lights up in delight. Excitedly, he says, "Well, it's obvious. I will write the best editor ever. It will do everything that the existing four editors do, but do their jobs better, and faster. And because of my new editor, the world will be a better place."

        The wizard quickly raises his hand and smacks the apprentice on the side of his head. The wizard is old and frail, and the apprentice isn't physically hurt, but is shocked by what has happened. He turns his head to face the wizard. "What have I done wrong?" he asks.

        "Fool!" says the wizard. "Do you think I want to learn yet another editor?"

        Immediately, the apprentice is enlightened.

        This version copy-and-pasted from here [neugierig.org].

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 07 2014, @10:17PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 07 2014, @10:17PM (#40718)
      Well, it's by GitHub and it's a Mac OS X exclusive so obviously it's just inherently superior.

      /me adjusts hipster glass frames
  • (Score: 1) by RobotLove on Wednesday May 07 2014, @06:57PM

    by RobotLove (3304) on Wednesday May 07 2014, @06:57PM (#40632)

    In my job I alternate between coding Java class files and looking at 500,000 line log files. Hard to find something that does both well. No idea if Atom will do the first, but I'm pretty damn sure it won't do the second.

    Also, Sublime Text's fuzzy auto-complete reigns supreme.

    • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 07 2014, @07:25PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 07 2014, @07:25PM (#40642)

      Files larger then 2MB aren't allowed.

      BTW, this "text editor" is 67MB - so it must be *a lot* better than the others, right?

    • (Score: 2) by Sir Finkus on Wednesday May 07 2014, @08:52PM

      by Sir Finkus (192) on Wednesday May 07 2014, @08:52PM (#40678) Journal

      I've found it to be pretty slow opening even modestly sized files. I really like how you can cd to a folder and type "atom" and it will automatically load everything in that folder in the sidebar. The diff visualization is also pretty neat.

      That all said, sublime text still wins it for me. It's opened in less than a second for everything I've thrown at it, the fuzzy search is awesome, and I like the vim bindings. My only real complaint is that you need to edit text files to change stupid stuff like the font, but that's not really a big deal.

      Atom does have promise I think, it just isn't quite there yet.

    • (Score: 1) by kwerle on Wednesday May 07 2014, @09:01PM

      by kwerle (746) on Wednesday May 07 2014, @09:01PM (#40684) Homepage

      Atom is primarily a code editor. I would not expect it to perform well on large files.

      Frankly, I'd probably invest in looking for a good log parsing program if I spent that much time looking at logs...

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 07 2014, @07:31PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 07 2014, @07:31PM (#40646)

    What the hell was wrong with Geany?

    • (Score: 2) by forsythe on Wednesday May 07 2014, @07:46PM

      by forsythe (831) on Wednesday May 07 2014, @07:46PM (#40654)

      Geany's webpage isn't on a domain that ends in '.io'.

  • (Score: 1) by twistedcubic on Wednesday May 07 2014, @07:42PM

    by twistedcubic (929) on Wednesday May 07 2014, @07:42PM (#40652)

    I just downloaded this on a Macbook retina 13". I give the default color scheme an A+. The dark theme is perfect for someone like myself with eye strain/swelling. I wrote a quick "hello world" in C, checked the memory usage in the activity monitor ("top" for Macs), and saw the following.

    Atom Helper: 105MB

    Safari: 78 MB

    This is with six tabs open in Safari. This is high, but as long as this doesn't grow exponentially with usage, it should be OK. I'll grade this a C.
    Lastly, it doesn't work like Vim, so tat's an F. Final grade D-. :)

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 07 2014, @07:47PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 07 2014, @07:47PM (#40655)

      In what world do you ever see something like 78 meg used in Safari? You are aware that each tab is reported as "Safari Web Content"? I just loaded up Safari myself (15" Macbook Pro) and with six random pages loaded (news, forums), I've got 151.2 for Safari, then 21.1 in Safari Networking, then about 240 spread across six Safari Web Content processes.

      If you're going to criticise something at least make sure you don't look like a dribbling fanboy in the process.

      • (Score: 1) by twistedcubic on Wednesday May 07 2014, @08:09PM

        by twistedcubic (929) on Wednesday May 07 2014, @08:09PM (#40670)

        The point is that Atom uses a lot of memory. Dribbling fanboy for Safari??? Now that's an insult.

    • (Score: 2, Informative) by kwerle on Wednesday May 07 2014, @09:30PM

      by kwerle (746) on Wednesday May 07 2014, @09:30PM (#40697) Homepage

      You might want to check out the vim-mode package - which admits it has a long ways to go...

      https://atom.io/packages/vim-mode [atom.io]

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 07 2014, @07:59PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 07 2014, @07:59PM (#40666)

    lol

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 08 2014, @03:58AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 08 2014, @03:58AM (#40805)

    Direct link (If you want it).

    https://atom.io/download/mac [atom.io]

    And that's a compressed file! If it's all source code it's around 500MB uncompressed!!! o_O;;;

    Ages ago for laughs I coded an ultra bare-bones 'full screen' text editor in ms-dos assembly language...it was under 700 bytes! I was inspired to do it by PC Magazine's TED full-screen text editor which was 2900+ bytes long.

    Had to decapitalize some words to get it past the lameness filter.

    Please Soylentnews, don't bring in the CAPTCHAs unless you ABSOLUTELY have to!