Anonymous Coward writes "GitHub's Atom, a new text editor blending C++ and web technologies, is now being released as a limited beta. The new editor, which claims to have partial TextMate support, is extensible with the help of a centralized add-on manger (the same way Eclipse does) and is heavily integrated with the github platform. The final licence is not known at the moment, but the project already makes use of over 80 open source software packages.
Access to the beta is currently "invite only"."
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GitHub's Atom: Yet Another Text Editor.
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(Score: 5, Funny) by Buck Feta on Friday February 28 2014, @11:28AM
Beta su...
Never mind.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Landon on Friday February 28 2014, @11:30AM
I'm looking forward to giving it a whirl. I do wish someone would capture the embedded vim unicorn though.... frankly gvim is useless, so I spend half my time on the terminal in vim and half the time in richer GUI editors (sublime text, pycharm's editor) with a vim emulation that fits right in the uncanny valley.
(Score: 2, Informative) by theHazardMan on Friday February 28 2014, @04:30PM
I'm in the same boat. Sublime Text offers the "VIntage Mode", which at least lets me use most of the basic vim keybindings, but I feel like switching back and forth between vim and sublime is holding me back from mastering either. On Linux I tend to prefer having many terminals open through Xmonad, so vim is the natural fit in this environment, yet I still spend a decent amount of time in Windows, so I need sublime to give me a somewhat sane environment for that.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Debvgger on Friday February 28 2014, @11:33AM
Wow, a Beta I'm willing to try.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Debvgger on Friday February 28 2014, @11:37AM
Seriously, I already requested a change to try it out. Text editors have been a source of frustration for me for ages.
I'm lately trying luck with Codelite, developers seem very friendly and I'm already using it for at least a couple of hours daily. It does have some rough edges but I generally like it because it is so much more configurable than Visual Studio.
Now, a text editor DESIGNED TO BE HACKABLE? You have a deal with me, at least for trying it :-) It may be slow, but what the heck. Modern IDEs are already ALL DAMN BETA SLOW (Visual Studio I'm specially looking at you).
Oh, and Buck Feta.
(Score: 4, Informative) by hatta on Friday February 28 2014, @02:41PM
Text editors have been a source of frustration for me for ages.
Why? I can't imagine what one would want out of a text editor that either vim or emacs hasn't been doing for years.
(Score: 1) by Debvgger on Saturday March 01 2014, @06:45AM
To be honest, I have already tried them many times, but I have a job, a wife, am currently attending university and on top of that I have many personal projects. I'm honest with you when I say I would LOVE to master both, but I just don't have enough time. It would be cool to have something like an emacs or vim "lite" with 10% of their full counterpart power but with 90% less learning curve slope.
That said, I'll try again in a few months. That's my fate :-)
(Score: 1) by BradleyAndersen on Friday February 28 2014, @11:53AM
?nobeta=1
(Score: 5, Informative) by Sir Garlon on Friday February 28 2014, @11:33AM
When I hear "Web technology" I think of HTTP messages going back and forth. That is not, apparently, what the developers mean. From TFA:
I don't know WTF they mean by "adding major features with HTML" and I am not sure whether to be intrigued or appalled. ;-) If I had to guess, Javascript is the real way to add features and (I hope) HTML only gets involved through the <script> tag.
I was going to say something snarky to the effect "those who don't understand Emacs [gnu.org] are doomed to repeat it" but then I read all the way down TFA:
So no, this is not a new Emacs. ;-) (ducks)
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight who is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Wodan on Friday February 28 2014, @11:45AM
That makes me wonder if they use some hmtl widget for their interface, that could make it interesting for things like using the same html/javascript on websites, assuming they improved the editing a lot over say soylentnews' text entry box.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Angry Jesus on Friday February 28 2014, @01:44PM
I don't know WTF they mean by "adding major features with HTML"
That would be prominent use of the <blink> tag.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by theluggage on Friday February 28 2014, @02:14PM
Sounds like HTML is the rendering engine, Javascript provides the logic.
What you have here is a "web app" written in HTML5 + Javascript, but running from local storage instead of via http.
That would actually be quite a handy way of writing platform-independent applications (esp. if you maybe wanted to offer a choice between a cloud-based app and a local app) except that browsers are completely paranoid about local resource access and cross-site scripting, so you quickly hit all sorts of obstacles. (the paranoia is mostly justified - although it would be nice if the anti-xss rules consistently recognised 'file://somepath/' as a 'domain' so you could at least script between resources loaded from the same directory).
So, I think what they've done is shipped it with a version of Chromium that gives scripts full access to local resource (but is presumably appropriately paranoid about accessing the web).
(Score: 2) by Sir Garlon on Friday February 28 2014, @02:58PM
Wouldn't it also be a handy attack vector?
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight who is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
(Score: 1) by Geotti on Friday February 28 2014, @05:38PM
Yeah, they actually meant to say that their editor is "web scale" but they forgot their buzzword bingo cards at home and had to go with whatever the intern suggested.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by webcommando on Friday February 28 2014, @11:44AM
I love that the text editor "scene" continues to grow with new ideas.
I do find that even now, years later, I still miss an editor called "Brief" for DOS. It was one of the programs that felt absolutely natural for me to use. Key layout and commands just made sense and it had copy features (like being able to copy columns and not just text) that worked well when I was doing machine vision coding in C.
I'm sure there are many other editors that would have this same feel but as development and UI design environments become more and more integrated (like XCode), I've resolved to just deal with how the IDE developers think things should work.
(Score: 1) by ikanreed on Friday February 28 2014, @12:57PM
Yeah, and the first video game of every genre you ever played was the best of that genre too.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Katastic on Friday February 28 2014, @02:55PM
Let me guess, you liked the new Star Wars movies better than the originals.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 28 2014, @12:01PM
Even though it is 2014, we don't have any good text editor. By good I mean opensource, slim, fast, extensible, powerful and with good plugins for various programming languages. Emacs is bloated, Sublime is not really opensource, Vim is old and vimscript is slow (there is a project [github.com] to improve it though. Any new text editor which is going to be "good" is greatly appreciated, looking forward to see more news about it.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bart9h on Friday February 28 2014, @12:15PM
"Vim is old"? Then what? Editing text is old. What kind of argument is that?
Vim is way beyond a good editor. I won't even consider a different editor that don't offer the same features that makes it so great. (No, I won't bother to list them here.)
But I'm looking forward to neovim too, even pledged to the project.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 28 2014, @01:26PM
I was talking about Vim's source code. It is old, complex c98. It is difficult to add features to it and maintain.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 28 2014, @02:14PM
> I was talking about Vim's source code. It is old, complex c98.
C98? What is that? "More-than-C90-but-not-quite-C99"?
(Score: 1) by CoolHand on Friday February 28 2014, @02:44PM
Wow, I hadn't heard of Neovim... that's awesome... I think I'll pledge when the next payday comes around... :)
I've been wanting a kde version of vim for a long time... it sounds like it will be easy for someone to make that happen after this :)
Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job-Douglas Adams
(Score: 3, Interesting) by ztoth on Friday February 28 2014, @01:03PM
Hmm, a happy emacs user here, I think emacs (and I hear vim, too), comes very close to these requirements. It has a steep learning curve for sure, but it's only as bloated as you want it to be. I just checked that a "pure", unconfigured emacs starts up and comes to a usable state in a fraction of a second on my 4 year old machine, and it already comes with many goodies preloaded, including support for many programming languages. My fully-loaded emacs takes about 5 seconds when I start it for the first time (i.e. after a fresh boot), and 2.5 seconds after that. Once it's up and running, it's fast. I'd say it's not so bad, and actually if you use the client-server model, even the startup is lightning fast: you start an instance once in the background, which loads every plugin and extension you want, then the rest of your instances will simply connect to it and start up in zero time.
With extensions like hideshow, smart-tab, yasnippet, and integrated cscope interface, version-control support, integrated man pages, compilation, GDB and shell, it becomes an extremely powerful editor and IDE. On top of that, org-mode is great for note taking, and I even use emacs to connect to irc.dev.soylentnews.org. There are countless other things people use emacs for (e.g. email, browsing, playing games, instant messaging...)
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 28 2014, @01:33PM
Csope/ctags are very old and outdated tools. These tools can't handle c++, not mentioning c++11. There is clang-complete for vim (horribly slow) or youcompleteme (requires rebuilding vim) but these tools lack refactoring and other features.
(Score: 1) by tibman on Friday February 28 2014, @04:22PM
Kate works pretty well. Not sure how many dependencies you'd need to install for just the text editor though. I'd hate to think you needed full blown KDE just for Kate.
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 4, Informative) by waximius on Friday February 28 2014, @12:16PM
Been using notepad++ for years, hasn't failed me yet. Used it for embedded programming, web apps, Javascript/PHP/CSS, XML (there's even a beautifier plugin, but the editor is great right out of the box). And it's freee
(Score: 2, Informative) by similar_name on Friday February 28 2014, @12:43PM
Where can I vote for ACs to be Anonymous Cows? It should always be plural
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 28 2014, @12:53PM
Notepad++ is my favorite text editor. The only limitation I'm aware of is that it's windows only.
(Score: 1) by dgoodmaniii on Friday February 28 2014, @03:51PM
That's an insurmountably huge limitation.
(Score: 1) by Dutchster on Friday February 28 2014, @01:38PM
+1 to this. I've found Notepad++ to be everything I need and a whole lot more. My only complaint has been the automatic indentation while editing certain programming files. For examine it would convert spaces to tabs and vice versa, so when I go to indent to a new level I'd have to respace each line, replacing autogenerated tabs on some but not others.
No big deal once I figured out how to adjust those options.
(Score: 1) by dak664 on Friday February 28 2014, @02:03PM
++
My biggest peeve is the dialog box and automatic tab switch when updated or missing files are detected.
A reload/keep/delete dialog upon switching to such a tab would be acceptable but in the meantime I care not for the properties of invisible text.
(Score: 1) by Crash on Friday February 28 2014, @02:05PM
I guess you've been lucky then? Notepad++ is the only text editor I've used in 30 years that crashed *repeatedly*. Bug reports and feature requests - that I made - got responses from the dev: "sounds great why don't you do it."
But at least it's free.
These days, EmEditor (paid and registered, lifetime license), *CodeLobster (licensed plugin bundle), Notepad and Notepad2.
*CL has been unstable at times, but few full out crashes.
My only real annoyance with EmEditor is the dev is Japanese and sometimes the phrasing (or location) of a command or menu-item can be hard to find.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by istartedi on Friday February 28 2014, @12:57PM
I've posted this on "that other site" several times; but not here yet. I started saying this in the 90s when Sun was pushing "The network is the computer". Remember that? I'd roll my eyes and say: "I can't use my word processor, the network is down".
In other words, the effort to tether things to the network when they don't really need to be there continues. Followed by, every business wants recurring revenue. Every customer should be mindful of that, but they aren't. Your job as a salesman is to obtain recurring revenue. Your job as a purchaser is to avoid becoming a source of recurring revenue.
Now of course there are some things that need to be on the network. Github provides a service that's inherently network oriented. Github integration into an IDE is nice as long as the IDE can run without phoning home all the time. That said... I wouldn't trust any provider of a network service to provide things that don't inherently require a connection without them getting their meat-hooks in.
Aside from that, they live in the Apple ecosystem and are only going to roll out there at first. That doesn't bode well for maintenance on other platforms going forward. No need for me to get started on that first thing in the morning...
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Lagg on Friday February 28 2014, @01:21PM
http://lagg.me [lagg.me]
9467 6082 8A35 2E1E 2D6B 76C4 5E9A ED56 076F 9E89
(Score: 2, Funny) by darkfeline on Friday February 28 2014, @01:36PM
Is there a new wave of editors coming? I just saw the fundraiser for Neovim (http://neovim.org/) as well. Personally, I am disheartened at the lack of vim-like editors. Most of the vi emulation I've seen in other editors are superficial at best. They seem to miss the key points of operator-object (command-motion) and repeatability (not a word) that makes vim a joy to work with.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 28 2014, @01:43PM
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
(Score: 2) by unitron on Friday February 28 2014, @02:22PM
Haven't they learned by now that the "B" word is irreparably tainted and one should now use "Alpha 2.0"?
something something Slashcott something something Beta something something
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Schafer2 on Friday February 28 2014, @02:26PM
So while Atom is going to be highly customizable and extensible, it does not sound forkable.
Personally, I'm just too dependent on familiarity with my main editor to go off and switch to a non-open replacement. It would need to have some key feature which I absolutely could not live without, that could not be replicated in an open editor.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by soylentsandor on Friday February 28 2014, @04:00PM
It would seem our AC submitter's email address has been exposed. Could this be a bug in the venerable slashcode or might it be user error?
This sig intentionally left blank
(Score: 2) by Popeidol on Saturday March 01 2014, @04:27AM
When you submit a story, you can optionally include an email/web address for users to contact you. It's pretty clear it might be published as part of the summary.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 01 2014, @06:58AM
Finally we found out who this AC guy is! Now should we award or punish him is the question...
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 01 2014, @07:17AM
I contributed that story and I think this might be an error on my part there. I wanted to post anonymously but filled in the mail field because I though this was required. I'll remember that it's not next time around.
That said, that was my first contribution and I'm happy it was published even if it's not much.
(Score: 1) by tobia on Friday February 28 2014, @07:55PM
I've been waiting for ages for an editor that would allow me to write a good elastic tabstops [nickgravgaard.com] plugin for it, while supporting proportional fonts, having powerful editing features (comparable to Vim or Sublime Text) and with an active community writing plugins. Oh and it needs to be damn fast.
Whether this HTML-based thing will be it, remains to be seen. I'm highly skeptical about the last point, given the premises.