New Text Editor from GitHub
GitHub is stepping into the text editor arena with Atom. Although the editor acts as a web application, the project is using a specialized variant of Chromium to render itself as a native application. This allows Atom to access local resources, like a file system browser, where a normal web application would have security restrictions.
For this reason, we didn't build Atom as a traditional web application. Instead, Atom is a specialized variant of Chromium designed to be a text editor rather than a web browser. Every Atom window is essentially a locally-rendered web page.Not too much to see yet, but you can visit the landing page to sign up for the beta.
Yeah, I know, get offa my lawn.
But all these additional layers cause complexity and slowness and latency and so on. And the end result isn't much better than what we're doing at present.
I find the whole thing depressing, even if it's a technological feat. Reminds me of that XKCD cartoon called 'Abstraction' :
PS - nice work Pipedot rendering block quote! This site is gorgeous.