New Text Editor from GitHub

by
in code on (#3EZ)
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.

So much complicated technology for so little (Score: 2, Interesting)

by zafiro17@pipedot.org on 2014-03-02 15:25 (#8P)

I'm not the target audience for this software, but I'm starting to realize I'm not the target audience for a lot of tech coming out lately. But when I think about the energy, resources, and tech that goes into making a text editor out of browser technology, it depresses me. What happened to the days when all you needed was a good C library and maybe something like ncurses?

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' :

An x64 processor is screaming along at billions of cycles per second to run the Xnu kernel, which is frantically working through all the POSIX-specified abstraction to create the Darwin system underlying OS X, which in turn is straining itself to run Firefox and its Gecko Renderer, which creates a Flash object which renders dozens of video frames every second ... because I wanted to see a cat jump into a box and fall over. I am a God."


PS - nice work Pipedot rendering block quote! This site is gorgeous.
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