New Text Editor from GitHub

in code on 2014-02-27 09:20 (#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.

9 comments

Mac only for now (Score: 3, Informative)

by mth@pipedot.org on 2014-02-27 12:03 (#7F)

The channel topic on the ##atom IRC channel (freenode) is "Mac beta; Linux/Windows in the future; http://atom.io".

Age (Score: 4, Interesting)

by wjwlsn@pipedot.org on 2014-02-27 14:57 (#7H)

I'm only 45 (eeeww, gross, that's like... so old), but seeing that makes me feel older for some reason. It looks to me like it's going too far in a lot of different directions. Overly complex, too many features, and probably capable of inducing near fatal cognitive overload within about 30 seconds. Maybe that's my ADD talking, or I've finally reached the old-man stage where all change is annoying.

I don't even have the energy to yell now, so I'll just sigh it... get off of my lawn... please?

Re: Age (Score: 2)

by umafuckitt@pipedot.org on 2014-02-28 01:34 (#7Q)

I feel a little like that about SublimeText2. It's very pleasant to use and everything, but it almost does *too* much.

Re: I'm not much younger than you... (Score: 5, Funny)

by jonh@pipedot.org on 2014-02-28 23:12 (#8F)

It's also neither Vim nor Emacs, so I too am struggling to see what this editor's differentiating feature is. Other than "runs in a browser, but sorta not". Also get off my lawn as well...

Notepad++ (Score: 3, Insightful)

by scott@pipedot.org on 2014-02-28 02:43 (#7R)

Why would I want to use this over Notepad++?

Re: Notepad++ (Score: 2)

by princevince@pipedot.org on 2014-02-28 11:44 (#84)

I imagine it will be a lot more streamlined out of the box. But I'm an avid NPP user myself, wonderful editor!

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.

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

by jonh@pipedot.org on 2014-03-03 16:53 (#94)

Well, if there's any truth to the rumours that Moore's Law is finally slowing down or stopping, then that seems to be a big opportunity for people like us. There's surely a lot of code out there which can be sped up in fairly trival ways, and if you have a track record for making other people's code run faster, then you should be pretty busy, once the option to 'throw new hardware at it' goes away...
On a somewhat tangential note, here's a C++ to Javascript compiler , which may either amaze or appall you (I'm not sure whether to be amazed or appalled myself, but it can run Qt demo apps in the browser ).
I've been away from the site for about 2-3 days, and when I come back we have comment moderation! Does bryan actually ever sleep? :D

Fuck Beta! (Score: 1)

by fuckbeta@pipedot.org on 2014-03-11 19:56 (#G1)

"Not too much to see yet, but you can visit the landing page to sign up for the beta."

Fuck Beta!