Live data from Hacker News

Atom

atom.io

261–270 of 662 posts

Re: Atom

#261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Emacs is GUI desktop software. Few people use it in a terminal. Also, people didn't born knowing Javascript. They learnt it. And one could argue that Lisp is just as easy to learn, if not easier.

Most emacs users I know alias emacs to emacs-nw, or install emacs-nox. Myself included (:

Yup. Terminals ahoy.

Re: Atom

#262
post #48
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Welp, makes that decision easy. Not making the most important tool in my toolbox one that I can't hack to my liking.

Agree. It's a tough decision for them -- I'm sure the "Hot New Text Editor" market has a decent chunk of money associated with it. But it's pretty hard to commit to a text editor that you can't open up and recompile. EDIT: Plus, if an editor is going to join the ranks of vim and emacs in history (something which neither Sublime nor TextMate are on track to do) it has to be open source. Anything else and it's just ano…

TextMate 2 is GPL. It just isn't multiplatform. Yet. I think there was some work to make it run on GNUStep, but I may be mistaken.

Re: Atom

#263

I am very excited about this, I love the Github team and this looks like a great tool. My only question is -- why should I switch to this from Sublime Text? Are there specific use cases it handles better out of the box, or is it more of a modular base that will be expected to grow and outfeature ST2/3's seasoned plugin economy? I am very happy with Sublime Text now, but I would be willing to switch if either it gaine…

In practice, the ST3 API is extremely limiting and poorly implemented. The docs are both lacking and dated (read incorrect). It is trivial to crash ST3 by making the incorrect sequence of correct API calls. It is also common to resort to polling the editor to make up for other deficiencies. The API also only allows for extremely limited UI choices forcing highly unintuitive interfaces on end users. The ST3 runtime al…

I've been using ST2 a lot recently and while I really like it, feature wise, I've had horrible issues with documentation. The big issue is that it doesn't seem to meaningfully exist, especially if you're looking to quickly start modifying things and creating new functionality. Maybe I missed the boat on it somewhere, but it's a nightmare to find anything out about it that isn't pretty simple. I've ended up doing a lot of digging through the keybindings, experimenting with random keywords, and reading other peoples code to get things to work. While that in and of itself is a learning experience (and there's something to be said about reading other code), it's hard to rftm when there's not really an m.

I guess it may be that my google-fu is just sucking lately, but the docs situation seems bad after a few weeks of using it. If I'm wrong and anyone has any suggestions, let me know and I'd really like to check them out.

Re: Atom

#265

I think, in the long run -3 to 5 years-, Jon Skinner -Sublime Text- will be leading, like now. I can clearly see his passion and investment in his product. People at GitHub are also great, well funded, but this is not their core product. Do they have a leader -I don't know if they have or not- who will be focusing only on this product and keep up with jskinner? I am sure Atom will be around for long years, as well as…

I hope that this spurs Jon on to continue working on Sublime Text and start to be more transparent with what development is ongoing etc. See the forums for recent outcries.

And fix the bus factor.

Re: Atom

#266

I was all ready to be skeptical and everything... but this could actually be amazing. I currently use Chocolat for code editing, which is beautifully elegant and I love it, but there are 25 little tiny things that I really wish I could fix. I file issues, but the developers rightly have their own priorities. It's closed-source, but even if it were open source, I'm not about to learn how to use XCode and Objective C a…

> and there's no compilation step or anything -- then it's almost a fundamental paradigm shift for what desktop software could be. > It already makes me dream of a word processor I could hack like that, or a music player. Just by opening up a text editor. It's an inspiring thought. Not to rain on your parade or anything, but you can already do this with Emacs, not to mention that Emacs is free, open source software.…

[deleted]

Re: Atom

#267
So, they want people to contribute writing plugins so they can turn-around and make money off the plugin ecosystem by selling atom?

Seems transparently under-handed to me.

Re: Atom

#268
A common thread or line of argument that I find when reading about new editors is their out-of-the-box ease of use compared to Emacs and Vim. For example, a quote from the Atom blog:

>Sublime and TextMate offer convenience but only limited extensibility. On the other end of the spectrum, Emacs and Vim offer extreme flexibility, but they aren't very approachable and can only be customized with special-purpose scripting languages.

It doesn't seem like they (and many others) are denying that Emacs and Vim are excellent editors. Why is ease of use such an important issue for text editors? Emacs isn't terribly difficult to use, but if my livelihood and the majority of my time is tied to what tools I use, then it's worth the investment of time. I don't think I've met an Emacs user who has put in the effort of learning Elisp and customizing Emacs to their liking ever deny the benefits of learning it in the first place. Yes, it's a pain in the ass initially. I quit Emacs twice before I became determined to stop whining and spend quality time learning about tooling.

There is no doubt that Emacs has a steep learning curve and perhaps that's because its developers have a higher expectation of its users. I would argue that these expectations are easily matched by the capabilities of a competent programmer.

Re: Atom

#270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Atom is free during the beta period. Where does it say it won't be free after the beta period?

Well, one can only assume, based on the wording they use here: https://github.com/atom/welcome/blob/master/lib/welcome.md > Atom is free during the beta period.

One can assume that, but that's not what it says. The statement that the editor is free during beta could mean "we haven't figured out whether to sell it after the beta, sell services around it, or develop integration with our other services and keep it free to enhance our overall value proposition."
Post reply on HN