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Definitely not (the beta's been great!). We've been discussing this ad nauseam for years and years, with some good points on both sides. We were looking to make it a partially open, paid app when we launched the beta, but after continuing discussions internally the Atom team decided to go the fully open source route.



Yeah, no conspiracy here. Sometimes when people say they're going to have a beta to gather information and make an informed decision, they actually do it.


Who's actually using Atom as their main editor?

edit: Not meant as a hostile remark, seriously wondering how it's going for people who have stuck with atom. I tried it for 5 minutes, but didn't give it a real commitment.


I tried replacing Sublime Text with it, and got quite into it.

I however fell back to ST for a number of reasons.

Speed - ST is just quicker to get up and running. I found a (large) file or two that atom just could not deal with.

State - I can CMD-Q ST with no nags, then re-open to my previous state when I want. I generally have a number of useful scraps open at one time, so not having to save these is great, and not losing them when I close the editor is just brilliant.

Visuals - The open file code overview on the RHS is a must have for me.

Muscle memory - I just kept opening ST from the terminal, and had to go through the process of closing ST and opening atom. This could have been mitigated by re-aliasing slt, but that's a commitment.

I do wish ST would automatically include the directory of the file you are opening in the project like atom. Brilliant when you are just flicking through source. Open one file and then not have to leave the editor to go to the next one.

There was also something funny when I opened a squid cached js file - I could highlight and copy the text, but whatever was copied to the clipboard was not what I had highlighted. Think highlighting and copying in general is still a bit beta.

That said, I spent some time tinkering, and loved the open nature of the plugins. The bracket matcher plugin does both highlighting of brackets and auto closing. I hate auto closing. It took all of 15 minutes to work out the plugin architecture, disable the offending plugin and hack in the parts of it that I liked.

In my books that's a winner. I may even pick it back up if it is going to get real love from the community.


> Visuals - The open file code overview on the RHS is a must have for me.

Good news! There's a package for that: https://atom.io/packages/minimap


Thanks!

I imagine that eventually there's not going to be much difference feature wise between ST and atom.

This then leaves the key differentiators as price and support. Atom wins the first, and if the community grows with it then it'll soon win the second.

edit. Oh yes, the speed thing. ST wins that.


I've been using Atom as my main editor since the beta rolled out. I love it - it has the (very) occasional quirks and glitches which you have to forgive as it's in beta, but once you get used to navigating around, it's really fast and fun to use.


I'd like to try it but I don't own a Mac.

From the FAQ: "At the moment Atom only runs on OS X (10.8 or later). Windows and Linux releases are on the roadmap."


The atom repo https://github.com/atom/atom has installation instructions for Linux and Windows. Just installing it on Ubuntu to give it a try.


Recommended Ubuntu LTS 12.04 is too old, now that next LTS, 14.04 is already out.

Which version of Ubuntu did you use ? Howz the experience ?


I use 14.04 and ran into this issue https://github.com/atom/atom/issues/1946 like several others. Adding the following symlink fixed it:

sudo ln -s /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libudev.so.1 /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libudev.so.0

Now that it runs, it feels pretty responsive and you can customize a lot of stuff. I haven't used for coding yet, but will try it out for that in the next few days.


It wasn't too painful to get running on Windows. Main pain points where making sure I had the correct versions of all of the dependencies installed.


Been using it as my main editor for two months now. Only real complaint is that it slows down over the day and needs restarting.


Had a mode extreme version of that - if I kept it open the whole day I had to restart my laptop.


I primarily use RubyMine day-to-day, but Atom has become my text editor of choice. I just really enjoy having the ability to hack my editor using technology I'm already familiar with.


Not main, but I stopped using ST for it.


I won't even give it a chance over ST until I can resize panes, unfortunately. How that isn't a feature is beyond me.


there is a package for that: https://github.com/santip/resize-panes

apm install resize-panes


But how can putting this functionality into an extension package be considered a reasonable design choice? It isn't an editing "component" like e.g. Scintilla, it's meant to be a general purpose editor: offering a decent out-of-the-box user experience and providing a sensible foundation for extensions should be two of the top priorities.


> But how can putting this functionality into an extension package be considered a reasonable design choice?

Obviously you don't use emacs.


Because you can then separate out what re-sizing is. Maybe you write a plugin that lets you drag with a mouse to re-size, but maybe someone else never uses their mouse, and would prefer a re-size plugin which auto re-sizes everything according to a tiling layout similar to a tiling window manager.

Separating it out has a lot of advantages, especially by not putting in much opinion by default.


> But how can putting this functionality into an extension package be considered a reasonable design choice?

I like the design of Atom, because it allows me to freely compose an editor that does exactly what I want, and nothing more. While multiple panes is a requirement for bpicolo (and you?), I use multiple panes in Atom (my primary editor) and haven't felt the need to resize them. Am I the minority, or are the others? Or is it 50/50? Basically, we don't know until the editor has time to grow, and its community has a chance to dictate what features are required.


That should be pretty easy. As I recall right, Sublime is a really basic core (we're talking notepad.exe levels), and various core plugins actually make up the main functionality of the application.


I've been using for two months as my main editor.

It works, hasn't crashed.

Still keeping emacs around for org-mode.


@Jormundir me.. for a little while now that something messed my sublime installation and I did not bother checking what's wrong. most likely a simple config error but atom's been more than ok to be my daily driver.


I use it as my daily editor and have been pretty happy so far.


Would you mind sharing why you the team didn't want to go down the partially open, paid app route?




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