Floobits for Atom – collaborative editing | Hacker News Reader

Floobits for Atom – collaborative editing

floobits.com

38 pointskansface4 comments

I'm sorry, the cofounder's testimonial cracked me up:

“Floobits works pretty well most of the time.”

In all seriousness, this looks like a pretty cool Atom plugin. I've been using Atom as my editor of choice for a while now. It has always been quite good for languages like Python, that don't require a lot of IDE. Specifically, if all you want is syntax highlighting, linting, and execution, then Atom is already a great editor.

What I'm most excited about in the future is the evolution of the plugin ecosystem. For example, when I first started using Atom I was convinced that I could never write Java in it. I didn't think it had enough oomph for the features that I have come to expect out of Eclipse and its ilk. But now I'm not so sure. The Atom plugin system seems pretty awesome, and projects like Go-Plus, which made Go development in Atom amazing, have convinced me of the potential of the ecosystem. Way to go Floobits for contributing another great way to use Atom! (Although I'm still looking for that great Java plugin :D)

(Full disclosure: I'm the other founder of Floobits.)

I'm pretty excited about what can be built with Atom. Since it's based on Chromium, you've got access to WebRTC for P2P stuff, getUserMedia() for camera/mic, HTML5 audio APIs, canvas for visualizations... there are so many building blocks that aren't available in any other editor.

Granted, Atom's browser roots do slow it down. But it's getting better. Even on my 1.1GHz MacBook, the only significant performance issue I have is startup time. If that's fixed, I'll probably switch over completely from Sublime Text.

I've been diggin on VS Code myself.. which is a bit surprising, it uses the electron base too, but imho the UI is slightly better in a lot of ways, haven't tried Atom in a while though. Hoping to see a floobits extension for VS Code, but I think MS is still working on the plugin model for it. :-(

I'm glad you guys have created Floobits, it's something I've wanted in something more like an IDE since first seeing something similar in an ANSI editor called PabloDraw. It allowed you to run in a "host" mode where other users could connect to you... Seeing something like this as an extension for multiple editors is pretty great.

It occurs to me that perhaps I should have linked to the source, https://github.com/Floobits/floobits-atom, or perhaps our docs instead: https://floobits.com/help/plugins/atom.

The easiest way to try it out is to install it via the package manager.

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