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Comment by josteink | Hacker News Reader

I find the momentum which Atom has gathered to be impressive. It seems to be building up an ecosystem at quite a rapid speed.

Myself, I prefer Emacs, because I like it's base philosophy (everything is a text-buffer, everything is hackable LISP) and the endless possibilities that provides in form of customization, extensions (and extension on extensions, and customization of those, etc etc).

I don't think Atom is quite there, or ever will be. It will be interesting to see if if has the staying power of Emacs, or if it will yet another TextMate, Sublime Text or whatever hip text-editor of the month there has been the last decade.

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On mobile so forgive my short reply. I just don't understand why you were getting down voted.

I too use Emacs, and another reply mentions that you have to learn Emacs (Elisp, etc) to program your thremes which is just plain incorrect. (See: https://github.com/mkaito/base16-emacs)

I'm a newish user of Emacs (around two years) having switched from sublime text. I can safely say I don't know much about elisp at all, but hope to some day.

I am never stuck in my ways, and always seek out tools that get the job done. Atom is actually quite impressive. Most of my co-workers use it on a daily basis (for JavaScript development).

... Man editing text in HN mobile blows in this tiny ass text box.

What keeps me in Emacs is it's philosophy as you said. There is a nice uniformity that the editor provides, and I can do practically anything. Atom has nearly stolen me from Emacs, but there are some issues in the past with some commands that have kept me from switching.

Let's see if this new version puts Emacs in my past.

Are you implying Sublime Text is somehow on its way "out"? Is there a reliable way to compare text editor usage beyond popularity from Google Trends?

While I do like Sublime Text, development really has stagnated and it doesn't help that the core is closed source.

The rate at which new plugins are developed (and maintained) for it maybe? Does it support xyz?

To me, editors are on their way "out" if they can't keep up with the new languages / etc. Sublime text isn't going anywhere quickly. It can do a lot of things. If it can't keep up with other text editors it will still be usable, but may not be best option for everything.

People value notepad/nano for quick editing.

What role will sublime text play once a "superior" text editor comes into play?

Absolutely. Their mistake was not making it open source sooner and the development is going very slow, too.

It was inevitable that once a good cross-platform open source editor is available many people would jump ship.

ST is a great editor, but Atom has already surpassed it in most categories, thanks to the community. You can't beat that with a small team working on a closed source editor.

It's actually just one guy behind Sublime. Probably the reason why it is sinking.

Developing software like ST alone is actually pretty amazing.

There hasn't been a new dev build of Sublime Text 3 in six months. It doesn't look very active, and being closed source definitely doesn't help.

Yes, many nice features are missing.

I mean, you have to code your themes, therefore you have to know much stuff about the editor. In many IDEs you can just load a them and get a config UI that lets you fine-tune it.

Depends what kind of things you need/want to make. I've modified few themes and it's pretty simple stuff after little experimentation.

You can style it using CSS. How much easier could it be?

I've heard that Atom doesn't really reuse CSS or (SASS/LESS sheet variables) in any meaningful way, meaning having consistent theming is hard, at least if you want to use extra modules and plugins.

He may be thinking about that?

> I mean, you have to code your themes

Are you talking about themes in Emacs? Because if so, that statement is definitely not correct.

You can code your themes (and sometimes I do!), but it's definitely not the standard or only way of doing it.

If you're talking about Atom... Thanks for the info :)

You don'd have to code your themes, there are always tools like ThemeCreator: https://github.com/mswift42/themecreator. (Works for Emacs and Atom)

Ummm.

Emacs has extensive preference setting functionality. There's lots of fine-grained configuration you can do, including themes, colors and fonts, without writing a line of elisp.

That said, elisp is fun to learn, no harder than JavaScript, and you can get pretty far customizing Emacs knowing just the basics.

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