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Comment by Sir_Cmpwn | Hacker News Reader

I use this Firefox add-on to edit text in gvim from time to time:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/its-all-text/...

But I don't see the advantage of editing text areas with atom, which presents an extremely similar text editing experience compared to the experience the text area already provided. On the other hand, moving to Vim to edit a particuarly long comment or what have you makes more sense because I get to use the crazy keybindings I've drilled into my fingers.

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Atom is a full featured text editor, like vim or emacs. The editing experience is therefore way superior to Firefox or Chrome textarea, and you can use all the shortcuts, plugins and goodies you are used to. For a short comment, a basic textarea is of course enough, but when you write something a little longer, I think it is a real gain of time to be able to edit in a real editor.

Atom has a very good vim-mode that implements vim key bindings. You can do similar things to get emacs or custom key-bindings

> Atom is a full featured text editor, like vim or emacs.

I have to take issue with your notion of "full featured". Atom is a fine editor with plenty of features but it's orders of magnitudes short of emacs.

I use and recommend It's All Text as well, but Atom is a programmer's editor, and if someone prefers Atom as their editor of choice, they'd find it a massive improvement over a browser textarea.

> atom, which presents an extremely similar text editing experience compared to the experience the text area already provided

Well, that's just rude. Atom is a customizable, programmable, featureful text editor. You can certainly believe that Vim is better, but you shouldn't think that on the spectrum from browser textarea to Vim, Atom is close the textarea side.

OP never said better though. I think the point was merely that vim is always a very different editing experience, where atom by default is not

I use It's All Text! with gvim, as well. It's a great tool when I have a lot of updates to do in large documents. That said, there is a vim mode for Atom, and this seemingly has the minor benefit of live updates to the textarea.

I suspect there are use cases where this makes sense, and, obviously, Atom is a more powerful editor than a browser textarea, though the key bindings may be similar.

I have vim-mode in Atom, so its just about exactly like editing in Vim.

If you are editing a gist or inserting a code snippet in a comment then editing in Atom would be nice because you get syntax highlighting, snippets, auto-complete.

I do the same as you, and I've never used atom. Maybe it has shortcuts or other similar configs that might be preferable to the standard text-box?

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