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Comment by spankalee | Hacker News Reader

I love Atom, and use it every day. (Happy anniversary Atom!)

But I don't get one very big thing about Atom: why is it so intimately tied to Electron?

Coming from a company that has a huge web site dealing in source code, and that even has a source code editor embedded in it, I can't understand why they would preclude Atom from running in a browser. Github offering online-IDE functionality seems like a such a natural extension to their business.

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I think you must be confused... Atom is the reason Electron exists, they were created in-tandem like Rails and Basecamp.

Electron is kinda like a browser anyway, you can even open Chromium's dev tools like you would in Chrome.

They haven't precluded Atom from running in a browser, they literally built it in a browser and they just don't have it online.

I'm not confused, I know the lineage of Atom, Atom Shell and Electron. I also write apps that run in Electron and the browser with only minor differences.

As a product and a set of building blocks for an IDE, I still don't understand why they would be tied so closely to web-incompatible APIs.

I've tried to get parts of Atom running in a browser, and it's pretty damn hard. Many parts of Atom directly call node APIs and assume synchronous APIs where async would be the only option on the web.

You will almost certainly have better luck with running VS Code in the browser. The editor core was originally developed to be used for Visual Studio Online as its built-in web editor: https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/products/what-is-visual-s...

I had no idea VS Code was actually open-source (MIT)... been using it as my favorite editor for what seems like close to a year now.

Plugins wouldn't work because they require installing node modules during runtime. Accessing the file system wouldn't work. Any multiprocessor support wouldn't work. I guess I don't see the point in an online editor.

I'm building an electron app that's web compatible and you lose a lot making it work for both and it requires a lot of planning to make feasible.

Hmmm! When you enquired about the intimate link to Electron, I assumed that it was because you'd prefer a native interface (GTK+, ncurses, etc.), not because you wanted it in the browser.

I can confidently say that I hope that I never have to use a text editor inside my browser.

You must not use atom. That or you must really hate url bars and back buttons. Otherwise I don't understand this comment.

So a big part of IDE features rely on the Node-y native access that Electron gives (for example calling out to external programs). You _could_ have things like syntax highlihgting, but it would end up being pretty crippled in the browser.

> I can't understand why they would preclude Atom from running in a browser.

If memory serves me right, I believe it was conceived to be a standalone commercial product, with tight GitHub integration; but somewhere a long the line, it became a free open source project that it is today.

I still don't understand why so much effort is being put into an editor though. I'm guessing people are drawing a comparison with the web browser war, with who owns the editor, will own the developer mind share.

GitHub does get huge mindshare from Atom. For packages to be included in Atom's repos, they need to be at GitHub, lots of stuff in Atom assumes GitHub etc. etc.

The three applications I use every single day without fail are an editor, an email client and a web browser (I'm a developer/sysadmin). If you provide one of those, I'm going to see your brand all the time, even if I'm not directly aware of it. That's quite a powerful position to be in.

I've taken on a curiosity of getting Atom to work in ChromeOS (natively, not with crouton or other developer mode solutions). It's just a curiosity at this point, I make no promises. But I'd think if Atom could jump to another environment besides Electron, then getting it inside a browser wouldn't be much more work.

Downvotes because I'd like to use Atom in a browser? Stay classy HN.

edit: If you think Atom, or parts of it, running in a browser is a _bad_ idea, maybe say why rather than just click a little down arrow.

I'll point out that GitHub embeds Ace when editing files. Ace is pretty good for quick edits, but Atom's editor is better, as is the whole package of UI. From editing from Chromebooks, to tighter git and GitHub integrations, Atom on the web could do a lot of good. If I were GitHub, I'd look to take advantage of the awesome work done on Atom in the core business somehow.

This comment isn't going to help.

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