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Comment by georgemcbay | Hacker News Reader

As far as I'm concerned GitHub is free to handle the licensing of their software however they like, but this opens up an interesting thought experiment:

We now have at least two companies making significant Chromium-based editors, one is Adobe and the other is GitHub.

One of them is developing the core of their editor technology using a fully open-source model (hosted on GitHub, naturally) under a well-understood and widely accepted license, the other isn't (or at least isn't currently planning to).

2 years ago, who among you would have guessed correctly that the one whose editor was open source would be Adobe's?

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Adobe's Bracket front-end editor is open-source, yes, but does it have any traction? I have yet to hear any front-end developer friends who even bother to use it in any capacity other than testing it occasionally. I tried it a few times and couldn't justify why I'd want to use it over Sublime Text.

Historically, it appears that closed source front-end editors like Textmate, Sublime Text and others find more success and usage in the market than open-source front-end editors.

"Historically, it appears that closed source front end editors like Textmate, Sublime Text and others find more success and usage in the market than open-source front end editors"

I wouldn't classify Sublime Text as a front-end editor. When I think of front-end editors, I think of Coda, Espresso, and Brackets. Sublime Text is better compared to Notepad++, Notepad 2, Gedit, SciTE, Emacs, and Vim, which are all open source software and extremely popular.

If you're going to market your text editor as hackable and as flexible as Vim and Emacs [1], it's not a stretch for the developers interested in your product to assume it's going to be or should be open source software.

[1] http://blog.atom.io/2014/02/26/introducing-atom.html

"Sublime Text is better compared to Notepad++, Notepad 2, Gedit, SciTE, Emacs, and Vim, which are all open source software and extremely popular."

Fair enough. I use ST2 like Coda/Espresso/Brackets for my own front-end development b/c of the app's agility and abundance of useful plugins for the front-end.

Keeping Atom partially closed source, again pointing to historical marketability, could give it more credence among developers of both ends. There's a reason closed source, proprietary editors are so massively popular vs. open source editors which often can't seem to get meaningful market share (whether Enterprise or Sole Proprietor/Freelancer).

That said, I really wish an open source editor, on the front-end specifically, like Brackets or even Notepad++ would become something I want to use more than ST2, Coda, etc. but there's always something missing.

Atom has potential as a partially open source editor but it remains to be seen. I'll need to be drooling in order to truly make a switch.

> There's a reason closed source, proprietary editors are so massively popular vs. open source editors which often can't seem to get meaningful market share

I'd be very interested to see data that indicates that closed-source text editors have more market share than their open-source counterparts.

I base this on my own personal experience and understanding from a front-end perspective. Maybe back-end devs are different?

I'm quite positive on the other end of development, mainly Microsoft devs, they're almost always using proprietary software like Visual Studio. Sadly, Microsoft dominates the Enterprise and these environments are nearly half the job openings I come across/hear about.

Better than VIM? What do you say that?

I think he meant useability (by a newbie).

I have yet to find an editor that makes me more productive than VIM.

While I love Vim and agree that it's probably the most extensible editor available, trying to explain its idiosyncrasies to a new user could take quite a while. Trying to explain why you can't just grab your mouse, highlight a line, and cut it and paste it somewhere else in the document would probably lose a person. "Hey, you're going to want to find the text, go into visual mode, select it, hit :m38 to move it to line 38... "

You've misunderstood me. I'm saying that Sublime Text should be compared to an editor like Vim, not Brackets. I'm also saying that the folks at GitHub said it was more flexible than Vim.

> Adobe's Bracket front-end editor is open-source, yes, but does it have any traction?

I suspect one of the big detractors from Brackets is that it doesn't [yet] support VIM/other keymaps out of the box (https://trello.com/c/ckAel1Cl/358-118-keyboard-shortcut-prof... ). Additionally it could have set itself apart as a possible thick-client NodeJS debugger, but again not out of the box (http://blog.brackets.io/2013/08/28/theseus-javascript-debugg... ).

While developers are used to installing features they want, Brackets suffers from the fact that there isn't any built-in package manager and therefore these types of optional features are gated behind a Google search (where most of the top results are questions about support, not the answers).

There's also https://trello.com/c/zlSEhJwW/936-vintage-mode-vim

(Disclaimer, I work for Adobe)

Actually, Brackets has a built in extension manager. You can find a list of extensions here - https://brackets-registry.aboutweb.com/ - and in the product you can go to File->Extension Manager.

All the extensions in the registry can be installed from within Brackets.

Github for Mac, and Windows are not open source. These are tools with tight integrations to Github, and still not open sourced. It's not like Atom is a precedent.

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