Atom Is Now Open Source
blog.atom.io
blog.atom.io
Good on you, Atom.io devs
now that it's open sourced, am sure it'll take like a second for someone to release the deb package
[1] - `ln -s $(which nodejs) ~/bin/node`
(or make the symlink yourself.)
edit: Not meant as a hostile remark, seriously wondering how it's going for people who have stuck with atom. I tried it for 5 minutes, but didn't give it a real commitment.
apm install resize-panes
Obviously you don't use emacs.
I like the design of Atom, because it allows me to freely compose an editor that does exactly what I want, and nothing more. While multiple panes is a requirement for bpicolo (and you?), I use multiple panes in Atom (my primary editor) and haven't felt the need to resize them. Am I the minority, or are the others? Or is it 50/50? Basically, we don't know until the editor has time to grow, and its community has a chance to dictate what features are required.
Separating it out has a lot of advantages, especially by not putting in much opinion by default.
From the FAQ: "At the moment Atom only runs on OS X (10.8 or later). Windows and Linux releases are on the roadmap."
Which version of Ubuntu did you use ? Howz the experience ?
sudo ln -s /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libudev.so.1 /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libudev.so.0
Now that it runs, it feels pretty responsive and you can customize a lot of stuff. I haven't used for coding yet, but will try it out for that in the next few days.
I however fell back to ST for a number of reasons.
Speed - ST is just quicker to get up and running. I found a (large) file or two that atom just could not deal with.
State - I can CMD-Q ST with no nags, then re-open to my previous state when I want. I generally have a number of useful scraps open at one time, so not having to save these is great, and not losing them when I close the editor is just brilliant.
Visuals - The open file code overview on the RHS is a must have for me.
Muscle memory - I just kept opening ST from the terminal, and had to go through the process of closing ST and opening atom. This could have been mitigated by re-aliasing slt, but that's a commitment.
I do wish ST would automatically include the directory of the file you are opening in the project like atom. Brilliant when you are just flicking through source. Open one file and then not have to leave the editor to go to the next one.
There was also something funny when I opened a squid cached js file - I could highlight and copy the text, but whatever was copied to the clipboard was not what I had highlighted. Think highlighting and copying in general is still a bit beta.
That said, I spent some time tinkering, and loved the open nature of the plugins. The bracket matcher plugin does both highlighting of brackets and auto closing. I hate auto closing. It took all of 15 minutes to work out the plugin architecture, disable the offending plugin and hack in the parts of it that I liked.
In my books that's a winner. I may even pick it back up if it is going to get real love from the community.
Good news! There's a package for that: https://atom.io/packages/minimap
I imagine that eventually there's not going to be much difference feature wise between ST and atom.
This then leaves the key differentiators as price and support. Atom wins the first, and if the community grows with it then it'll soon win the second.
edit. Oh yes, the speed thing. ST wins that.
It works, hasn't crashed.
Still keeping emacs around for org-mode.
They made it perfectly clear that it will not be open source and it will cost money. I don't think they need 10 weeks to understand the benefits of open source.
Anyone polite asks, or doesn't do it at all.
That's analytics.
If you care about that sort of situational awareness, there are tools like Little Snitch that make it easier.
(I'm not an atom developer. I just envy being able to make decisions in the context of data, having spent most of my developer life without it.)
As I saw it, GitHub was trying to see if it could become a business. Developers will pay decent money (as in "desktop software" money, not "mobile app" money) for a quality text editor.
I wouldn't have blamed them for going commercial, but I'm happy to see them releasing this to the community. :)
Text editors are dime a dozen and in that space, you are competing with much more than tools that are geared just toward developers.
Maybe the slightly-snarky lesson here is "developers will pay decent money for a text editor... on OSX".
Developers will pay decent money for any editor that helps them create better code (and thus more money). :-P
Why do I keep using it? Because generally new functionality requires about 2 minutes of readme.md and then it is working, rather than half an hour of hacking with vim config files.
I still love Vim and use it for editing single files or whenever I remote in to another machine but this new generation of text editor / IDE hybrids just fit my project workflow a bit better.
I don't know that I'd say Sublime users are "stuck". The long beta on v3 seems to be splitting the community, somewhat, but it wouldn't be surprising if the final release resulted in it consolidating again.
I've already movers most of my we stuff to IntelliJ/WebStorm. I really liked ST2 but was a little miffed that right after I bought my licence ST3 was pushed to the forefront of the site without a reasonable upgrade plan.
It looks and works the same on all platforms, OSX, Windows, Linux.
So maybe there is something in that the OSX crowd will pay for tools.
That said, I find it far easier to get up and running with a myriad of free software on OSX than I ever did on Windows (much love to homebrew)
On a list of software projects I wish existed, a modernized Vim would be numbers 1 through 10. I enjoy core Vim, but the pain of Vim's limits when adding in new functionality with plugins (like pauses running Syntactic checks, or the hiccups and lack of smoothness of every autocompletion plugin ever) are a downer.
I wonder if Emacs will eventually compete, though, both UI-wise and for cleaner plug-ins.
[1]: In my humble opinion
[2]: and I do, actually
What's your use case? I'm curious.
Project switching, I find, is really hard, but it is made way harder by having to remember all the unique locations of files, directories and commands related to the project, and having to wait for everything to load.
If you have a project open and need to switch to another one, Ctrl-Alt-P opens the project switcher. If you switch to another project, the previous project's workspace is saved. So when you come back to the last project, everything is JUST as you left it.
Alternatively, if you need to have it open in another window (for comparisons or whatnot), just open a new window before opening the project switcher! (Ctrl-Shift-N, Ctrl-Alt-P)
Does that mean NeoVim will support Lua for scripting alongside VimL?
> As Emacs and Vim have demonstrated over the past three decades, if you want to build a thriving, long-lasting community around a text editor, it has to be open source.
I agree whole-heartedly. In fact, I don't believe that editors like Sublime Text would have such a large following if not for the extended "free-trial" functionality.
It will be exciting to see where this project goes, and I think open-sourcing the rest of the editor was a great move.
“Atom won't be closed source, but it won't be open source either. It will be somewhere inbetween, making it easy for us to charge for Atom while still making the source available under a restrictive license so you can see how everything works. We haven't finalized exactly how this will work yet. We will have full details ready for the official launch.” - Tom Preston-Werner, 27 Feb 2014 http://discuss.atom.io/t/why-is-atom-closed-source/82/9
There was a HN discussion about this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7310017
I buy Orson Scott Card books, for example.
Some people don't partition the reputations of corporate 'entities' into separate walks of life.
"Open Source" is a well-defined term[0] . What Tom Preston-Warner describes there is basically the same as Microsoft's "Shared source[1] " licenses, which do not fit the definition of Open Source.
[0]http://opensource.org/osdhttp://opensource.org/osd
[1] http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_sourcehttp://en.m.wiki...
And anyway, this wasn't the sense in which Preston-Warner used the phrase — he did describe what he meant, and it was not open-source software. It was, as chimeracoder said, similar to Microsoft's "shared source" program.
That's under-promise/over-deliver in action my friend :)
https://github.com/atom/atom/issues/5
I realize this is inherent to the nature of version control, but it's neat to think about the history as a "Making-Of" Atom.
Using a free software license is a big improvement, but I wish that they used a copyleft license like the GNU GPLv3. Inevitably, we'll see proprietary extensions and "pro" versions. Strong copyleft is important for the freedom of end users.
There is and it is called Google. It's a champion for Open Source and seems to use Open Source software almost exclusively across their entire organisation.
Of course there is Google, Amazon, Red Hat, SUSE, even IBM uses a lot of GPL software...
Plenty of businesses depend on FOSS desktop software, it makes them money. If I use Linux and tools like Blender, Vim, GCC, etc..., and I sell the resulting product, then I'm making money with FOSS, am I not?
So unless you make the effort to contribute back, they will have some issues to pay the rent.
A copyleft license would prevent someone else, who does not hold copyright on Atom, from doing that.
This is called "open core" strategy and few companies use it correctly because there is so much incentive to focus development on the "pro" version and let the free/open one stagnate (or lack basic features).
I wish they had it released under a less restrictive license like BSD or MIT.
Of course, then when you don't get any contributions that only feeds the justification for focusing on the paid product, because clearly "the community doesn't care".
[1] mysql is the biggest and most obvious example, but it seems like a lot of tension built up over it and that's resulted in several forks existing now. Who presumably accept contributions without attribution to Oracle.
Therefore companies who want to make their money selling pro versions usually choose the GPL license. So in practice, we see more "commercial/pro" versions of GPL software than we do of MIT/BSD licensed software.
This is only true as long as they accept no 3rd party contribution. In this case, accepting 3rd party modules is a crucial feature, so GPL+commercial wouldn't fly.
It would preclude using so much code in extensions, for no particularly good reason.
I believe that the ability to sell it if you hit a home run leads to a lot of big ideas getting tried and the base hits making their way back into the open codebase.
But I think it is a matter of taste/personal preference. For me, copy middle feels more free.
The editor I use now (Epsilon) was last significantly rev'd about 8 years ago. It's a fine editor, but I'm starting to look for a replacement (and, oddly, I cannot stand where modern Emacs went).
Sublime Text 2 is darned close. If only I could teach it proper bindings of C-U . . .
- Toolbars suck
- Menus suck
- Having Emacs suspend the shell I'm working in sucks
- Getting names of files to actually appear as buffers, without extra gorp like a listener window that I don't care about at all is an exercise in frustration
... and more, but I need to find the last .emacs file that I spent half a day hacking up for details (and don't get me started on the geometry nonsense you need to control where Emacs starts up and how big its window is, and how well this plays with environments that have different monitor sizes and . . . oh bog, it can be better).
Inevitably someone's going to argue about how Emacs should be used ("you're supposed to get into it and never leave" and similar nonsense), or point out that I can customize away the things I hate. True. But I've been using Emacs since 1979 or so, and it just seems much worse in the last ten years.
If you're inclined to amplify on your perspective of how Emacs has changed over time, I'd be delighted to hear anything you have to say on the subject. It's so much more powerful than anything else I've ever used that I'm still very much in the honeymoon phase despite having used Emacs as my sole editor for almost a half decade now; I would value most highly the privilege of hearing from someone with a more experienced and balanced understanding, such as yours.
I'm inclined to agree with the shell thing, though that is more of a property of the shell, isn't it?
And you've lost me on the names of files. What do you mean?
I certainly don't think you are using it wrong. I am extremely interested in how things have gotten worse. In particular, examples of how things were better would really help to understand. (And, no, you don't owe this to anyone. I would appreciate it, though.)
Does emacsclient -n not work?
While I did mean what I said earlier about not feeling qualified to argue with someone who's been using Emacs since before I was even a gleam in my father's eye, I do want to point out that it's maybe sort of unfair to blame this one on Emacs; any process you launch from a shell, which doesn't immediately perform a detaching fork from its parent process (as most things don't), is going to have the same effect, and require the same modified invocation to prevent blocking your shell.
FWIW the Zeus editor has an Epsilon keyboard mapping offer up by a Zeus user many years ago.
But as I'm a Brief keyboard user myself, I'll have to be honest and say I don't know how accurate it is :(
Also Zeus is shareware and is native to Windows, but several users have reported it does run on Linux using Wine.
Jussi Jumppanen
Author: Zeus IDE
Is it too slow as your child comments suggest because of the used web technics?
Or are you missing important features? Couldn't they be added as plugins? Maybe such plugins were already made.
Or is it the overall design? What's bad about it?
I think it'd be nice if some of the IDEs gave up on forcing everything into their project structure. There's a real market for stand alone visual debuggers that don't try to manage your entire project.
I suspect because lots of developers actually use those text editors as their main development environment. So they have the D and the E parts of that equation covered.
Also since these editors tend to be highly configurable, with a bit tweaking the user can make the editor do a lot of the I as well.
I can run some monolithic IDE like Eclipse that comes with everything I need plus a bunch of stuff I'll never use or I can take Sublime Text/vim and add just the right combination of packages to fit my needs.
Javascript has been the biggest waste and diversion of programmer talent since computers were invented. Billions of dollars have been wasted trying to fit every square peg there is into a Javascript round hole, and the sh*t still continues.
Even after 20 years Javascript UIs can't match stuff done 20 years ago on native UIs.
Whatever happened to the notion of cost-benefit analysis?
Is there ever going to be some professionalism in the programing profession, if in its current state it can be called a profession?
How much effort is the industry going to put into implementing software on the Javascript/HTML combo which is, has been and will always be under-specified for what programmers want to use them for?
PS. It seems that every other article on HN relates to an attempt to hack some complicated stuff on top of an ill-suited Javascript/HTML combo. Is there some connection here?
The first time I've heard about Atom was here: https://medium.com/p/433852f4b4d1
+1, an about page wouldn't go amiss either. I still don't know what it is.
[edit] Wow, downvoted. I just want to know what it is by visiting the website quickly. It's not a lot to ask.
The Atom Shell open sourcing is also interesting ... I wonder if it will lead to a rash of other Chromium-fork-apps
---
There are builds for atom-shell for Windows and it gives you something that looks like this: http://imgur.com/H0RcGc5
I haven't understood what you're supposed to do with it yet (I thought it was just a library).
OT: Fullscreen and windowing is nicer in Windows... In OSX (@home) everything feels sluggish with the overflow of animations...
The docs for Atom Shell are pretty good, have a look at https://github.com/atom/atom-shell/tree/master/docs to get started
I was really happy to see that post from Kari the new PR person, but no more word after that... http://www.sublimetext.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=15477&s...
TBH I just want window background transparency and I'll be snug as a bug, all other updates are meaningless
Uncaught Error: Atom can only handle files < 2MB, for now.
(1) I've written lot's of elisp code, for example a norton commander clone called evening commander (https://github.com/pgundlach/evening-commander)
We were leaving all options open during the beta.
The adoption rate was incredible (contrary to suggestions to the contrary), and in the end the Atom team decided the best thing GitHub could do with Atom is give it to the community - not because of any sneaky reasons, just because that's how we believe it can do the most good in the world.
Thumbs up, Github!
I'm definitely with the group that they 'opensourced' this because they had to... I know my entire office went from 'fuck-yeah' to '.... meh' to 'what? yeah, I forgot about that' in about two weeks time.
I mean, it's still damn good of 'em I just hope it gets some love. I'd like to see more competition in the space, but right now I have a feeling it's just going to be abandoned before too long then I'll be knocking on the door of ST3 or Vim again.
From the outside, looking at the conversations that took place on Twitter after the initial release, he seemed to have a strong opinion on Atom being the same way, core inside github and rest is open-source.
Now that he's gone, that limitation is off and it's open source as it should have been from the get-go.
There's absolutely no reason this product won't be open source to the core, the more people actively developing on it the better.
Me personally, I haven't used it and I don't see myself using it ever in the future, but it seems like a very nice concept project.
It looks pretty open to me. However, I don't speak legalese, so I may be misunderstanding it.
The legalese is translated into bullet points in the right-hand column.
>Today, we're excited to announce that we are open-sourcing Atom under the MIT License
https://github.com/atom/atom/issues/1931
but finally got it building on 12.04LTS
Upon its initial launch, most of the criticism around it pertained to it not being open source. I think we can certainly expect to see its growth overtake that of Sublime Text, and I'm interested to see how the community interest will stack up against other open source editors like Light Table.
Hopefully Atom may join the legendary ranks of Vim and Emacs.
$ git clone git@github.com:atom/atom.git
Cloning into 'atom'...
The authenticity of host 'github.com (192.30.252.129)' can't be established.
RSA key fingerprint is 16:27:ac:a5:76:28:2d:36:63:1b:56:4d:eb:df:a6:48.
Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no)? y
Please type 'yes' or 'no': yes
Warning: Permanently added 'github.com,192.30.252.129' (RSA) to the list of known hosts.
Permission denied (publickey).
fatal: Could not read from remote repository.
$ git clone https://github.com/atom/atomEDIT: I am mistaken. I thought cloning git@ meant you could read/write from it (aka allowed to push). Turns out it's just a public key thing. Comment above me is correct.
You need to add your public key to your github account.
Follow this algorithm for an open net. Profit margins get pretty tight tho
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7696555 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7696593
never.
I just can't imagine a behemoth like Github not injecting itself into Atom for the better.
Atom's soft wrap doesn't works well. It seems to count character length in order to split the line.
For a self-contained, deployable desktop application use `node-webkit`. It is basically chromium + embedded node.js. From what I'm reading, atom-shell is similar to node-webkit. There are a few other `node-webkit` like projects on github.
For lighter deployments, where your audience already has chrome and node.js installed, try `node-chrome`. It's a skeleton to run a chrome packaged app locally which communicates over websockets to a node.js service you build.
Both of these are good options if your UI, notifications can be contained in HTML. Challenges arise when you want to use OS specific integrated menus, growls/notifications, tooltips, etc. Node-webkit may have addressed most of these by now.
not working atm, looks like it makes a POST request to a server every times its launched and the server seems to be down .
In the end, for most of these products, open sourcing is usually just the last step before the product dies.
-Posted From Linux
This may be irrational, but I never had a great feeling about Brackets because it was an Adobe product.
about this, I use brackets, a lot of it does look like brackets maybe with some ideas taken from light table http://www.lighttable.com/
There's a thread on discuss.atom.io about what distinguishes the two http://discuss.atom.io/t/what-distinguishes-atom-io-from-bra... I guess I don't feel atom does enough different from brackets that I can justify switching editor at this point, but if anyone has more to add than was found there I'm interested to hear.
They don't have official builds yet. If you care enough you can build it. They'll get official builds probably soon enough. I don't know what you're complaining about..
EDIT: I fudge fingered this. I meant copy left license. MIT is a free software license.
I installed it today for the first time because this was the first time I didn't need to be in a special club to use it.
I opened a directory of source that ST opens instantly. This thing took 5 seconds to open. Then when I quit the app, I get an "Editor is not responding." message. Everything feels sluggish.
This is progress people!
Having said that, I do agree that the sluggishness of many of these "modern" editors (including Sublime Text, which even at ST3 is quite a bit slower at opening large files than it should be) really is quite a shame.