
Atom Is Now Open Source - jordn
http://blog.atom.io/2014/05/06/atom-is-now-open-source.html
======
pachydermic
I wonder why it wasn't this way from the get-go... Oh well, at least I'm
actually interested in it now. Can't wait for the Linux version to try it out.
Pumped that they did the right thing and open-sourced it so that it actually
has a chance of becoming widespread, and more importantly, of sticking around
for longer than a couple years.

Good on you, Atom.io devs

~~~
rmrfrmrf
At the risk of being too cynical, I suspect that they're open sourcing it
because their analytics indicated an adoption rate that wouldn't justify
active development. Not sure if this is still the case, but the Atom.io
website, at one point, indicated that its price would not be free, but would
be competitive with similar products in the market (I'm assuming Sublime
Text).

~~~
holman
Definitely not (the beta's been great!). We've been discussing this ad nauseam
for years and years, with some good points on both sides. We were looking to
make it a partially open, paid app when we launched the beta, but after
continuing discussions internally the Atom team decided to go the fully open
source route.

~~~
thedaniel
Yeah, no conspiracy here. Sometimes when people say they're going to have a
beta to gather information and make an informed decision, they actually do it.

~~~
Jormundir
Who's actually using Atom as their main editor?

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.

~~~
_puk
I tried replacing Sublime Text with it, and got quite into it.

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.

~~~
gjtorikian
> Visuals - The open file code overview on the RHS is a must have for me.

Good news! There's a package for that:
[https://atom.io/packages/minimap](https://atom.io/packages/minimap)

~~~
_puk
Thanks!

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.

------
jwcrux
This is fantastic news!

> 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.

~~~
pytrin
You're confusing "free" in pricing with "free" in freedom. A free trial
creates a completely different type of community than free and open code.
GitHub could have just provided a closed binary for free if they wanted to go
the Sublime route.

~~~
ubercow13
I'm pretty sure he's not confusing anything

------
jordn
Interestingly, Tom Preston-Werner (former CEO of Github) said in February that
Atom wouldn't be fully open-source:

 _“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](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](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7310017)

~~~
jdmichal
Is there any chance this change of heart has to do with his departure? Perhaps
the team always wanted to commit to being fully open-source, and he was the
blocker.

~~~
tomp
Or perhaps GitHub wants to salvage their reputation in the Tech circles by
doing "something good" without too much business loss (selling text editors
probably isn't very good business).

~~~
Jare
GitHub's reputation in tech circles is extremely good. Don't confuse the noise
with the signal.

~~~
afternooner
GitHub's reputation is conflicted at the moment. It has had a lot of support,
but some events do raise warning bells. Only time will tell whether they are
actively ensuring their work environment is something I will continue to
support. The exit of Tom is a good sign, but since we can't know what terms
there were, the only logical thing is to hope they are good to their word.

~~~
sneak
You are conflating the reputation of github the company that provides services
to hackers and github as a place to work. Entirely different reputations.

I buy Orson Scott Card books, for example.

~~~
serf
And that's an example of the multitude of different 'colors' of consumers.
Card's comments kept me from purchasing his stuff. I read it, sure, but I sure
as hell didn't purchase it.

Some people don't partition the reputations of corporate 'entities' into
separate walks of life.

------
pit
Kind of cool that you can view issues all the way back to the beginning:

[https://github.com/atom/atom/issues/5](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.

~~~
devcpp
Also makes me much more trustful about the openness of Atom. Much better than
the closed development processes that I usually see from big corporations (e.g
Google, Apple, Samsung, EA, at their respective open-source websites).

------
davexunit
> 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.

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.

~~~
poolpool
God forbid people want to get paid for their hard work and effort bringing
something new into the world.

~~~
callahad
A copyleft license would not preclude this, as the Atom authors would still
hold copyright, and could freely distribute a "Pro" version under a
proprietary license.

A copyleft license would prevent someone _else_ , who does not hold copyright
on Atom, from doing that.

~~~
gtirloni
So you're happy that the original authors use copyleft+proprietary instead of
allowing anyone else to release a fork (which would also be free software)?
How's that better?

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.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_core](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_core)

~~~
stormbrew
Well, it's also very difficult to justify contributing to a project that's
open core because it means assigning your copyright to someone who stands to
profit from your work while denying you the same right. There have been
projects that have managed to still get contributions under this model [1],
but they're probably the exception rather than the rule.

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.

------
kabdib
I tried Atom, and it was glacial.

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 . . .

~~~
gaigepr
I'm curious what about modern emacs you don't like. Not to argue with you but
truly out of curiosity.

~~~
kabdib
Many of the defaults are wrong.

\- 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.

~~~
taeric
I'm not entirely sure I follow. Is it that toolbars and menubars themselves
suck, or the particular ones in emacs? (fwiw, I have them disabled and don't
feel like I'm missing much. Reenable them every now and then to explore the
"promoted" options of modes.)

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.)

~~~
aaronem
FYI, you can access a buffer's menus, while menubars are disabled, with
C-<mouse-3> on the buffer.

------
rayiner
I'm excited to see all these new IDE projects, but have we pretty much given
up on having a good, integrated debugger?

~~~
wmil
I think we have. Debuggers are highly language specific. It's just easier to
have a separate debugger for each language.

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.

~~~
saurik
But that was the whole point of an IDE: it integrated the development
environment, piecing together the editor, the compiler, and the debugger,
taking advantage of intimate knowledge of the specific targets. Why are we
suddenly calling a text editor an "IDE"?

~~~
jussij
> Why are we suddenly calling a text editor an "IDE"?

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.

~~~
saurik
I also use a text editor as my primary development tool, yet I do not call it
an IDE. I repeat: the whole point of an IDE is to be a truly integrated
development environment, piecing together the editor, the compiler, and the
debugger, taking advantage of intimate knowledge of the specific targets. If
you don't have an integrated debugger, you are not using an IDE. There is no
shame in that, but it still doesn't make any sense to be calling the tool an
IDE unless it, well, is an IDE. It seems like the more useful thought is then
"people seem to have stopped using IDEs as much", not "IDEs have given up on
integrating features like the compiler and the debugger"... if you aren't
integrating the compiler and the debugger, we already have a word for that:
text editor.

------
vfclists
When is this insanity going to end?

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?

------
edwintorok
Perhaps the blogpost should first mention what Atom is.

The first time I've heard about Atom was here:
[https://medium.com/p/433852f4b4d1](https://medium.com/p/433852f4b4d1)

~~~
DanWaterworth
_Perhaps the blogpost should first mention what Atom is._

+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.

~~~
Kequc
It's strange how that blog post doesn't seem to link to Atom.

[https://atom.io/](https://atom.io/)

------
matthewmacleod
Well, I'm thoroughly impressed and a little bit embarrassed about beating up
on Atom only yesterday :)

~~~
jdmichal
You should only be embarrassed if you continue to beat up on it in light of
the new information. Otherwise, if your arguments were correct and valid at
the time, there's no reason to be embarrassed.

~~~
ChrisGaudreau
Well said. This is an insight rarely realized.

------
donaldguy
This is exciting, and bad news for Sublime Text. Though it will be interesting
to see if Atom's performance actually gets up there

The Atom Shell open sourcing is also interesting ... I wonder if it will lead
to a rash of other Chromium-fork-apps

~~~
swah
Can I run Atom-core on top of Atom-shell like any other app?

\---

There are builds for atom-shell for Windows and it gives you something that
looks like this: [http://imgur.com/H0RcGc5](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...

~~~
xpaulbettsx
Atom Shell is a runtime environment that you can write your own Node-in-a-web-
browser apps against, yeah. Atom-shell is the C++y bits to provide some of the
APIs that are available in JS.

The docs for Atom Shell are pretty good, have a look at
[https://github.com/atom/atom-
shell/tree/master/docs](https://github.com/atom/atom-shell/tree/master/docs)
to get started

~~~
swah
Thanks for the explanation. What is not clear to me is if Atom editor is just
an app that runs on top of Atom shell.

------
patrickg

        Uncaught Error: Atom can only handle files < 2MB, for now.
    

I'd love to use an opensource editor for working on large xml files.

~~~
SoftwareMaven
I've never had a problem opening very large files in Emacs. I would imagine
Vim is much the same. I have an 80MB JSON file open in emacs right now.

~~~
patrickg
That's true. I used to be an emacs fanboy (1) until one day came along
textmate with snippets, tabs and "sub major modes" (don't know how to call 'em
- take for example php inside html or such). Then I switched to sublime text.
Now both editors are stalled... I might switch back to emacs.

(1) I've written lot's of elisp code, for example a norton commander clone
called evening commander ([https://github.com/pgundlach/evening-
commander](https://github.com/pgundlach/evening-commander))

------
adefa
If anyone is interested, I was able to build a copy of Atom for Windows:

[http://work.strieber.org/Atom-0.95.0-61fff23be.zip](http://work.strieber.org/Atom-0.95.0-61fff23be.zip)

~~~
adefa
New Unofficial Atom builds for Windows:
[http://atom.strieber.org](http://atom.strieber.org)

------
ruswick
This is an interesting reversal for Github. The original FAQ implied that
Github would try to market Atom commercially. I'm curious as to what made them
change their mind.

~~~
jglovier
>The original FAQ implied that Github would try to market Atom commercially.

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.

------
endijs
Installed on Linux Mint. Some minor UI problems here and there. But that's
nothing compared to how bad autocomplete is. At least for PHP development it's
unusable at all. Because of that even had no intention to check further. But
for those who wonder - yes, it works on Linux.

~~~
sspiff
Did you find or compose any kind of build instructions?

~~~
endijs
There are build instruction for Linux in README.
[https://github.com/atom/atom](https://github.com/atom/atom) Plus I had to fix
libudev problem with this
[https://github.com/atom/atom/issues/1814#issuecomment-423253...](https://github.com/atom/atom/issues/1814#issuecomment-42325331)
Other than that it had no problems to build or launch.

------
pwr
I'm pretty excited about Atom Shell as it looks like they fixed the different
js context problem that node-webkit had. The last time i tried node-webkit i
was really annoyed by the sneaky bugs that pushing objects from one context to
the other introduced.

Thumbs up, Github!

------
rubyn00bie
Maybe someone will implement the UI without a Node/CoffeeScript backend?
Memory usage has been pretty abysmal in my trials (though we've got some very
large repos).

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.

------
avitzurel
IMHO Tom (now gone from the company) always held a strong opinion to open-
source ALMOST everything.

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.

------
brlewis
I am now way more interested in atom than I was previously. I think this is
going to be a good thing for github.

------
ErikRogneby
I appreciate knowing the cost of opted in features: "This package added 66ms
to startup time."

------
jonahx
Could someone give the tldr; version of advantages atom has over vim?

------
hxrts
Can someone comment on whether it's feasible to port Atom to function in-
browser? Seems like this + something like Codepen could potentially be an
asset to frontend developers.

~~~
CaveTech
It's written in coffee script and runs on webkit. I'd say it's possible but
you'd lose some of the deeper OS integrations.

------
AceJohnny2
Alright, now I need a comparison of how Atom compares to Sublime Text, Light
Table and Emacs (and maybe even Vim, but its moded editing makes it a
completely different beast).

~~~
allworknoplay
slow, as far as I can tell.

------
prezjordan
I'm excited to compare atom-shell with node-webkit. I wonder if any big
players will use it.

------
thejosh
Running on Ubuntu 14.04, after following the instructions, running "atom" or
/usr/local/bin/atom doesn't do anything.

~~~
Andys
Be patient: after a while it segfaults

------
ihuman
For anyone who is curious (since there was a tad bit of concern about it in
the past), here is a link to the core's license:
[https://github.com/atom/atom/blob/master/LICENSE.md](https://github.com/atom/atom/blob/master/LICENSE.md)

It looks pretty open to me. However, I don't speak legalese, so I may be
misunderstanding it.

~~~
donaldguy
It seems to be a standard MIT License... like the blog entry says

~~~
wging
Seems to be a bug in the MIT License that it doesn't refer to its own name
within its text. By contrast the GNU GPL is more easily recognizable.

~~~
Agathos
Congratulations on making it on to @shit_hn_says!

[https://twitter.com/shit_hn_says/status/463711610172088320](https://twitter.com/shit_hn_says/status/463711610172088320)

------
gberger
Hopefully someone can package a Ubuntu build now.

~~~
andyhmltn
Check the README: Apparently you can already do it yourself. I'm just in the
process of building a version at the moment on 12.04LTS. Will update

~~~
andyhmltn
Yep, it worked. Took a lot of playing about with it and this:

[https://github.com/atom/atom/issues/1931](https://github.com/atom/atom/issues/1931)

but finally got it building on 12.04LTS

------
fhinson
Really great news for Atom.

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.

------
pdknsk
I followed the steps, but it didn't download.

    
    
        $ 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.
    

This works.

    
    
        $ git clone https://github.com/atom/atom

~~~
prezjordan
Looks like their README reflects the fact that anyone who could see the repo
could also push to it. You should submit a PR :)

EDIT: 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.

~~~
meemo
I think it assumes that you have a github account. I'm not sure if this is a
bad thing considering who they are.

------
undoware
Everyone knows the rules by now. If something awesome comes out that's not
FOSS or even only partially FOSS (dual license, etc) just ignore it until it's
either cloned or fully opened.

Follow this algorithm for an open net. Profit margins get pretty tight tho

~~~
camus2
SublimeText is not opensource,yet it's a success.

------
pavanky
The cloned repo is ~238mb. I can't help but think some of it is not necessary.

~~~
hamburglar
A cloned Chromium repo is 11GB, last I checked. Not a particularly relevant
metric.

------
munro
Fun! A few days ago I mentioned I wish Sublime Text could have preview panes,
but it only does text. [1] This editor does just that! Unfortunately it's very
sluggish. Which also ties back to a comment about another HTML5 text editor.
[2] I want to love this editor so bad, but I'll wait until the performance
improves.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7696555](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7696555)
[2]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7696593](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7696593)

------
plg
are there demos somewhere that show the value added over sublime text or emacs
or vim?

~~~
JacksonGariety
> show the value added over emacs

never.

------
vitaluha
How about translating it to other languages?

~~~
sergiotapia
I'd also like to donate time to translate Atom to spanish.

------
mckoder
I don't get why people keep creating new text editors. Emacs exists, people.
And it is a great text editor. These new editors look pretty and do work, but
they don't even come close to Emacs. Instead of re-inventing the wheel, why
not just take Emacs and add a pretty face to it?

~~~
exadeci
Well emacs last stable was March 11, 2013. I use emacs on my headless servers
and it's perfect but if you really want to work with it you loose time. Take
any big project you want to open a file from emacs you have to know the exact
path, with atom (and sublime text) you just type the name and you get
suggestions. Plus you can still use emacs shortcuts if you want. Yeah emacs is
good and useful but it's almost 50 years old it's like telling us "why would
you want a nexus when the 3310 already exists?".

~~~
mckoder
No, you take the core of emacs and add a pretty shell around it that adds
these features you are talking about. Such as quick way to open files, and so
on. There is no need to re-invent core text editing.

------
DigitalSea
I am really stoked for a Windows version, which in turn will mean I will move
on from Sublime Text Editor 2 onto Atom. Unless of course Sublime Text Editor
3 comes out before then. Tried Atom on a friends Mac, a really solid editor
that I am excited to see what the future holds for it.

------
sergiotapia
Masivo props to Github. They just almost assuredly made this editor long-term.
What was once a cool tech-demo is now probably going to go mainstream for
everybody. Wow.

I just can't imagine a behemoth like Github not injecting itself into Atom for
the better.

------
krautsourced
I wonder if this was partially because they considered the effort involved to
develop a Windows and Linux version, plus the amount to get the performance
where people would like it, and then decided it's not worth it? At least
commercially.

------
daviddoran
I'm delighted to see Atom open sourced. I tried it out a few weeks back and
came across a bug where the editor would lock up when a few empty files were
created. Then I couldn't dig into the code to fix the issue but now I can.

------
helpbygrace
I wonder why almost every apps that was introduced at first don't support wide
character type system such as CJK.

Atom's soft wrap doesn't works well. It seems to count character length in
order to split the line.

------
jhh
I wonder if the way that atom was built is or can turn into a good way to
build modern cross platform desktop apps while employing web technologies.
Does anyone have any input or actual experience with this?

~~~
mmgutz
If you know node backend and web front-end, there are at least two options
right now:

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.

~~~
jhh
wow, node-webkit has +12k stars on github. I must have been living under a
rock.

------
hitlin37
want, atom with python support for a simpler version of ipython notebook!

------
ing33k
Yeah, finally got in working on Ubuntu 14.04 , looks good and solid !

not working atm, looks like it makes a POST request to a server every times
its launched and the server seems to be down .

------
neil_s
So still nothing on the homepage or anywhere else explaining why this is
something useful compared to existing apps? I can't think of a single USP.

------
laureny
It always makes me chuckle when I see companies trying to ship a product (free
or not) and realize a few months later that it's not picking up adoption. Then
they decide to open source it in an effort to make it popular but of course,
they can't admit that, so they always come up with excuses like "We want the
community to benefit from it" or "We really believe in open source", etc...

In the end, for most of these products, open sourcing is usually just the last
step before the product dies.

~~~
eq-
Open sourcing is never the end of a good product.

~~~
bendersalt
Yep.

-Posted From Linux

~~~
orbifold
I don't think Linux was ever intended as a product.

------
uger
I'm surprised how much memory it takes up.

~~~
pit
Well, it's a web browser after all.

~~~
k__
Is it like brackets?

~~~
pekk
Brackets didn't make the (I think quite arrogant) decision only to work on
Macs. That's an absurdity for an editor built on top of a web browser.

~~~
peterhajas
Not just for Mac. Check the Readme.

------
Sekhmet
Thanks for sharing this. I received betz access, but I'm using linux. Have to
try compile entire Atom to linux!

------
danielweber
The FAQ doesn't tell me what Atom is.

~~~
notatoad
the homepage does. [https://atom.io/](https://atom.io/)

------
jbigelow76
I don't need another editor but this interests me because of the Atom Shell
and how that works.

------
krick
That + clojurescript and we can have better emacs… can we? I haven't tried it
yet, honestly.

------
anjanb
I look forward to getting a RHEL/CentOS 6.x(6.3) package soon.

------
math0ne
Ugh.. still mac only....

~~~
rok3
Just follow the instructions in the README on GitHub. Builds and runs fine on
Arch Linux. Haven't tried building on a Win machine yet.

[https://github.com/atom/atom/blob/master/README.md](https://github.com/atom/atom/blob/master/README.md)

~~~
mediocregopher
What steps did you take to get it running on Arch? I got as far as convincing
it to use python2, but then realized I need gnome-keyring, and kind of stopped
there. Which keyring package did you install?

~~~
janerik
There are already two packages in the AUR:

[https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/atom-
editor/](https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/atom-editor/)

[https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/atom-editor-
git/](https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/atom-editor-git/)

------
johnchristopher
Does anybody have any success building it on Debian Wheezy ?

~~~
hoov
Not exactly what you asked, but I got it working on Debian Jessie just now. I
had to install npm from scratch, but other than that it was smooth.

~~~
johnchristopher
Ah, thank you. Unfortunately messing with npm is a bit of a show stopper for
me at the moment.

------
ing33k
nice, trying to install it on Ubuntu 14.04 .

~~~
desipenguin
How did it go ? Easy to build ?

------
chrisabrams
Does atom-shell allow for 64 bit node on OS X?

------
ohmygeek
Emacs FTW!

------
timthom2
Love it

------
mempko
Congradulations to the github team for releasing atom with an open source
license. I hope future projects are free software instead of open source.

EDIT: I fudge fingered this. I meant copy left license. MIT is a free software
license.

~~~
icebraining
MIT licensed software _is_ free software. See
[https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-
list.html#Expat](https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#Expat)

~~~
mempko
You are absolutely correct. I meant to say copy left license. I stayed up way
to late and woke up way to early. They do say being tired is similar to being
drunk... ugh.

------
digerata
I'm still trying to find out why a great company like GitHub would shamelessly
copy Sublime Text 2. It's one thing to say we need to build another text
editor because nothing out there gives you what you need. But to say we need
another text editor and then copy Sublime... What the heck is that?

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!

~~~
georgemcbay
Atom is no more a shameless copy of Sublime Text than Sublime Text is of
TextMate.

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.

~~~
math0ne
Most text editors look almost exactly the same, my VIM and emacs look almost
identical to sublime, and if i wanted i could make it identical.

