
Atom Now Available on Windows - podgib
https://atom.io/faq
======
someguy1233
Just a notice for HN. I'm going to stop making builds on atom.someguy123.com,
but I might continue if Github doesn't do nightly unstable builds.

I recommend using the official builds from now on, as there is no reason for
me to continue building stable builds of Atom for Windows

~~~
bithush
Makes sense. Thanks for your time on the builds until now.

------
alandarev
Good, but not new. Windows Atom users existed for a while now. They could
compile themselves (quite problematic, I tried), or use unofficial, but well
maintained builds: [http://atom.someguy123.com/](http://atom.someguy123.com/)

In the end, my congratulations to the Atom team finally getting Windows
officially supported. Now we need only Linux on board as well.

------
milankragujevic
Wasn't Atom available since forever for Windows, it's just that you have to
compile it from source which I won't do so I'm not using it.

~~~
jbrooksuk
Essentially yes, there were also third-party builds available.

------
bitL
Just an honest curiosity - what new atom.io can bring to Windows users? I
understand the situation on OS X is dire with only a handful of capable text
editors (a fact that drives me crazy when I need to do something non-trivial
on OS X I am used to do on Windows), but on Windows you have a plenty of
excellent programmer-friendly text editors/IDEs that seem to have more
features than atom.io or sublime (even with live editing, multiple cursors
etc.). Yes, I am using both atom.io and Sublime on OS X because I have no
choice, but on Windows?

------
mosselman
How is VIM mode coming along? Last time I tried atom it wasn't up to par at
all.

~~~
grayrest
That's going to depend on your specific set of edit patterns. When I checked a
week ago my core set of patterns were there except for C-i/C-o.

~~~
mercer
Yeah, that one unfortunately was the dealbreaker for me. But other than that
there's decent basic support.

------
kaelzhang
Good news! There are still many developers using Windows in my company.

------
enesunal
66MB build. I guess they have written such Sublime Text v.63

------
KhalilK
Remind me again, this is what, compared to Emacs?

~~~
alandarev
People argue it is very similar to Sublime, but is open source, thus has
higher community support and promising future.

I would not compare Atom to emacs or vim. On the other hand, Windows always
frustrated me of low text editors choice, Atom might quickly earn its name on
Windows platform.

~~~
swasheck
So far I'm having a hard time discerning its value over the Windows release of
Geany. I'm not saying that it _doesn 't_ have that value, I'm just struggling
to find it. Having said that, choice is generally perceived to be a good
thing.

~~~
seabrookmx
I use and like Geany on Linux. GTK apps on Windows have always been buggy for
me though. Geany had a strange issue where it would sometimes maximize larger
than the screen, so the only way to get control of the window again was
WindowsKey+DownArrow.

I also have trouble finding nice themes for Geany.

Sublime and Notepad++ are much more polished, but I plan on giving Atom a
legitimate trial now that there's an official build.

------
vs4vijay
Much needed....

------
NietTim
Is anybody actually still using atom?

~~~
thibaut_barrere
Still? I see quite a bit of people moving to it recently, around me at least.

For me, it has completely replaced textmate/sublimetext (except for one huge
file from time to time, but I use command line head/sed etc for that too).

My favorite point is that it comes with a default configuration which works
for me, which means installing it on a machine let me work straight away.

~~~
welly
What does it offer you that Sublimetext doesn't? I've been thinking about
taking a look at Atom for a while but wouldn't mind hearing something from the
(or a) horse's mouth.

------
eps
The heck is Chocolatey and why am I expected to trust them as a distributor of
clean binaries? Rhetorical question.

I've been using Windows as a primary OS for over 20 years and there's no way
_in hell_ I am installing some random "package manager" just to get some other
piece of software. This is not how things work on Windows. I am willing to
assume that GitHub knows how to build and look after their distributions to
keep them clean, but I am _not_ going to extend the courtesy to Chocolatey,
because they are basically no-ones, regardless of how nice and well-
intentioned they are.

~~~
someguy1233
KevinSawacki who owns the atom repo on Github is one of the maintainers, and
chocolatey has been around for a while now. The reason they suggest chocolatey
is because there's no auto updater for Windows atom yet, instead they
recommend you use the update function from chocolatey.

With my builds, I had to announce them and poke some people who use my builds
actively because of this issue, so that they would download the new version.

~~~
eps
> KevinSawacki

Nice to know, but it doesn't move a needle a bit. I have no desire to
establish trusting relationship with Kevin, but I am willing to trust GitHub.

Adding a simple update checker is as trivial as pulling a URL and seeing if
the response contains a version number that is greater than your own. How is
this too hard to add and how it justifies adding some random dependency that
needs full admin rights to run?

~~~
SuddsMcDuff
As cwoac mentioned, Chocolatey is quite well etablished on Windows and has
been for some time, it's not "some random dependency".

~~~
eps
Pray tell how does being "quite well etablished" translate into being
competent sysadmins and ensuring that they don't get compromised and won't end
up pushing a whole load of crap on my box on the next update?

~~~
chton
That is an argument against literally every updater or automatic check for
updates. It applies equally to Chocolatey and to any auto-updater they could
have used for Atom. Please go back and find a better reason.

~~~
eps
I am not making up reasons, so you can keep "go and find a better one" to
yourself.

There are _no_ bulk auto-updaters on Windows except for Windows Update, which
_is_ professionally provisioned. If Chocolatey wants to act as one, it needs
to measure up.

