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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
I've been using Atom as my main editor since the beta rolled out. I love it - it has the (very) occasional quirks and glitches which you have to forgive as it's in beta, but once you get used to navigating around, it's really fast and fun to use.
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 primarily use RubyMine day-to-day, but Atom has become my text editor of choice. I just really enjoy having the ability to hack my editor using technology I'm already familiar with.
But how can putting this functionality into an extension package be considered a reasonable design choice? It isn't an editing "component" like e.g. Scintilla, it's meant to be a general purpose editor: offering a decent out-of-the-box user experience and providing a sensible foundation for extensions should be two of the top priorities.
Because you can then separate out what re-sizing is. Maybe you write a plugin that lets you drag with a mouse to re-size, but maybe someone else never uses their mouse, and would prefer a re-size plugin which auto re-sizes everything according to a tiling layout similar to a tiling window manager.
Separating it out has a lot of advantages, especially by not putting in much opinion by default.
> But how can putting this functionality into an extension package be considered a reasonable design choice?
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.
That should be pretty easy. As I recall right, Sublime is a really basic core (we're talking notepad.exe levels), and various core plugins actually make up the main functionality of the application.
@Jormundir me.. for a little while now that something messed my sublime installation and I did not bother checking what's wrong. most likely a simple config error but atom's been more than ok to be my daily driver.
You're not too cynical! I'm in the same thinking boat. The first thing that that I thought about is either they don't want to do it anymore or the adoption rate was not what they expected.
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.
I like the idea of knowing whether people are actually using a feature or gesture that I as a developer thought, but was just guessing, was so important. So that I can remove or improve it.
(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.)
Mostly the VC-backed web stuff, where folks coming from the web don't seem to understand that explicitly and unnecessarily contacting a server to push analytics is very different than recording the requests that web browsers make by virtue of their operation.
Ever see that questions when you first start your phone, or MS office, or Google Chrome, or OS that's like 'Over time we like to collect anonymous diagnostics and usage information. Yes or no?'
When it's done by software running on hardware you control, it has to consult your hosts file and your iptables and your proxies and your routers. Ultimately it can't do anything you don't let it. You don't have to opt-in to paying attention to the connections each program makes, but you also don't have to willfully ignore them.
If you care about that sort of situational awareness, there are tools like Little Snitch that make it easier.
