I have been a Sublime Text user for quite some time now but I am always interested in open source software, especially when they are built using web technologies. I decided to install Atom.io today and was surprised by the performances, the features (especially through the package system really close in richness to Sublime's) and the overall quality of the editor. For Brackets users out there, how does it compare?
I've been using it at my job to build prototypes. In general, I'm super-pleased with it, there are only two things that stop it from being awesome:
1. The LiveReload feature stops if you open Chrome DevTools, which I often use to debug. Unfortunately, Brackets' own tools aren't enough to match Chrome DevTools, so I have to work with the LiveReload feature turned off, which is a bummer. I really really hope they fix this.
2. We use LESS at my job, and while there are LESS autocompile plugins, working with LESS in Brackets is still not as seemless as working with CSS. However, I think that with some better plugin support and some tweaks to the current plugins, it eventually could be.
I've got to say though, Brackets has totally replaced Sublime for me as my primary editor whenever I'm working on front-end stuff. Theseus and the other Javascript debugging tools are top-notch. I recommend that any front-end developer at least give it a shot for a week or two.
I believe that "Live Preview" conflicting with Chrome DevTools is a limitation on the Chrome side. Note that the Brackets feature isn't a live "reload" - Brackets pokes into the live DOM and makes changes dynamically, without reloading the page. As I recall, it does this with the same hooks DevTools uses, and Chrome only allows one entity at a time to do such things.
Personally I've gotten in the habit of switching back and forth. I tend to use Live Preview when I'm tweaking layout and design (so much easier than doing things in the inspector and then remembering what changes to reflect in my code), but switching to the browser tools for most script stuff. If Live Preview had a javascript console I suspect I'd hardly use the browser tools..
As others mentioned, you can't use the Chrome dev tools and Live Preview at the same time is because of a limitation in Chrome. We're working on changing how Live Preview works to support different browses and also enable the use of browser tools. It's available as an extension here:
The hour first point, this is a limitation of chrome. They only allow a single debugger to be attached at once. As dev tools and livereload both count as debuggers you can only have 1 active.
Dart has the same issue I believe when connected to their dartium browser.
When I had first installed Atom a few months back, I had performance issues as well, but it does not seem to be the case anymore with all the work they put in the editor's performance last summer.
In my experience atom is really slow at regex find/replace + reindexing projects with lots of files each time you open them. It's going to be nice one day though.
For now my biggest frustration is that Atom does not 'remember' the files/folders I was working on the last time I had it opened, and the Reopen last item does not seem to work at startup.
I've been using Atom for months and I'm getting very frustrated by the slow, buggy performance and utterly terrible autocomplete. I'm giving Brackets a shot because I've heard great things about its autocomplete.
Agreed, Atom is still a diamond in dirt, its just waiting to be polished and then I will try It out. Brackets does the "little" details right. Everything feels good about Brackets and seems to get out of your way. If you are a front end developer then definitely have a go at it.
