Trying out Atom as an editor

John Cooper — Mon, 23 Jun 2014 13:44:00 GMT

I use Vim as my everyday editor mostly because it's available on all the systems that I have ever administored. Once you get used to a modal editor though it gets very annoying trying to use anything else.

I have been trying to ignore the buzz around the Atom editor from GitHub for a while now but had to give in recently. So I downloaded, compiled and installed it. That was pretty painless and it makes a nice .deb by default so I can install it cleanly. Good so far.

Next up was to launch it and have a play. Wow! it's quick. I assumed it would be a fairly beefy startup and while nothing could be as slow as Eclipse I thought it might be of that order but no it's pretty lean.

Editing in it. Well it's pretty slick. There are a million new keyboard shortcuts and I think a lot of them are mac based so it's all a bit weird.

Making it easier with the vim plugin. I am not a great fan of plugins that make something behave like something else as it often makes things not work how they expect. In this case I don't think I can go back to a non modal editor.

It looks nicer. I can't deny that the smoothness of the interface and the cleanness of the style looks nicer than the harsh terminal interface. Things like having a builtin preview for Markdown or RST is nice.

In conclusion I might give this a bit of a go.

Choffee (Posts about atom)

Trying out Atom as an editor