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Hey everyone ! I'm Nick - GitHub Campus Expert and the author of this tutorial. I'm glad that you all enjoyed hacking with Atom and can't believe that my post

Hey everyone ! I'm Nick - GitHub Campus Expert and the author of this tutorial. I'm glad that you all enjoyed hacking with Atom and can't believe that my post got to the front page! I would love to answer any questions about the content and would appreciate any feedback for this or future posts.

ben_jones 10y ago
Automatically finding and dragging in code from stackoverflow is the most dangerous thing I've ever heard of. How accurate would you consider comparisons between yourself and J. Robert Oppenheimer? Jokes aside it's a cool tutorial. Plugin development for many editors is unnecessarily hard and a detriment to their ecosystems. It's cool that it's that simple for Atom. But as someone happy with my current editors (Jetbrains derivatives + plugins for projects / Sublime + plugins for small stuff), what advantages would you say Atom has that would incentivize people to try it out?
- nicktikhonov 10y ago
  While I advocate hacking Atom, I don't advocate actually using the plugin the tutorial teaches you to make as-is! A safer bet is Sourcerer (https://atom.io/packages/sourcerer https://atom.io/packages/sourcerer) - it's got some neat features like previewing snippets and attributing credit to the SO author through added comments. I always thought of this plugin as an educational tool for learning new languages, rather than something to be used regularly when building real software. That said, So many of us use StackOverflow to find library/API examples, and this is a nice shortcut! I think that this is generally safe for finding one-line examples and shorter snippets, where it's easy to read and understand what the code does. Before switching to Atom, I used vim and Sublime Text. The thing I enjoyed most about both of these editors was extending them with plugins. I think it's important to customise and personalise your editor because it's one of the few tools we use the most as developers, and any tweak/feature that saves us time doing a particular task means a great deal in the long term. I chose to switch to Atom because it's an editor designed around being easy to extend and customise - anyone who has done any web/Node development can dive right in. There are already nearly 5000 packages and themes available, and so far I found it much more open and easier to develop for than both Sublime and Vim.

ben_jones 10y ago

Automatically finding and dragging in code from stackoverflow is the most dangerous thing I've ever heard of. How accurate would you consider comparisons between yourself and J. Robert Oppenheimer? Jokes aside it's a cool tutorial. Plugin development for many editors is unnecessarily hard and a detriment to their ecosystems. It's cool that it's that simple for Atom. But as someone happy with my current editors (Jetbrains derivatives + plugins for projects / Sublime + plugins for small stuff), what advantages would you say Atom has that would incentivize people to try it out?

nicktikhonov 10y ago
While I advocate hacking Atom, I don't advocate actually using the plugin the tutorial teaches you to make as-is! A safer bet is Sourcerer (https://atom.io/packages/sourcerer https://atom.io/packages/sourcerer) - it's got some neat features like previewing snippets and attributing credit to the SO author through added comments. I always thought of this plugin as an educational tool for learning new languages, rather than something to be used regularly when building real software. That said, So many of us use StackOverflow to find library/API examples, and this is a nice shortcut! I think that this is generally safe for finding one-line examples and shorter snippets, where it's easy to read and understand what the code does. Before switching to Atom, I used vim and Sublime Text. The thing I enjoyed most about both of these editors was extending them with plugins. I think it's important to customise and personalise your editor because it's one of the few tools we use the most as developers, and any tweak/feature that saves us time doing a particular task means a great deal in the long term. I chose to switch to Atom because it's an editor designed around being easy to extend and customise - anyone who has done any web/Node development can dive right in. There are already nearly 5000 packages and themes available, and so far I found it much more open and easier to develop for than both Sublime and Vim.