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Since it's based on node-webkit, that will be difficult. I find it hard to understand why they thought building text editors in a web engine was a good idea. Cr

Since it's based on node-webkit, that will be difficult. I find it hard to understand why they thought building text editors in a web engine was a good idea. Cross-platform support seems to trump all other considerations.

hartator 10y ago
Sublime has also cross-platform. However, Atom.io is very easy to modify. I was able to do 1 or 2 PRs on the code base without any big issues.
bastawhiz 10y ago
It's actually built on Electron, which is their own from-scratch version of NW. JavaScript is very fast, though, and there's really not a way of rendering arbitrary content as well as a browser. The ability to take contributions from the community is much better, as well. Far more people can competently write JavaScript (or with Atom, coffeescript) than C++.
- skykooler 10y ago
  But, it's not abitrary content. It's text. And we've had good text rendering engines for decades.
  - majewsky 10y ago
    And then you want a popup with a progress bar. Where's your text rendering engine now?
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - flukus 10y ago
      You launch a popup with whatever GUI toolkit you're using, just like every other application. We had popups with progress bars before computers had GUI's at all.
  - bastawhiz 10y ago
    And when your linter wants to provide formatted feedback, or you want to render Markdown, or you want the nice code maps on the right hand side, or you want to render the MDN page for that JavaScript method you're hovering over... Plenty of valid uses for non-text rendering, especially in the realm of plugins.
    - flukus 10y ago
      All of that can and has been done with better (native) text rendering engines.
      - Klathmon 10y ago
        What about easy theming? Various font choices? Different languages and scripts? RTL languages? Inline images? Live updated browser tab? Tabs at all? Code folding? Minimap-like previews? Tooltips for linters, code completion, syntax errors, and more? 3d visualization? Click able hyperlinks to documentation pages? Icons for files? Etc... IMO a browser is a perfect platform for a text editor, because you get so much shit for free, and it's done right across most major platforms. Or you can do most of that on your own across most platforms and hope your version is faster...
        flukus 10y ago
        Have you ever used an IDE or rich text editor? All of those features were around long before we had computers capable of running electron apps. >What about easy theming? That's a particular cancer that needs to die, themeing is the OS job, not the apps. You're themed electron apps look ugly and out of place on my desktop.
        Klathmon 10y ago
        I never said they weren't, but their implementations have varied greatly. On the one hand you had "clearly not native" clumsy UIs and features that were very out of place and didn't support common keybindings or were very obviously the wrong type of "widgets" for the platform (I'm really glad I no longer see really shitty java file selectors that are in some crazy ass format and don't support any keybindings or even typing the path out manually) on the other hand you had "works on windows 7 only", or "we created our own language to do this, so learn that before you contribute" Like them or not, browsers have nailed a lot of those things, and for good reason (after all, that's all they do). They made them work well, work consistently, work cross platform, work with a great UX, and work pretty damn fast. >That's a particular cancer that needs to die Well this comment took a turn! Call it vain, call it stupid, call it whatever, but a good looking UI is a big point for my editor. I stare at this thing for many hours a day, I want it to look good, have a good (preferably customizable) set of colors both in the editor and in it's syntax, and I want to be able to fully customize every single part of it (I like to have my "file tree" take up the bottom half of a sidebar and the "minimap" take up the top half. I'm not going to be able to do that in sublime, in atom it's 10 lines of CSS in a config file that gets synced to all my computers I run it on). You can say it's the "OS's job" but the OS doesn't allow that kind of customizability either. It's one of the main reasons why I and many others use an editor like Atom. You don't need to use it or even like it, but it's not like they are doing something "wrong", it's just not for your use case. There are many people out there very happy with the workflows that atom works great with, just like how there are many others that are happy with a workflow in vim. The 2 can coexist and have different goals, features, workflows, and users without any issues. And calling a feature that you don't like a "cancer that needs to die" is silly at best. I'm sure there are many out there that see reimplementing another text renderer a pointless exercise, but that doesn't mean it's wrong in all cases.
quaunaut 10y ago
And ease of modification.

hartator 10y ago

Sublime has also cross-platform. However, Atom.io is very easy to modify. I was able to do 1 or 2 PRs on the code base without any big issues.

bastawhiz 10y ago

It's actually built on Electron, which is their own from-scratch version of NW. JavaScript is very fast, though, and there's really not a way of rendering arbitrary content as well as a browser. The ability to take contributions from the community is much better, as well. Far more people can competently write JavaScript (or with Atom, coffeescript) than C++.

skykooler 10y ago
But, it's not abitrary content. It's text. And we've had good text rendering engines for decades.
- majewsky 10y ago
  And then you want a popup with a progress bar. Where's your text rendering engine now?
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - flukus 10y ago
    You launch a popup with whatever GUI toolkit you're using, just like every other application. We had popups with progress bars before computers had GUI's at all.
- bastawhiz 10y ago
  And when your linter wants to provide formatted feedback, or you want to render Markdown, or you want the nice code maps on the right hand side, or you want to render the MDN page for that JavaScript method you're hovering over... Plenty of valid uses for non-text rendering, especially in the realm of plugins.
  - flukus 10y ago
    All of that can and has been done with better (native) text rendering engines.
    - Klathmon 10y ago
      What about easy theming? Various font choices? Different languages and scripts? RTL languages? Inline images? Live updated browser tab? Tabs at all? Code folding? Minimap-like previews? Tooltips for linters, code completion, syntax errors, and more? 3d visualization? Click able hyperlinks to documentation pages? Icons for files? Etc... IMO a browser is a perfect platform for a text editor, because you get so much shit for free, and it's done right across most major platforms. Or you can do most of that on your own across most platforms and hope your version is faster...
      - flukus 10y ago
        Have you ever used an IDE or rich text editor? All of those features were around long before we had computers capable of running electron apps. >What about easy theming? That's a particular cancer that needs to die, themeing is the OS job, not the apps. You're themed electron apps look ugly and out of place on my desktop.
        Klathmon 10y ago
        I never said they weren't, but their implementations have varied greatly. On the one hand you had "clearly not native" clumsy UIs and features that were very out of place and didn't support common keybindings or were very obviously the wrong type of "widgets" for the platform (I'm really glad I no longer see really shitty java file selectors that are in some crazy ass format and don't support any keybindings or even typing the path out manually) on the other hand you had "works on windows 7 only", or "we created our own language to do this, so learn that before you contribute" Like them or not, browsers have nailed a lot of those things, and for good reason (after all, that's all they do). They made them work well, work consistently, work cross platform, work with a great UX, and work pretty damn fast. >That's a particular cancer that needs to die Well this comment took a turn! Call it vain, call it stupid, call it whatever, but a good looking UI is a big point for my editor. I stare at this thing for many hours a day, I want it to look good, have a good (preferably customizable) set of colors both in the editor and in it's syntax, and I want to be able to fully customize every single part of it (I like to have my "file tree" take up the bottom half of a sidebar and the "minimap" take up the top half. I'm not going to be able to do that in sublime, in atom it's 10 lines of CSS in a config file that gets synced to all my computers I run it on). You can say it's the "OS's job" but the OS doesn't allow that kind of customizability either. It's one of the main reasons why I and many others use an editor like Atom. You don't need to use it or even like it, but it's not like they are doing something "wrong", it's just not for your use case. There are many people out there very happy with the workflows that atom works great with, just like how there are many others that are happy with a workflow in vim. The 2 can coexist and have different goals, features, workflows, and users without any issues. And calling a feature that you don't like a "cancer that needs to die" is silly at best. I'm sure there are many out there that see reimplementing another text renderer a pointless exercise, but that doesn't mean it's wrong in all cases.

quaunaut 10y ago

And ease of modification.