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"Historically, it appears that closed source front end editors like Textmate, Sublime Text and others find more success and usage in the market than open-source
by akxo 13y ago
"Historically, it appears that closed source front end editors like Textmate, Sublime Text and others find more success and usage in the market than open-source front end editors"
I wouldn't classify Sublime Text as a front-end editor. When I think of front-end editors, I think of Coda, Espresso, and Brackets. Sublime Text is better compared to Notepad++, Notepad 2, Gedit, SciTE, Emacs, and Vim, which are all open source software and extremely popular.
If you're going to market your text editor as hackable and as flexible as Vim and Emacs [1], it's not a stretch for the developers interested in your product to assume it's going to be or should be open source software.
[1] http://blog.atom.io/2014/02/26/introducing-atom.html http://blog.atom.io/2014/02/26/introducing-atom.html
- technojunkie 13y ago"Sublime Text is better compared to Notepad++, Notepad 2, Gedit, SciTE, Emacs, and Vim, which are all open source software and extremely popular." Fair enough. I use ST2 like Coda/Espresso/Brackets for my own front-end development b/c of the app's agility and abundance of useful plugins for the front-end. Keeping Atom partially closed source, again pointing to historical marketability, could give it more credence among developers of both ends. There's a reason closed source, proprietary editors are so massively popular vs. open source editors which often can't seem to get meaningful market share (whether Enterprise or Sole Proprietor/Freelancer). That said, I really wish an open source editor, on the front-end specifically, like Brackets or even Notepad++ would become something I want to use more than ST2, Coda, etc. but there's always something missing. Atom has potential as a partially open source editor but it remains to be seen. I'll need to be drooling in order to truly make a switch.
- rpdillon 13y ago> There's a reason closed source, proprietary editors are so massively popular vs. open source editors which often can't seem to get meaningful market share I'd be very interested to see data that indicates that closed-source text editors have more market share than their open-source counterparts.
- technojunkie 13y agoI base this on my own personal experience and understanding from a front-end perspective. Maybe back-end devs are different? I'm quite positive on the other end of development, mainly Microsoft devs, they're almost always using proprietary software like Visual Studio. Sadly, Microsoft dominates the Enterprise and these environments are nearly half the job openings I come across/hear about.
- _RPM 13y agoBetter than VIM? What do you say that?
- pritambaral 13y agoI think he meant useability (by a newbie).
- _RPM 13y agoI have yet to find an editor that makes me more productive than VIM.
- nobleach 13y agoWhile I love Vim and agree that it's probably the most extensible editor available, trying to explain its idiosyncrasies to a new user could take quite a while. Trying to explain why you can't just grab your mouse, highlight a line, and cut it and paste it somewhere else in the document would probably lose a person. "Hey, you're going to want to find the text, go into visual mode, select it, hit :m38 to move it to line 38... "
- akxo 13y agoYou've misunderstood me. I'm saying that Sublime Text should be compared to an editor like Vim, not Brackets. I'm also saying that the folks at GitHub said it was more flexible than Vim.