6 ms·

Atom Now Available on Windows

50 points by podgib 12y ago

kaelzhang 12y ago
Good news! There are still many developers using Windows in my company.
milankragujevic 12y ago
Wasn't Atom available since forever for Windows, it's just that you have to compile it from source which I won't do so I'm not using it.
- jbrooksuk 12y ago
  Essentially yes, there were also third-party builds available.
alandarev 12y ago
Good, but not new. Windows Atom users existed for a while now. They could compile themselves (quite problematic, I tried), or use unofficial, but well maintained builds: http://atom.someguy123.com/ http://atom.someguy123.com/ In the end, my congratulations to the Atom team finally getting Windows officially supported. Now we need only Linux on board as well.
KhalilK 12y ago
Remind me again, this is what, compared to Emacs?
- alandarev 12y ago
  People argue it is very similar to Sublime, but is open source, thus has higher community support and promising future. I would not compare Atom to emacs or vim. On the other hand, Windows always frustrated me of low text editors choice, Atom might quickly earn its name on Windows platform.
  - swasheck 12y ago
    So far I'm having a hard time discerning its value over the Windows release of Geany. I'm not saying that it doesn't have that value, I'm just struggling to find it. Having said that, choice is generally perceived to be a good thing.
    - seabrookmx 12y ago
      I use and like Geany on Linux. GTK apps on Windows have always been buggy for me though. Geany had a strange issue where it would sometimes maximize larger than the screen, so the only way to get control of the window again was WindowsKey+DownArrow. I also have trouble finding nice themes for Geany. Sublime and Notepad++ are much more polished, but I plan on giving Atom a legitimate trial now that there's an official build.
- lmedinas 12y ago
  Currently full of Bugs, Emacs not! Currently supports a few OS, Emacs supports a lot's! It's is slow, Emacs not! <and so on> Ok the list is full but i'm not really sure about Atom. Maybe it could replace ST in the future, since the developer is away. But i guess to take Emacs or Vim will take much more time. Atom is simply not ready yet for production.
  - hnarn 12y ago
    Which noone claimed to begin with.
- CmonDev 12y ago
  It's very similar: a notepad application with keyboard shortcuts. Good when cannot afford/access a proper IDE.
  - sehr 12y ago
    > Good when cannot afford/access a proper IDE. Or when you don't want one of those at all.
    - CmonDev 12y ago
      I guess, although this sort of editors tend to mutate into a semi-IDE in their later stages: https://sublime.wbond.net/browse/popular https://sublime.wbond.net/browse/popular
- chr1 12y ago
  editor that doesn't loose cursor position when scrolling.
- swah 12y ago
  Atom has some Emacs-like qualities. See for example a game for destroying the window contents: https://atom.io/packages/asteroids https://atom.io/packages/asteroids This is the kind of thing we saw in emacs.
vs4vijay 12y ago
Much needed....
mosselman 12y ago
How is VIM mode coming along? Last time I tried atom it wasn't up to par at all.
- grayrest 12y ago
  That's going to depend on your specific set of edit patterns. When I checked a week ago my core set of patterns were there except for C-i/C-o.
  - mercer 12y ago
    Yeah, that one unfortunately was the dealbreaker for me. But other than that there's decent basic support.
- bhuga 12y ago
  It will depend on exactly which feature set you use, but it's under active development and has improved a lot recently. There's still a lot of open feature requests, but a lot of non-trivial actions work. Most of the missing or buggy motions are very simple fixes, and contributions are welcome.
eps 12y ago
The heck is Chocolatey and why am I expected to trust them as a distributor of clean binaries? Rhetorical question. I've been using Windows as a primary OS for over 20 years and there's no way in hell I am installing some random "package manager" just to get some other piece of software. This is not how things work on Windows. I am willing to assume that GitHub knows how to build and look after their distributions to keep them clean, but I am not going to extend the courtesy to Chocolatey, because they are basically no-ones, regardless of how nice and well-intentioned they are.
- someguy1233 12y ago
  KevinSawacki who owns the atom repo on Github is one of the maintainers, and chocolatey has been around for a while now. The reason they suggest chocolatey is because there's no auto updater for Windows atom yet, instead they recommend you use the update function from chocolatey. With my builds, I had to announce them and poke some people who use my builds actively because of this issue, so that they would download the new version.
  - eps 12y ago
    > KevinSawacki Nice to know, but it doesn't move a needle a bit. I have no desire to establish trusting relationship with Kevin, but I am willing to trust GitHub. Adding a simple update checker is as trivial as pulling a URL and seeing if the response contains a version number that is greater than your own. How is this too hard to add and how it justifies adding some random dependency that needs full admin rights to run?
    - SuddsMcDuff 12y ago
      As cwoac mentioned, Chocolatey is quite well etablished on Windows and has been for some time, it's not "some random dependency".
      - eps 12y ago
        Pray tell how does being "quite well etablished" translate into being competent sysadmins and ensuring that they don't get compromised and won't end up pushing a whole load of crap on my box on the next update?
NietTim 12y ago
Is anybody actually still using atom?
- ansimionescu 12y ago
  I test-drove it for a while and it ended up replacing ST3 in my toolkit/workflow. Until I switch to vim completely, Atom is filling in the gaps quite well.
  - tanganik 12y ago
    These resources helped me in doing the switch: - nethack, for getting the hjkl in muscle memory - watching a few vimcasts - vim-adventures
- thibaut_barrere 12y ago
  Still? I see quite a bit of people moving to it recently, around me at least. For me, it has completely replaced textmate/sublimetext (except for one huge file from time to time, but I use command line head/sed etc for that too). My favorite point is that it comes with a default configuration which works for me, which means installing it on a machine let me work straight away.
  - welly 12y ago
    What does it offer you that Sublimetext doesn't? I've been thinking about taking a look at Atom for a while but wouldn't mind hearing something from the (or a) horse's mouth.
- CSDude 12y ago
  I tried it but it feels lagging on my system.
- pit 12y ago
  No, I've moved on to Proton: http://www.proton.io http://www.proton.io
enesunal 12y ago
66MB build. I guess they have written such Sublime Text v.63
someguy1233 12y ago
Just a notice for HN. I'm going to stop making builds on atom.someguy123.com, but I might continue if Github doesn't do nightly unstable builds. I recommend using the official builds from now on, as there is no reason for me to continue building stable builds of Atom for Windows
- bithush 12y ago
  Makes sense. Thanks for your time on the builds until now.
bitL 12y ago
Just an honest curiosity - what new atom.io can bring to Windows users? I understand the situation on OS X is dire with only a handful of capable text editors (a fact that drives me crazy when I need to do something non-trivial on OS X I am used to do on Windows), but on Windows you have a plenty of excellent programmer-friendly text editors/IDEs that seem to have more features than atom.io or sublime (even with live editing, multiple cursors etc.). Yes, I am using both atom.io and Sublime on OS X because I have no choice, but on Windows?

50 points by podgib 12y ago

Good news! There are still many developers using Windows in my company.

Wasn't Atom available since forever for Windows, it's just that you have to compile it from source which I won't do so I'm not using it.

jbrooksuk 12y ago
Essentially yes, there were also third-party builds available.

alandarev 12y ago

Good, but not new. Windows Atom users existed for a while now. They could compile themselves (quite problematic, I tried), or use unofficial, but well maintained builds: http://atom.someguy123.com/ http://atom.someguy123.com/ In the end, my congratulations to the Atom team finally getting Windows officially supported. Now we need only Linux on board as well.

KhalilK 12y ago

Remind me again, this is what, compared to Emacs?

alandarev 12y ago
People argue it is very similar to Sublime, but is open source, thus has higher community support and promising future. I would not compare Atom to emacs or vim. On the other hand, Windows always frustrated me of low text editors choice, Atom might quickly earn its name on Windows platform.
- swasheck 12y ago
  So far I'm having a hard time discerning its value over the Windows release of Geany. I'm not saying that it doesn't have that value, I'm just struggling to find it. Having said that, choice is generally perceived to be a good thing.
  - seabrookmx 12y ago
    I use and like Geany on Linux. GTK apps on Windows have always been buggy for me though. Geany had a strange issue where it would sometimes maximize larger than the screen, so the only way to get control of the window again was WindowsKey+DownArrow. I also have trouble finding nice themes for Geany. Sublime and Notepad++ are much more polished, but I plan on giving Atom a legitimate trial now that there's an official build.
lmedinas 12y ago
Currently full of Bugs, Emacs not! Currently supports a few OS, Emacs supports a lot's! It's is slow, Emacs not! <and so on> Ok the list is full but i'm not really sure about Atom. Maybe it could replace ST in the future, since the developer is away. But i guess to take Emacs or Vim will take much more time. Atom is simply not ready yet for production.
- hnarn 12y ago
  Which noone claimed to begin with.
CmonDev 12y ago
It's very similar: a notepad application with keyboard shortcuts. Good when cannot afford/access a proper IDE.
- sehr 12y ago
  > Good when cannot afford/access a proper IDE. Or when you don't want one of those at all.
  - CmonDev 12y ago
    I guess, although this sort of editors tend to mutate into a semi-IDE in their later stages: https://sublime.wbond.net/browse/popular https://sublime.wbond.net/browse/popular
chr1 12y ago
editor that doesn't loose cursor position when scrolling.
swah 12y ago
Atom has some Emacs-like qualities. See for example a game for destroying the window contents: https://atom.io/packages/asteroids https://atom.io/packages/asteroids This is the kind of thing we saw in emacs.

vs4vijay 12y ago

Much needed....

mosselman 12y ago

How is VIM mode coming along? Last time I tried atom it wasn't up to par at all.

grayrest 12y ago
That's going to depend on your specific set of edit patterns. When I checked a week ago my core set of patterns were there except for C-i/C-o.
- mercer 12y ago
  Yeah, that one unfortunately was the dealbreaker for me. But other than that there's decent basic support.
bhuga 12y ago
It will depend on exactly which feature set you use, but it's under active development and has improved a lot recently. There's still a lot of open feature requests, but a lot of non-trivial actions work. Most of the missing or buggy motions are very simple fixes, and contributions are welcome.

eps 12y ago

The heck is Chocolatey and why am I expected to trust them as a distributor of clean binaries? Rhetorical question. I've been using Windows as a primary OS for over 20 years and there's no way in hell I am installing some random "package manager" just to get some other piece of software. This is not how things work on Windows. I am willing to assume that GitHub knows how to build and look after their distributions to keep them clean, but I am not going to extend the courtesy to Chocolatey, because they are basically no-ones, regardless of how nice and well-intentioned they are.

someguy1233 12y ago
KevinSawacki who owns the atom repo on Github is one of the maintainers, and chocolatey has been around for a while now. The reason they suggest chocolatey is because there's no auto updater for Windows atom yet, instead they recommend you use the update function from chocolatey. With my builds, I had to announce them and poke some people who use my builds actively because of this issue, so that they would download the new version.
- eps 12y ago
  > KevinSawacki Nice to know, but it doesn't move a needle a bit. I have no desire to establish trusting relationship with Kevin, but I am willing to trust GitHub. Adding a simple update checker is as trivial as pulling a URL and seeing if the response contains a version number that is greater than your own. How is this too hard to add and how it justifies adding some random dependency that needs full admin rights to run?
  - SuddsMcDuff 12y ago
    As cwoac mentioned, Chocolatey is quite well etablished on Windows and has been for some time, it's not "some random dependency".
    - eps 12y ago
      Pray tell how does being "quite well etablished" translate into being competent sysadmins and ensuring that they don't get compromised and won't end up pushing a whole load of crap on my box on the next update?

NietTim 12y ago

Is anybody actually still using atom?

ansimionescu 12y ago
I test-drove it for a while and it ended up replacing ST3 in my toolkit/workflow. Until I switch to vim completely, Atom is filling in the gaps quite well.
- tanganik 12y ago
  These resources helped me in doing the switch: - nethack, for getting the hjkl in muscle memory - watching a few vimcasts - vim-adventures
thibaut_barrere 12y ago
Still? I see quite a bit of people moving to it recently, around me at least. For me, it has completely replaced textmate/sublimetext (except for one huge file from time to time, but I use command line head/sed etc for that too). My favorite point is that it comes with a default configuration which works for me, which means installing it on a machine let me work straight away.
- welly 12y ago
  What does it offer you that Sublimetext doesn't? I've been thinking about taking a look at Atom for a while but wouldn't mind hearing something from the (or a) horse's mouth.
CSDude 12y ago
I tried it but it feels lagging on my system.
pit 12y ago
No, I've moved on to Proton: http://www.proton.io http://www.proton.io

enesunal 12y ago

66MB build. I guess they have written such Sublime Text v.63

someguy1233 12y ago

Just a notice for HN. I'm going to stop making builds on atom.someguy123.com, but I might continue if Github doesn't do nightly unstable builds. I recommend using the official builds from now on, as there is no reason for me to continue building stable builds of Atom for Windows

bithush 12y ago
Makes sense. Thanks for your time on the builds until now.

bitL 12y ago

Just an honest curiosity - what new atom.io can bring to Windows users? I understand the situation on OS X is dire with only a handful of capable text editors (a fact that drives me crazy when I need to do something non-trivial on OS X I am used to do on Windows), but on Windows you have a plenty of excellent programmer-friendly text editors/IDEs that seem to have more features than atom.io or sublime (even with live editing, multiple cursors etc.). Yes, I am using both atom.io and Sublime on OS X because I have no choice, but on Windows?