Hardscrabble 🍫

By Max Jacobson

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Atom Editor

April 13, 2014

I tried out Atom Editor, the new text editor from GitHub.

I’m excited that GitHub is the kind of company that makes a new text editor. GitHub plays such a big part in my life as a programmer that it’s easy to forget that they’re basically irrelevant to almost all my friends and family. But maybe they won’t be forever.

Atom looks and feels uncannily like Sublime Text. I saw some speculation that GitHub had acquired Sublime Text and I kind of hope that’s true, although there’s been no confirmation or real indication that this is the case. It’s very flagrant. But, there are several ways in which it’s much better:

For the above reasons, this is probably the text editor that I’ll recommend to people who are new to programming.


I wrote the above when I first got the beta a few weeks ago and expected to elaborate before posting. I haven’t used Atom very much since thenor even heard much about it. I went to a vim meetup and an emacs meetup last week. I use vim but I’m curious to learn what emacs is all about. One of the speakers at the vim meetup said he uses and practices vim because it makes him more productive. I don’t know if I buy that – I’ve seen people be amazingly productive with a bunch of tools. But I think it makes it more fun and enjoyable, which I guess can lead to productivity. I’m reminded of a meme you hear in the writing community: writing about writing isn’t the point, writing is.

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