GitHub's configurable editor
Hacker Kitchen
© Lead Image © serezniy, 123RF.com
The Atom code editor from GitHub is a highly configurable free application. Just one year old, even at this early stage, the mix looks very promising.
When GitHub announced Atom [1] in June 2014, many observers sighed: Does the world really need yet another text editor? Well, the makers of GitHub are convinced it does. Sublime Text [2] might be convenient, but it is not genuinely configurable. On the other hand, Emacs and Vi are highly configurable, but not exactly convenient for the uninitiated.
The makers of GitHub know pretty well how the open source world ticks, and they have gotten very few things wrong thus far. Atom is no exception. Vi and Emacs only work as sustainably and well as they do because they are both open and have a large community. Consequently, GitHub plans to be involved long-term with the editor. Atom 1.0 was released on June 25, 2015, under an MIT license, but that does not rule out GitHub offering an enterprise variant of the editor at some time.
Atom Model
Atom is intended to help developers program desktop and web applications across multiple platforms. The software comes with syntax highlighting for various programming languages – from JavaScript, through Perl and Python, up to C, C++, or Java. At the end of the day, Atom is a variant of the Chromium browser, and the windows are no more than locally rendered web pages, from which the content can access the Node.js API.
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