I guess the target market for Atom is those that already use a closed editor like textmate or sublime.
As an emacs user, I would be pretty happy if someone came along, took the super extensibility of emacs (which at first glance atom appears to do) and spun up a sexy, modern, not-lisp-using alternative. The thing is though, my number one priority for a text editor is that it's under a Free Software compatible license. This is simply not a negotiable point for me personally.
I honestly find it pretty amusing that despite the fact technology progresses at such a rapid rate, I'm using a text editor that was first developed a decade before I was even born.
Why not Light Table? It's released under a GPL license [0] and seems to very much be going for "super extensibility". Granted, it does use a lisp, but ClojureScript is pretty nice.
I'm an Emacs user and I've evaluated lighttable. I like a lot of what I see, but for now it's lacking some pretty fundamental user interface concepts that are critical in making an editor that's optimized for the long-term user and not just for the newbie.
For example, if I need to move my hand over to the mouse to do some common action, that's not ok. If I even have to move my hand over to the arrow keys, that's seriously suspect.
I would also never use the native OS file open dialogs for the same reason. It's fine to offer them of course. But anybody who's trying to get fast and proficient will rapidly move beyond them. For this, lighttable offers workspaces & the navigation pane, which is still really primitive compared to ido-mode (poor keyboard navigation, no tab completion of partial names, no ability to jump beyond a single, pre-created workspace).
> I would be pretty happy if someone came along, took the super extensibility of emacs (which at first glance atom appears to do) and spun up a sexy, modern, not-lisp-using alternative.
As an emacs user, I would be pretty happy if someone came along, took the super extensibility of emacs (which at first glance atom appears to do) and spun up a sexy, modern, not-lisp-using alternative. The thing is though, my number one priority for a text editor is that it's under a Free Software compatible license. This is simply not a negotiable point for me personally.
I honestly find it pretty amusing that despite the fact technology progresses at such a rapid rate, I'm using a text editor that was first developed a decade before I was even born.