Atom 1.0: First impressions
Last week I decided to give GitHub's Atom an honest try as my go-to editor (in tandem with Vim, depending on the project). There were a couple of factors leading to this decision:
- Atom had just hit 1.0, and I wondered if my early criticisms of it (mostly speed-related) were still warranted.
- I'd just started setup of a fresh Mac OS X install and was in the midst of an informal software audit. Bye bye, TextMate and TextMate 2. We've had a great run together.
So about one week in, here are the things I'm liking most:
- The Atom ecosystem is already huge. It's really nice to notice something you'd like the editor to do (for example, displaying a realtime word count while writing blog posts and book chapters), check for Atom packages, and find at least one solution, or more. It's a testament to the ubiquity of JavaScript.
- And when Atom doesn't quite do what you'd like, it's dead simple to customize using common web tools. This has been my favorite features, hands down. I also like how straightforward it is to get to customizations in Atom. To be honest, I never quite figured out how extensibility in TextMate 2 was supposed to work, and wound up reverting my behavior to just accepting whatever was available to me.
- I don't know if I'm supposed to be doing this, but I like that I can keep my Atom configurations under source control by adding an atom directory in my dotfiles, then symlinking ~/.atom to it. I couldn't easily do that with TextMate. It'll be nice to have consistent settings, more or less out of the box, across multiple Macs and an Ubuntu workstation.
Gripes? Just a couple:
- It does still seem a smidge slow sometimes, at least when opening a large-ish project.
- In a perfect world, I'd love to see an iOS release of some sort. Not a deal breaker.
It's probably apparent that, overall, I've been pleased with Atom and plan to keep using it.
. Questions or comments? Let me know what you think.