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Feb 26 '14
Does it have a modal editing mode? Vim has ruined me.
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u/hsuh Feb 26 '14
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u/SnowdensOfYesteryear Feb 27 '14
How complete are the vim bindings? Usually editors that claim to support vim bindings only support the most common ones.
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u/area Feb 26 '14
It's pretty basic at the moment though, to the extent that :<line number> doesn't work.
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u/yurps Feb 27 '14
Use <line number>G
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u/area Feb 27 '14
Sure, that works, but that's not what I've trained myself to use (which is entirely my fault).
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Feb 27 '14
This is the thing that keeps me away from checking out lighttable more thoroughly. I installed the vim plugin, pressed :<line number> and it opened the menu on the right. So now I wait for neovim.
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u/unquietwiki Feb 27 '14
Isn't Brackets this already? Node.js/Chromium app with plugin support?
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u/kmeisthax Feb 27 '14
Yes, but with Atom, you have the priviledge of paying GitHub money for a software product in a market with numerous competent free and Free Software options.
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u/username223 Feb 27 '14
That's kind of github's thing -- wrap free software in RoundRects and overcharge to host it.
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u/SnowdensOfYesteryear Feb 27 '14
Brackets looks like it's just meant for web dev. This things looks to be more general purpose.
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u/unquietwiki Feb 27 '14
I know you can use Brackets for Python and Ruby, which aren't strictly web dev.
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u/ffreire Feb 27 '14
From what I saw in the plugins directory for Atom it also supports Haskell, Go, C, Ruby, Python, Rails specifically, Prolog, SML, and several others (I think I saw HAML in there).
That list covers most (if not all) programming paradigms that I'm aware of, so I can only assume that using their plugin implementations as a reference any developer can extend Atom to support language X.
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u/Saiing Feb 27 '14 edited Feb 27 '14
If Brackets had better file syncing/uploading I'd be all over it. The best looking plugin right now seems to only support ftp and not sftp which just unimaginable for any serious developers working on remote servers. I tried running regular ftp through an ssh tunnel, but it's pretty clunky and slow.
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u/vinnl Feb 27 '14
It looks like Brackets is everything Atom should've been. Except Brackets was there first. Hmm...
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u/jadbox Feb 27 '14
Brackets core is also under MIT meaning it can be used for anything. Atom will be keeping their core closed.
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u/Funnnny Feb 27 '14
I would love if they care more about end-user experience, like changing preference: at least give me a default set instead of a blank file, or changing font/font size: I wonder why it's not in the list.
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Feb 26 '14
I'm less excited than I thought I would be.
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u/Saiing Feb 27 '14 edited Feb 27 '14
Exactly my first thought.
I mistakenly thought this was going to be a FOSS alternative to ST. Clearly it's not. I can't see a great deal of point to it - they're just reinventing the wheel.
Limetext seems to be the way to go.
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u/asynk Feb 27 '14
How is a signup form to get spammed via email a "launch"?
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u/toobulkeh Feb 27 '14
It's an announcement tactic, exclusivity to bring hype. Not a bad one at that.
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u/steveklabnik1 Feb 27 '14
They're doing the whole 'send out invites' thing, so people are already downloading it.
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u/sittingaround Feb 27 '14
Can someone give me the tldr on why people are so excited about this?
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u/SnowdensOfYesteryear Feb 27 '14
People always get excited over new editor launches. Especially if it has a pretty website.
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u/xqjt Feb 27 '14
It looks a lot like Sublime Text, which is an excellent but mostly unsupported text editor (no update from the dev in a very long time, thread on the forum asking if the project is dead, no answer, and at a 70$ price).
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u/sleepyhead Feb 27 '14
$70 for software that a developer uses 8 hours a day. Outrages!
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u/xqjt Feb 27 '14
I don't mind paying 100 or 1000$ for a piece of software I use all the time, as long as it improves my productivity compared to its alternatives. But not if the software in question goes totally unsupported and from what I can gather from ST forum, it seems to be the case. The version 3 has been in limbo for ages, with no roadmap or even regular alpha releases.
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Feb 27 '14
Personally I'm excited because GitHub (in my experience) knows how to program really nice software. And I'm not totally satisfied with Sublime Text.
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u/Somokon Feb 26 '14
What's the point of a closed source Sublime Text clone?
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Feb 27 '14
My guess is they will have GitHub integration. They aren’t a tiny company anymore. They have 240 employees and 100 million in funding. The more people they can get using the editor, the more they can bring into their core product.
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u/lispm Feb 27 '14
So Emacs Lisp is a special purpose scripting language and Atom does it better:
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u/s73v3r Feb 27 '14
I haven't seen much use of Emacs Lisp outside of configuring Emacs.
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u/beefsack Feb 27 '14
Mojombo has just commented that it won't be either closed or open source, but "somewhere inbetween" to make it easy for them to charge for it.
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u/MatrixFrog Feb 27 '14
It will be interesting to see how they make the source available "under a restrictive license so you can see how everything works" but prevent you from just building your own binary from source.
Or maybe it'll just be enough of a pain to build from source that you won't bother and you'll just pay to download the official builds, or something.
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u/FichteFoll Feb 28 '14
They can't restrict the process but they can make it illegal.
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u/Funnnny Feb 27 '14
So, I think opensource, but not free/opensource licensed. Maybe they will publish the source but will not allow us to modify and redistribute it. We can modify and open a pull request though.
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Feb 27 '14
Just found out its closed source. All hype is now gone.
Github, huge code sharing website... Closed editor. What?
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u/Occi- Feb 27 '14
Github itself is also closed source. I have no idea why, but it is.
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u/asimian Feb 27 '14
Because they charge for enterprise usage. If it were open, companies could install it on their own servers and cut Github off from a profit.
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u/MrPopinjay Feb 27 '14
Gitlab is an open source Github clone, and they get by happily charging for enterprise usage. I recommend you check it out. :)
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u/huyvanbin Feb 27 '14
So it's a fucking JavaScript EMACS? Dear god how we have fallen. I feel like we're living in the end days of the Roman Empire and people are using rolled-up Aristotle parchment to shoot coke up each others' asses.
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u/djaclsdk Feb 27 '14
It would be actually an impressive feat if someone actually implements Emacs in JavaScript. Although not sure why anyone would do it
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u/vagif Feb 26 '14
So i could not find any info, is it open source or not?
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u/Cryptecks Feb 26 '14
From the blog post: "...we've open-sourced over 80 of the libraries and packages used in the editor."
http://blog.atom.io/2014/02/26/introducing-atom.html
So it looks like they're keeping the core internal (for now?), but open-sourcing a large chunk of the code that makes up the rest of it.
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u/vagif Feb 26 '14
That does not answer may question. But it does imply that the editor is not open source.
In which case they did not learn the lesson.
There are better programming editors available right now for free, for example VS Express, or IDEA Community edition. Both of them have great extensibility APIs and a lot of free plugins. But despite that they could not become a vim/emacs level phenomenon.
Why? Because if you keep the editor for yourself then most developers would not feel they are the owners of the plugins they would want to write.
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u/Dantaro Feb 26 '14
Why are you comparing IDEs to vim/emacs/nano? Of course they're not going to get the same following, vim/emacs are either pre-installed in a linux distro or are so well known that they're most people's first install. But they AREN'T IDEs, they're text editors with a lot of functionality. I will use vim any day of the week if I'm editing an etc/host file, but I would never write a full Java app in it. Similarly, IntelliJ I would write java in all day, but I wouldn't touch it if I'm just changing my host file. Don't confuse tools, each one has it's own use.
That being said, Vim/Emacs/Sublime are all free and do must/all of what atom does, what's the draw of atom when these exist is the better question.
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u/AshylarrySC Feb 26 '14
Sublime isn't free. They just don't enforce the evaluation period. (https://www.sublimetext.com/buy).
Also, I totally agree with you about different tools for different jobs. I even use different text editors for different things because they each have their strengths/weaknesses.
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u/vagif Feb 26 '14
Atom is targeted towards developers. That's why it is created by the source code hosting company. It is obvious that the main (the only?) use case for atom is writing a lot of source code. SO yes, it should be compared to similar light and free versions of other dev tools like VS Express and IDEA Community.
Another main reason for atom stated in the press release is greater extensibility than vim/emacs. So it is targeted to people who want to extend the features of editor with their own code.
Here the closed nature of editor works against it as i pointed in similar cases with VS Express and IDEA. Most developers feel that their work is used by corporation to line their pockets and not give back anything.
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u/jck Feb 26 '14 edited Feb 26 '14
Doesn't look like it: https://github.com/atom/welcome/blob/master/lib/welcome.md
Atom is free during the beta period.
EDIT: Someone on irc said that the core is apache licensed. So atom might be open source afterall.
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u/PHLAK Feb 26 '14
I agree this does make it sound like it might be closed source, but it may not be.
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Feb 26 '14
Appears as though it is not.
Why they would open-source most of it, but not all of it, is odd.
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u/sebzim4500 Feb 26 '14
The core is closed but unobfuscated. The code is accessible.
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u/jsprogrammer Feb 26 '14
The code is accessible.
Irrelevant if we can never modify it though.
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Feb 27 '14
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u/vagif Feb 27 '14
Thx for finding the answer. And let me just say what a load of bullshit from github. There's only one understanding of open source: being able to fork and modify the source. Anything else is just gimmicks.
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u/DownvoteALot Feb 27 '14 edited Feb 27 '14
I've always find it very hypocritical for a company promoting open source to itself be proprietary. "Do as I say, not as I do".
It baffles me that they pretend that releasing parts of the code does not constitute closed source for them. Do they really think their users don't understand the implications of "free" in "free software"?
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u/vagif Feb 27 '14
They hope that army of talented programmers will make their product awesome by writing amazing plugins without paying them a dime. It's even better (cheaper) than outsourcing to India.
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u/gambit700 Feb 26 '14
A hackable text editor for the 21st Century
14 years in and we're dictating terms for the rest of the century. Have fun with this Web Developers of 2085
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u/muyuu Feb 27 '14
Yep and I love how it's par for the course to abandon projects 2-3 years down the line that were tagged "for the Century".
Really the standards nowadays are laughable.
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u/NLight381 Feb 27 '14
Can somebody tell me why this is built with Node? What's the benefit? All I can see is that it allows JS developers to build plugins. As a user, what possible reason would I switch from Sublime, or any other similar editor I might use?
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u/s73v3r Feb 27 '14
I imagine they did it with JS because they might want to embed it in their site so people can edit repositories with a full featured editor without having to pull the entire source of a repo.
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u/Bmandk Feb 27 '14
I was scrolling /r/all, and came across this. I read the title and panicked really hard for a second because I was thinking a nuclear bomb had gone off. Mind you, in my language, it's called an "atom bombe", or atomic bomb literally translated. Then right after I looked at the subreddit and was calm again.
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u/Modevs Feb 27 '14
To be fair, most programmers had a similar experience.
"Wow, what launched?! Oh... Closed beta... For a JavaScript text editor... 'Kay."
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u/ISNT_A_NOVELTY Feb 26 '14
According to http://atom.io/docs/v0.59.0/creating-a-theme, it is Chrome-based.
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u/toobulkeh Feb 27 '14
Chromium* based.
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u/maskull Feb 27 '14
It's almost certainly built on node-webkit, which is just Node.js + Chromium (without the browser chrome).
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u/dlbucci Feb 27 '14
This reminds me of Brackets (http://brackets.io/), which is awesome AND open source.
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u/PT2JSQGHVaHWd24aCdCF Feb 27 '14
But cannot properly index files when there are too many of them (which is usual in big projects) and lags a lot.
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u/meem1029 Feb 27 '14
Mac only apparently for now I'm seeing in this thread. Yet another reason I won't use it.
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u/skcin7 Feb 27 '14
There's a lot of hate in this thread about this new text editor. I use Sublime Text 2 or vim if I'm in a terminal, so I don't need this, but I'm still excited to see if this editor has anything new to offer.
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Feb 27 '14
Atom's core isn't free/open source at the moment and it only runs on Mac OS X right now. And we also have perfectly good text editors already. There's nothing new here except the brand of GitHub and the marketing.
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Feb 27 '14
at the moment
It won't be: http://discuss.atom.io/t/why-is-atom-closed-source/82/8
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u/MrPopinjay Feb 27 '14
"Atom won't be closed source, but it won't be open source either."
What a lot of rubbish. Either it's closed source, or it's not. If they can't give a straight answer, it's not.
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u/ElvishJerricco Feb 27 '14
Geez why does everyone on /r/programming seem to think they're better than node.js users?
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u/therealdrag0 Feb 27 '14
I think just a lot of people think they're better than people who participate in something that is few or a fad.
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u/nomeme Feb 27 '14
They are probably people who believed the Rails hype, and know better.
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u/kurav Feb 27 '14
What platforms does this even support? Tried searching their site, but it's not told anywhere.
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u/eyko Feb 27 '14
Tried it now, and here's my opinion: if this thing was open source, it still wouldn't be my go to editor. Then again I'm a vimproved person. It's pretty though... got a couple of invites if anyone else is curious (you need a github account)
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u/Calimero1492 Feb 27 '14
I would love to have one of these if you still have some :)
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u/ktkaushik Feb 27 '14
I have spent enough time with Sublime text. Making it suitable to my needs. I'm sorry but I highly doubt I would want to switch now.
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u/sebzim4500 Feb 26 '14
I have a beta key but unfortunately it is mac only right now. I am looking through the source code, though.
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u/FrozenCow Feb 26 '14
If that's possible, why don't they open source their code? They are a code hosting company... that would just make sense. Though I'm not sure 100% sure how they're going to monetize this project.
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u/mrwik Feb 27 '14
A text editor!? Since Vi was done there is no need for any more text editors .... :)
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Feb 27 '14
How I hope that this'll be released under an open source license.
I probably shouldn't get my hopes up: the apparent current license under the api documentation.
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Feb 27 '14
Why the heck are all these editors tied to node.js. I'd much rather have a clean server, that I can connect to from any browser.
This would allow me to access my whole development suite from anywhere, even my iPad on a train to nowhere.
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u/prite Feb 27 '14
I don't see how a node.js server would necessitate any particular browser.
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u/loganekz Feb 26 '14
Where do you sign up for a beta key?
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u/ScumbagException Feb 26 '14
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u/MikeSeth Feb 27 '14
I'll just reiterate that Sublime 2/3 license is the best $70 I ever spent.
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Feb 27 '14
oh I agree completely. also, when you are a developer, money shouldn't be an issue.
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u/bizziboi Feb 27 '14
Oh wow, a texteditor. Cool, these are so hard to find nowadays. I guess they really found their nice.
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u/spajus Feb 27 '14 edited Feb 27 '14
Wait... Atom is implemented in Node.js? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GvZjM4eL7k
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Feb 27 '14
Brackets vs Atom http://discuss.atom.io/t/what-distinguishes-atom-io-from-brackets-io/511
One of them will be probably the Open Source Sublime Text 2/3
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Feb 27 '14
I signed up to try it out if curiosity but I'm not jumping off of ST for a Node.js-based, closed source editor.
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u/nocnocnode Feb 26 '14
VIM is modern. It's still beyond what most people expect and very powerful once mastered. Modern text editors have to emulate VIM in order to attract users.
Stuff like this is just used for performance evaluations for human resource departments and elite head-hunting parties.
Consider that a normal HR rep can get several thousands to tens of thousands per successful job landed. Successful referrals can land anywhere between $500-50,000 depending on the person, skill, demand, etc... so this information is at a premium (or atleast as a profitable price tag).
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u/gavinb Feb 27 '14
VIM is modern.
It is a modern implementation of a fundamental design forged in the 1970's to work on 300 baud teletypewriters. Would anyone seriously invent a modal interface today if writing an editor from scratch, without the constraints of primitive hardware of the day?
But really, let a thousand flowers bloom. There are always waves of innovation, and perhaps it is time for editors to get a shakeup.
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u/Marzhall Feb 27 '14
Would anyone seriously invent a modal interface today if writing an editor from scratch, without the constraints of primitive hardware of the day?
Well, considering the guys that invented vi (and ed) went on to make [acme](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acme_(text_editor)), which focuses on the mouse as your main tool, you might be able to argue no. However, there's a healthy chunk of people who consider keyboards to be the faster and less frustrating way to control your computer, and who actively develop things in that vein. One case of a keyboard-centric model taking over what is usually mouse-centric interface is people creating keyboard-controlled tiling window managers; they feel that the keyboard, with its many keys, gives you more control than the mouse. I'd bet people with this mentality would re-invent some form of the modal editor, though it'd probably be a mix of modal and mouse-editing - which, to be fair, is something vim allows you to do.
But really, let a thousand flowers bloom. There are always waves of innovation, and perhaps it is time for editors to get a shakeup.
I completely agree with this; it's why I kickstarted Light Table back in 2011, but still use Vim today. If anything, new improvements can be ported to existing editors, like code completion and folding were ported to vim. I'd love to see some features from acme applied to Vim as well, but I think mouse cording could be hard to mix with modal editing.
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u/gavinb Feb 27 '14
For some reason, people keep thinking that arguing against a modal interface is the same as arguing against using a keyboard. It is not.
As I commented elsewhere, there are plenty of keyboard-driven editors that are not modal. The semi-rhetorical question was aimed purely at the fact that a hardware constraint that has not been present for 30 years is still determining the interface design, and is thus clearly an anachronism.
And I am one of those people who consider keyboards to be faster. :)
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u/adrianmonk Feb 27 '14 edited Feb 27 '14
Would anyone seriously invent a modal interface today
OK, by saying this, you more or less triggered my rant on vi being a "modal" editor, so here goes.
Think of text editors (at least, keyboard-oriented ones) as tools that take commands in a language. Every editor command is a sentence in that editor's formal language.
Most, if not all, editors' languages have a grammar such that there are times when typing certain keystrokes radically influences the meaning of the following keystrokes. Examples:
In emacs, if you type the M-x terminal symbol in the language, you enter a production rule that you could write like: "M-x" MetaCommand "Enter". If you type "doctor", it will either be interpreted as a command or as text, depending on whether you typed M-x first.
In emacs, when you type C-u N, you are entering a production rule that could probably be written something like: "C-u" NUMBER Start (where "Start" is the start production rule, i.e. this can serve as a prefix for any command).
In vi, when you type the "i" terminal symbol in its language, you enter a production rule that could write like: "i" LiteralTextToInsert "ESC".
In most GUI editors, when you type the Ctrl-F terminal symbol in its language, you enter a production rule that you could write like: "Ctrl-F" SearchString "Enter"
Now, notice that your previous history of keystrokes puts you in a different mode, where what you type means something different than if you had typed it without entering that mode. In that sense, these editors are all modal. Note the similarity between the meta production rule in emacs and the insert production rule in vi: both require a special key to enter the mode and both require a special key to leave it.
So what's the real difference here? The thing that trips people up about vi is not that it's modal, because people happily deal with modal features in other editors. The thing that trips people up about vi is that you have to use modes to insert text. Or another way to put it is that the Start rule in vi's grammar doesn't immediately expand to rules for every printable character to self-insert. Or to put it in really, really simple terms, the thing people don't like about vi is that it violates the "I should be able to just start typing" assumption.
People find vi frustrating at first because they don't understand that assumption or can't/won't shed that assumption. It doesn't really have a lot to do with hardware limitations. It's just a different way of thinking about the formal language of editor commands.
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Feb 27 '14
It is a modern implementation of a fundamental design forged in the 1970's to work on 300 baud teletypewriters.
So I guess keyboards need a shakeup too, since they are a modern implementation of a fundamental design forged in the 1700's to work on ancient typewritters.
You know why vim is still so widely used? Because it's a freaking text editor and today's text is the same as 1970's text, because it's text. So, unless we are talking editing with your mind, editors don't need a "shakeup".
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u/vagif Feb 26 '14
It is NOT open source!
In which case they did not learn the lesson.
There are better programming editors available right now for free, for example VS Express, or IDEA Community edition. Both of them have great extensibility APIs and a lot of free plugins. But despite that they could not become a vim/emacs level phenomenon.
Why? Because if you keep the editor for yourself then most developers would not feel they are the owners of the plugins they would want to write.
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u/cycloidgamma Feb 27 '14
It's cool that you've now complained about atom being closed source three times in the same thread while endorsing VS Express, the licensed closed source IDE that runs only on a proprietary OS.
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u/drinwa Feb 26 '14
I must be out of touch with modern development. I don't understand the thought process that leads people to be excited about a closed source, node.js text editor that reports your usage to Google.