I’ve been using the Atom editor for a couple of weeks, to give it a try. I found it appealing, but not yet for the every day use. Here is why.
The biggest problem I have are the bugs on vim-mode or related to it, you won’t be able to use ci}
motions/modificators and I ended up using bct}
, but still, you miss those very common commands. Those are bugs regarding atom-keymap
on GNU/Linux I helped debug two weeks ago.
Working on the terminal with tmux
and emacs
every day, for me switching for a while to a GUI IDE was a bit of a hassle. In the end I was fast due to vim-mode too, but I have a lot of transitions to the terminal during the day and errors due to bugs on the editor.
I made my own theme, completely inspired on vim Jellybeans, my favourite dark theme. It still need some work, but I’m getting there I think.
I also worked on some packages, but found difficult to play with it due to the lack of good documentation. I found a nice one, but not yet completed, rest-client, a REST client for Atom, and added the option of using custom headers. I think we could improve it so It’s more useful (save common requests, common headers, etc), but this was a nice way of getting into Atom package development and learn how it works underneath a bit.
Commands/tips I found nice to develop packages/themes
Opening the action panel (Ctrl-Shift-P
):
- Key Binding Resolver
Ctrl-.
: So you know what key is doing what when pressing it. - Webkit Dev tools (obviously).
- Sublime text match patterns, Atom uses the same syntax to match expressions.
atom --dev
.
I didn’t like
Atom editor gives more importance to Atom editor errors than linter errors (left in the image below, Atom editor warnings). I guess is something only until the 1.0 version, so nothing really annoying.
I liked
The Linter error bar and git gutter have a nice UX in the editor, and you could easily style it in your theme.
Separating environments to write/debug packages for the editor.
Atom Plugins I liked the most
- Term2 Nice terminal
- Project Manager
Simple plugins I missed from Emacs
I missed more packages, but these would be easier to develop, at least a simple first version of it.
- Rainbow delimiters
ex mode
I know it’s still a work in progress, but I am liking how It’s being improved, It’s going fast and as soon as some side packages are stabilized, the user experience could be much better.
After this two weeks I am back to Emacs, although I never really left. :-)