Github now has their own editor and have named it Atom. As a side note it’s being described as “web native”. What does that mean? To put it simple, it’s built on top of web browser technologies, namely Chromium (which Chrome is built on). More on that below.
The fact that GitHub now has a new code editor is what has attracted most interest, but the real news is how this editor was conceived and designed.
Since GitHub is hosting code in the cloud it would be obvious that their editor was somewhat cloud based and/or an web app of some sort. There’s plenty of such editors. like Orion and CodePen. But what Github created is completely different. It’s not a browser hosted web app. Although a lot of the implementation is HTML/Javascript based it doesn’t run in a browser. Github found that web app based editors had some limitations from a security standpoint with regards to accessing the local file system and can’t run local sub processes.
So what did they do?
They took the source code of Chromium, the open source browser that Chrome is based on and customized it to work with the Atom web app. Put simply they have removed all of the security features built into the browser and this allows Atom to access anything it needs to. From the users point of view this is a very strange situation because they are running a web app but they have to download a special desktop application to run it! And a hefty download it is. Around 50 MB, but who cares about such things these days anyway?
The advantage of this approach is that the web app part of the system can be continuously updated and it has all of the interactive qualities of a web app but without the security restrictions mentioned above. As the Atom blog points out it also solves the problem of browser compatibility:
“Another great thing about writing code for Atom is the guarantee that it’s running on the newest version of Chromium. That means we can ignore issues like browser compatibility and polyfills. We can use all the web’s shiny features of tomorrow, today.”
The disadvantage is that the user has to download a special desktop app and can’t just move to another machine to work without downloading and installing the app. As I see it, minor.
Atom can currently run on the most popular OS’s, Windows, OSX and even Linux (some distributions).
The editor looks great and has the look and feel of Sublime Text. This is probably not a coincidence. It seems like GitHub has aimed at offering a free version of this popular programmers editor. And according to many who writes code they are very close to being successful in this regard.
If you like to use an advanced text editor and want something different and new you should most definitely take a look at Atom. Yes, you will be downloading a complete web browser to run it, but who cares as long as you get your job done in an elegant and well functioning shiny new editor called Atom! Get it here:
