[coldtea]

>If this was truly that simple, don't you think someone would have already done it?

Someone already has done it. An one-man-shop built Sublime Text by himself.

Surely it's not having JS as an extension language as opposed to Python (the only difference between ST and what I propose) that's making it difficult.

>Furthermore, is there even an actively maintained, open source, cross platform, development-focused text editor with native UI components?

There's a "cross platform, development-focused text editor with native UI component" that's working great.

Whether there's an open source editor like that is orthogonal, since what I'm discussing is whether is technically feasible to create such a browser -- and the existence of ST proves that it is (and that's by a single developer: with resources such as that GitHub or even better MS, have, it would be much easier).

The choice of license is just a decision after that.

[nilliams]

I think the developer behind Sublime Text is widely recognised as an outlier.

>> "Sublime Text 2 is mostly coded in C++ and uses a custom UI toolkit." ... [0]

How many other devs/teams are going to reasonably take that on.

(And how do you think the debugging story of his custom framework compares to Chrome Devtools).

[0] http://stackoverflow.com/a/9201645

[frou_dh]

> How many other devs/teams are going to reasonably take that on?

This strikes me as a sort of devolving-human standpoint that might lead to someone in 2050 asking how anybody could possibly walk 10 miles unassisted.

In the past, small teams of talented developers have written an entire game + game engine + associated tools from scratch, countless times.

Doing in-depth custom UI development for the desktop as part of creating a text editor does not bin as 'Mountain-moving; Don't even try' difficulty.

[dstaley]

I don't think anyone is arguing that it's technically impossible to create anything. I was just pointing out that the tradeoffs that Atom accepted aren't simply trivial to solve. Jon has put an amazing amount of work into Sublime Text to get it where it is today; it's not some simple thing to build a great, native text editor. However, it's not like Sublime Text isn't without its own tradeoffs.

[Touche]

How long did it take to build Sublime Text vs. Electron + Atom? Are the original developers in Atom experienced in C++? How easy is it for 3rd party developers to contribute extensions to each? How do the extension catalogs compare, in size?