[jamesmoss]

I've just had play around with the beta. It looks like it's using a version of CodeMirror 4 (as it has multiple ranges). Fairly fast but it doesn't match Sublime Text just yet

Initial impressions: it's early days but this thing is just oozing for customisation. The fact it's written in JS means writing packages is pretty simple compared to Python for ST; we're going to see TONNES of addons for it. I can already think of 2-3 I'd like to build.

The one thing that really excites me is how people getting into programming could start off with a pretty basic editor and add and write packages as they hone their skills, ending with something incredible powerful and tailored to them. In fact I'd really love to see a super customised starter version for children / beginners that acts as a learning aid as well as a text editor.

No doubt there's going to be haters in the vim / emacs / ST / insert favourite editor here camp but I really hope this works out for the Github guys (and I have a feeling it will).

[ytpete]

Fwiw, Brackets (http://brackets.io) supports a similar degree of customization since it's also written in JS/HTML, uses CodeMirror, and offers lots of extensibility APIs. And it's MIT-licensed. Writing an extension is as easy as this: https://github.com/adobe/brackets/wiki/Simple-"Hello-World"-...

[spyder]

Looks like in Atom you can just inspect elements of the editor and change them right there. In Brackets if you want to change the font of the editor then you have to write an extension or search for the CSS file of the editor which is barely editable with Brackets because it's slows down with the somewhat bigger CSS file, syntax highlight stops at the half of the file and searching was extremely slow for me in this big file.

[ytpete]

You can open dev tools on either of these editors, but in both cases you're not making permanent changes to the source that will stick around the next time you launch the app.

Hacking the minified source isn't going to be fun no matter what, but if you clone Brackets from git the original LESS files are very easy to modify. Or you could just write a three line extension (https://github.com/adobe/brackets/wiki/Customize-Your-Code-F...) to adjust the CSS without modifying the core at all. That flexibility is the advantage of building on the web tech stack (an advantage shared by Brackets, Light Table, and Atom alike).

[greyskull]

When I first saw Brackets, I was surprised to see it come out of Adobe. I had no idea that they did any open-source work, especially considering their product portfolio.

[_zen]

> Initial impressions: it's early days but this thing is just oozing for customisation. The fact it's written in JS means writing packages is pretty simple compared to Python for ST; we're going to see TONNES of addons for it. I can already think of 2-3 I'd like to build.

This isn't why it's going to be popular for plugin development though. Sublime plugins are Python, which isn't that hard to learn.

Atom's plugins are worth looking forward to if the API is more extensive than Sublime. There is too much you can't do in Sublime Text plugin authoring.

[jamesmoss]

> This isn't why it's going to be popular for plugin development though. Sublime plugins are Python, which isn't that hard to learn.

Agreed, but Javascript has many more developers who know JS over Python. From my initial glance at the docs the learning curve for package development isn't too steep either.

[marijn]

What makes you think it's using CodeMirror? My impression is that they implemented their own editor component from scratch.