[lug] Atom text editor

[Brennen Bearnes]

Rambling, it-is-Friday-and-I-am-about-to-go-to-Rockygrass thoughts:

I've test driven it a little of late. I'd say it's hit a state of
actual, day-to-day usability, if you don't mind some rough edges.

A coworker has built some cross-platform desktop tools with
https://github.com/atom/electron - it's not exactly a lightweight
dependency, but then again I'm not sure what is any more, and the
results are pretty decent.

I'd say it's IDE-like, and can be made more so by installing various
plugins (sorry, packages), but I guess I'd really describe Atom itself
as something between a project-oriented editor and a desktop UI
framework.  In practice I expect I'd use it a lot like I use a tricked
out Vim with NERDTree and a few other plugins for syntax checking /
version control stuff.  It definitely doesn't feel like an Eclipse or
what-have-you.

For your example cases I think the answer is that yeah, you could run
through those examples without having to shell out, given a couple of
packages. There're also shell packages (I just installed term2, but
maybe something else is better), and it might be most natural to just
do git things in a shell running alongside your file tree and code.

If it matters to anyone, the vim-emulation is not what I'd call great,
but neither is it completely hopeless.

I don't think it will replace my current primary tools any time soon,
but I do hope to see it survive and flourish. We need more viable
editors.

I'd look forward to hearing from anyone who can actually answer Jeff's
question from a few months of dedicated use... :)