In short, Atom editor by GitHub is well-built, focused on code (there isn't really anything getting in your way), similar to Sublime. Now I haven't used Sublime beyond basics and generally favour GUI, rather than command line. Everything can be found via CTRL+SHIFT+P. However, if something can be typed with 5 characters, and it could have also been called with 2 keystrokes, I'd choose the keystrokes approach. I'm not a Sublime user, you guessed it right, won't be paying 70$ for a fancy text editor, if WebStorm is worth 59$. Not an affiliate of JetBrains, just common sense. TL;DR version is at the bottom of this page - under Summary. Options for color schemes are very good, I found a really great dark theme, this coming from a user who never used dark themes on anything yet. If you are like me, try it out, their dark theme is excellent. I used "One Dark" for UI Theme and "Base16 Tomorrow Dark" for Syntax Theme. In my opinion, these make a great combination together. Not to mention that you can install custom themes as well. With all my current plugins, Atom looks like this (details to follow): To me it looks great, makes you want to write some code. Unfortunately, it does not work like this out of the box, so below I will describe plugins, which help make Atom more usable. The good - what worked:
The bad - what didn't work (and I really hoped it would):
People can say "use command line" or TortoiseGit (which I have installed, just lazy to minimize Atom, navigate in Explorer/Total Commander and use from the right click menu) - I prefer the IDE to have everything in it. Good example - there simply isn't anything to compare with the level of convenience offered by WebStorm/PhpStorm (click on below image to see full size): Challenge - if you know better than the above diff view, feel free to drop me an email. If I find it decent, the article will be updated and you will get a credit. Side note - I already know about Beyond Compare, Araxis Merge, Code Compare by Devart, WinMerge and many others. Summary Overall, I spent 2 hours straight (no breaks for coffee), trying to make things work and really hoping it would suffice my basic needs. Unfortunately, integrated support for version control is crucial. Atom editor is fairly new, many important plugins are community authored, and most of them are poor quality, i.e. they work, but often you see display artifacts/glitches. Not a production quality product, but hopefully in 2-3 years from now, we'll see a strong competitor to JetBrains and others. It's free though, so you may still give it a try and - because it's open source - help develop. |
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