Coming from a background in Linux server administration, of course my first editor was Vim. I really like Vim as a basic editor, but when I started programing it really did not fit my needs. I realize that you can highly customize Vim and make it much like “modern” editors of today, this just seemed way to complex for me and I wanted something a bit more user friendly with mouse support.
The editor everyone recommended to me was Sublime 2. I enjoyed the look and feel of Sublime, but it still did not seem as user friendly that I hoped. Even so, I decided to go ahead with it as it seemed to be the best option at that time.
I used Sublime 2 as my primary editor for about 2 years. I had it very customized to my liking and I was very confortable with it. So changing editors at this point was not even on my radar.
About 6 months ago I stumbled across Atom, an editor still in beta from GitHub. It was promising an awesome packaging system, theme support, GitHub support baked in, and powered all by NodeJS and web technologies. At the time I was really getting into NodeJS and decided that I wanted to give it a try to see what it was capable of.
Right out of the box Atom blew me away with an amazing packaging system. Within minutes I found a theme and syntax that I liked and all the comparable plugins I was using in Sublime 2. I felt at home with Atom as it was much like Sublime 2 and most the keyboard shortcuts were the same. It wasn’t till I started coding in an actual Git project that I realized I would not be going back to Sublime 2. It had built in Git support that I had never seen before, such as lines were colored that had been changed/added/deleted and the same thing with new/changed files/folders in the tree view.
Atom recently released version 1.0 and at this point I would recommend it to everyone. It is extremely stable and they have greatly improved the startup time and speed. I am excited to see what they do next with Atom, hopefully some more great baked in GitHub features and solving the problem of opening very large files (200MB+).
Recommended Plugins
- atom-beautify
- color-picker
- pigments
- file-icons
- linter - List of compatible linters http://atomlinter.github.io/
- merge-conflicts