Early Thoughts on Atom

I got a beta of the Atom editor soon after its initial release. The first thing that I decided to do was to add support for the Dylan language.

As we had a Textmate bundle available, this was an easy process:

apm init -p ~/.atom/packages/language-dylan \
  -c https://github.com/textmate/dylan.tmbundle

This was the start of a pleasurable experience with Atom. Creating and publishing a new package was easy and the command line tools were easy to use (and documented). After just a couple of minutes, I had a package that provided basic syntax highlighting and code folding for Dylan. It also worked on any Dylan file that I opened, unlike using our Textmate bundle in SublimeText which would occasionally hang on some files (while Textmate was fine). How's that for extensibility? :)

Next up, I decided to improve upon our new Dylan package. So I added support for auto-indenting and code snippets. This too was straight forward and easy.

As a comparison, I've also worked in the past with some other Dylan hackers on a plugin for IntelliJ to provide Dylan language support. While many things in IntelliJ are relatively easy to do, they all ...

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