Atom is a free and open source text editor offering a range of packages and themes.
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Enthought Canopy
Score 7.0 out of 10
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Austin based Enthought offers their flagship scientific Python distribution, Canopy. The Canopy Geoscience (or Canopy Geo) variant of the product is a data analysis, exploration and visualization package optimized for geologists & geophysicists, and researchers in petroleum science.
Atom is great for simple HTML coding. It's fast, has intuitive shortcuts and several options. I particularly love the "convert spaces to tabs" function that I haven't seen in other editors.
I'm not sure how it would fair in more serious web development today, if there are plugins for live updates of the page you are working on...
But the problem is that it has been discontinued so you know there are no new features or fixes coming through.
Enthought Canopy is best suites for scripting data analytical concepts. It has a wide range of data analytical libraries and also is good for data visualization. I would not recommend using Enthought Canopy only as an IDE, there may be better options available. If you're looking for a good data simulation & visualization package, Canopy it is.
Atom is highly customizable and allows for various themes and extensions that can make your code easier to read.
Atom has many code hinting features that allow users to write faster and integrate with services likeLINT that can clean up your code once your done to meet your internal teams style choices.
It's very fast and manages projects well - Accessing other files within a related folder(s) is very easy and intuitive.
Providing scientific libraries, both open source and Enthought's own libraries which are excellent.
Training. They provide several courses in python for general use and for data analysis.
Debugging tools. Several IDEs provides tools for debugging, but I think they are insufficient or too general. Canopy has a special debugging tool, specially design for python.
Well Atom is open source so the re-new is a no brainer. The only way I would stop using Atom is if the developers somehow made it not function well. Or, if the project got forked to a commercial version or something. Or, there could be the case that development stops or that it was not updated on this or that platform
I give Atom a 9 because it is one of the most modern text editors built with JavaScript intentionally to allow the editor to be changed and modified with custom functionality that a team may need. I think I would otherwise give atom an 8 due to support, but it gets a 9/10 because of the extensibility/plugin capability.
Atom has an active forum and a Slack group where you can ask technical questions. Occasionally, the authors will pop in to answer a few questions here and there, but most of the time, its other helpful users who will assist you. Though they aren't the most knowledgeable, they are at least timely.
As for plugin support, that differs with each plugin, but as I mentioned before, many plugins are no longer maintained.
Our company likes to keep things open, and we don't want to prevent developers from customizing their environment the way they want. Atom seemed to be a lot more open than our existing tools and has good community support on pretty much any programming language. This can create some confusion since adding too many extensions or customizing can make the tool slower than it is supposed to be.
Before Canopy with its python we were working with Matlab. We decided for Canopy against Matlab for two reasons: First, we believe that python together with NumPy or SciPy can achieve the objectives with less code and therefore less training, and second the prizes are much lower than matlab which is most robust, expensive and less intuitive. It's clear we are making the comparison with python and it has nothing to with canopy. But with Canopy you feel you have all those tools close together without the problem of configuration, besides a lot of personalized libraries that complements a typical python environment.
The tool we use when we need quick fixes. Allows fast, reliable scripting to fix urgent problems in our applications.
When applications grow from 5-10 files to 100's, they need to be migrated to a heavier-duty IDE. This can be cumbersome and quite annoying, but is necessary to maintain code integrity on such a large scale (since it cannot be done with the limited default toolset of Atom).
