A 'hackable' editor by GitHub
November 21, 2019

A 'hackable' editor by GitHub

Chaithra Kamath | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Atom

My team uses it to develop and maintain our websites using HTML, JavaScript and Django, a python based framework. It is also used as a general purpose text editor. It's light weight too. It also gave us functions comparable to that of a IDE without all the memory usage. It's open source and easily customizable. We also found it to have one of the best GIT integrations among its competitors.
  • Opensource : While Sublime is a good editor which is comparable to Atom, it's not opensource. Atom is opensource. Which makes it easier to tailor it to suit your needs.
  • Autocomplete: Atom automatically variable names, functions and constructs, it also closes the brackets as soon as you open one. Which helps me avoid syntax errors.
  • Simplicity : It maintains simplicity without sacrificing important features.
  • GIT Integration : Considering that it's built by GitHub, it's no surprise that Atom has a very good GIT integration.
  • Startup is a bit slow. Memory management can be improved.
  • Support for syntax highlighting for some languages are missing.
  • Some plugins randomly crash and Atom stops responding. Uninstalling the plugin that crashed usually solves this.
  • Search engine does not work as you would expect it to work.
  • We could run it on systems running different operating systems which enabled better co-operation within the team.
  • The go-to editor for small projects and web development in our team.
We needed an opensource program to tailor it to our needs. It was also stable enough to handle small to medium projects. It had one of the best built-in GIT integration. It has a clean UI. The simplicity of Atom is why we use it to train new members.
The community is very helpful and active. Most of the problems are solved with a quick google search. We have not experienced any major issues with Atom yet.

Do you think Atom delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Atom's feature set?

Yes

Did Atom live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Atom go as expected?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy Atom again?

Yes

It is well suited for new programmers who are looking for a free editor to start coding. It also supports most major languages out there. You can use the same software to develop a program in Java, python and many other languages. It is also cross-platform. It is a bare-bones code editor that you can build up to your
liking using the available plugins to extend the functionalities.