Item: Atom
Rating: 9
Author: Deepshi Sharma

Overall Satisfaction with Atom

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Atom is used by only the development team in my organization. Atom has a simple UI that makes users use it without any issues. It has support for GitHub and has a lot of plugins. Along with this, a user can write its own plugin. Support code formating for different languages and its minimap feature also helps sometimes. It is being used to develop clean, well-structured code for our product. It is simply perfect because of everything it provides. The next best thing about Atom is that you have git control over it which helps to make things super easy in terms of open sourcing.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Adding packages in preferable language
Formatting of code making it easy to read for all users
Support for GitHub and plugins and plugin development
It is able to handle large amounts of data without slowing down

Cons

There should be a better user tips manual page to learn keyboard shortcuts
It would also be beneficial if mathematical and data analytic tools were added
it has quite high start-up timing when you open large projects to work on it
Sometimes, atom closed suddenly and do not open again
It still lacks better options with the previews even though there are already some by users adding plugins
It doesn't have self-correct features for lint errors, unlike IntelliJ

Most Important Features

Support for GitHub, Plugins and Plugin development
Support for many languages
Support for many operating systems
UI is very good, has three column layout, syntax highlighting feature and much more
Fast coding with good error detection
It is moddable - hack your keymap / hotkeys / write scripts for your own actions and assign them the shortcuts

Return on Investment

ROI can be said as neutral because eventually, we have to switch to another text editor because of many limitations of Atom for large code.
In starting stage of the project, everything was fine and things were happening as expected
Overall it has been a great experience using Atom in my organization but many challenges were faced so that's something Atom should work on.

Alternatives Considered

Microsoft Visual Studio Code, Sublime Text and Vim

In beginning stage of project, Atom wins the race against them all. I selected Atom because of its support for many plugins, simplicity, formatting tools, open source control . But for large scale projects, atom is not suitable editor because of its unexpected behaviour in case of large amount of code.

Key Insights

Do you think Atom delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Atom's feature set?

Did Atom live up to sales and marketing promises?

Did implementation of Atom go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Atom again?

Other Software Used

Microsoft Visual Studio Code, Sublime Text, GitHub

Likelihood to Recommend

Atom is well suited for users who just beginning with their development careers. For developing production level or at the local level, for any use-case Atom is well suited as it provides support for many plugins and version control too. It is not suitable for heavy projects because it takes a lot of time in getting opened and also stops unexpectedly in between. It can be used by early-stage startups who are just beginning their project but when there is an ample amount of code, then they must switch to some other software.

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Atom - A simplest, finest , open-source text editor