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Atom

16.9K
14.5K
+ 1
2.5K
BBEdit

36
34
+ 1
5
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Atom vs BBEdit: What are the differences?

Introduction

This Markdown provides a comparison between Atom and BBEdit, highlighting the key differences between the two text editors.

  1. Extensibility: Atom is highly extensible due to its open-source nature and large community support. It allows users to customize and enhance its functionality by installing various community-built packages. On the other hand, BBEdit focuses more on providing a robust and feature-rich text editor out-of-the-box, with limited customization options.

  2. Platform Compatibility: Atom is built using web technologies, making it available on multiple platforms such as Windows, macOS, and Linux. This cross-platform compatibility allows users to have a consistent experience across different operating systems. Conversely, BBEdit is exclusively developed for macOS and does not have official support for other platforms.

  3. Package Ecosystem: Atom boasts a massive package ecosystem, offering users a wide range of extensions and themes to enhance their coding experience. The Atom package manager enables easy installation and management of these packages. In contrast, BBEdit has a more limited package ecosystem, with a focus on providing core features rather than an extensive variety of add-ons.

  4. Price: Atom is completely free to use, making it accessible to a large user base worldwide. On the other hand, BBEdit is a commercial product and requires a paid license for full access to its features. However, BBEdit does offer a limited free version with some functionality, providing users with an option to try the software before purchasing.

  5. Interface and User Experience: Atom provides a more modern and visually appealing interface with features like a built-in package manager, split screen, and a customizable layout. It also has a user-friendly design that attracts developers who prefer a sleek and intuitive interface. BBEdit, on the other hand, has a more traditional interface and focuses on delivering a powerful and efficient text editing experience without the distraction of a visually enriched UI.

  6. Text Editing Capabilities: BBEdit is known for its powerful and efficient text manipulation capabilities, making it a preferred choice for professionals who deal with large codebases or complex text editing tasks. It offers advanced functionalities like search and replace with regular expressions, multi-file search, and the ability to perform complex text transformations. While Atom also provides solid text editing features, it may not match the depth and power of BBEdit in terms of handling large-scale editing tasks.

In Summary, Atom offers a highly extensible and cross-platform text editor, with a vast package ecosystem and a modern interface, all available for free. BBEdit, on the other hand, is a macOS-exclusive text editor renowned for its powerful text manipulation capabilities and a more traditional interface, though it requires a paid license for full access to its features.

Decisions about Atom and BBEdit
Andrey Ginger
Managing Partner at WhiteLabelDevelopers · | 3 upvotes · 522.6K views

Since communication with Github is not necessary, the Atom is less convenient in working with text and code. Sublim's support and understanding of projects is best for us. Notepad for us is a completely outdated solution with an unacceptable interface. We use a good theme for Sublim ayu-dark

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Pros of Atom
Pros of BBEdit
  • 529
    Free
  • 449
    Open source
  • 343
    Modular design
  • 321
    Hackable
  • 316
    Beautiful UI
  • 147
    Backed by github
  • 119
    Built with node.js
  • 113
    Web native
  • 107
    Community
  • 35
    Packages
  • 18
    Cross platform
  • 5
    Nice UI
  • 5
    Multicursor support
  • 5
    TypeScript editor
  • 3
    Open source, lots of packages, and so configurable
  • 3
    cli start
  • 3
    Simple but powerful
  • 3
    Chrome Inspector works IN EDITOR
  • 3
    Snippets
  • 2
    Code readability
  • 2
    It's powerful
  • 2
    Awesome
  • 2
    Smart TypeScript code completion
  • 2
    Well documented
  • 1
    works with GitLab
  • 1
    "Free", "Hackable", "Open Source", The Awesomness
  • 1
    full support
  • 1
    vim support
  • 1
    Split-Tab Layout
  • 1
    Apm publish minor
  • 1
    Consistent UI on all platforms
  • 1
    User friendly
  • 1
    Hackable and Open Source
  • 0
    Publish
  • 1
    Support for character encodings and file formats
  • 1
    Flexible project file management
  • 1
    Snippets functionality includes substitutions
  • 1
    Highly extensible (plugins, text filters, etc)
  • 1
    Superb regex find/replace

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Cons of Atom
Cons of BBEdit
  • 19
    Slow with large files
  • 7
    Slow startup
  • 2
    Most of the time packages are hard to find.
  • 1
    No longer maintained
  • 1
    Cannot Run code with F5
  • 1
    Can be easily Modified
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    6.6K
    4.9K
    2
    158
    161
    - No public GitHub repository available -

    What is Atom?

    At GitHub, we're building the text editor we've always wanted. A tool you can customize to do anything, but also use productively on the first day without ever touching a config file. Atom is modern, approachable, and hackable to the core. We can't wait to see what you build with it.

    What is BBEdit?

    It has been crafted to serve the needs of writers, Web authors and software developers, and provides an abundance of features for editing, searching, and manipulation of prose, source code, and textual data.

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    What companies use Atom?
    What companies use BBEdit?
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    What tools integrate with Atom?
    What tools integrate with BBEdit?

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    What are some alternatives to Atom and BBEdit?
    Sublime Text
    Sublime Text is available for OS X, Windows and Linux. One license is all you need to use Sublime Text on every computer you own, no matter what operating system it uses. Sublime Text uses a custom UI toolkit, optimized for speed and beauty, while taking advantage of native functionality on each platform.
    Visual Studio Code
    Build and debug modern web and cloud applications. Code is free and available on your favorite platform - Linux, Mac OSX, and Windows.
    Brackets
    With focused visual tools and preprocessor support, it is a modern text editor that makes it easy to design in the browser.
    cell
    cell is a self-constructing web app framework powered by a self-driving DOM. Learning cell is mostly about understanding how cell works, and not about how to use and memorize some API methods, because there is no API.
    Element
    Element is a Vue 2.0 based component library for developers, designers and product managers, with a set of design resources.
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