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  1. Stackups
  2. DevOps
  3. Code Collaboration
  4. Text Editor
  5. Atom vs Nova

Atom vs Nova

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Atom
Atom
Stacks16.9K
Followers14.5K
Votes2.5K
GitHub Stars60.8K
Forks17.3K
Nova
Nova
Stacks47
Followers64
Votes3

Atom vs Nova: What are the differences?

## Introduction

Key differences between Atom and Nova are outlined below:

1. **Customization & Theming**: Atom offers extensive customization and theming options through packages and themes, enabling users to tailor the editor to their preferences. In comparison, Nova has a more limited selection of themes and plugins but provides a more streamlined and integrated experience out of the box, with a focus on modern design and functionality.
2. **Built-in Git Integration**: Atom has popular Git integration through packages like Git Plus, while Nova comes with built-in Git support, allowing for seamless version control within the editor without the need for additional plugins.
3. **Performance & Stability**: Atom has faced criticisms for its occasional performance issues and memory usage, while Nova has been praised for its improved performance and stability, offering a smoother editing experience even with large files or complex projects.
4. **Developer Environment**: Atom is known for its diverse developer ecosystem with a wide range of community-created plugins, whereas Nova offers a more curated selection of official extensions and tools, ensuring compatibility and quality control in the development environment.
5. **License & Pricing**: Atom is an open-source project under the MIT license, making it free for all users, while Nova is a commercial product with a license fee, providing dedicated support and regular updates for those willing to pay for a premium editing experience.
6. **Native UI & MacOS Optimization**: Nova boasts a native UI design that is optimized for macOS, offering a polished and integrated experience for Apple users, while Atom's interface, although customizable, may not provide the same level of macOS-specific optimization.

In Summary, the key differences between Atom and Nova lie in customization, Git integration, performance, developer ecosystem, licensing, and platform optimization.

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Detailed Comparison

Atom
Atom
Nova
Nova

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.

It is the new native code editor for Mac. It is packed with features, built for modern workflows, lightning-fast and stylish. It also has a robust extensions architecture and replaces Code for Mac.

Atom is a desktop application based on web technologies;Node.js integration;Modular Design- composed of over 50 open-source packages that integrate around a minimal core;File system browser;Fuzzy finder for quickly opening files;Fast project-wide search and replace;Multiple cursors and selections;Multiple panes;Snippets;Code folding;A clean preferences UI;Import TextMate grammars and themes
A powerful editor; A themeable interface; Flexible workflows; Useful tools; Robust extensions
Statistics
GitHub Stars
60.8K
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Forks
17.3K
GitHub Forks
-
Stacks
16.9K
Stacks
47
Followers
14.5K
Followers
64
Votes
2.5K
Votes
3
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 529
    Free
  • 449
    Open source
  • 343
    Modular design
  • 321
    Hackable
  • 316
    Beautiful UI
Cons
  • 19
    Slow with large files
  • 7
    Slow startup
  • 2
    Most of the time packages are hard to find.
  • 1
    Cannot Run code with F5
  • 1
    No longer maintained
Pros
  • 1
    Fluid and Fast
  • 1
    Beautiful
  • 1
    Extensions
Cons
  • 1
    Mac only
Integrations
GitHub
GitHub
ESLint
ESLint
TypeScript
TypeScript
Vue.js
Vue.js
macOS
macOS
Prettier
Prettier

What are some alternatives to Atom, Nova?

Sublime Text

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.

Vim

Vim

Vim is an advanced text editor that seeks to provide the power of the de-facto Unix editor 'Vi', with a more complete feature set. Vim is a highly configurable text editor built to enable efficient text editing. It is an improved version of the vi editor distributed with most UNIX systems. Vim is distributed free as charityware.

Visual Studio Code

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.

Notepad++

Notepad++

Notepad++ is a free (as in "free speech" and also as in "free beer") source code editor and Notepad replacement that supports several languages. Running in the MS Windows environment, its use is governed by GPL License.

Emacs

Emacs

GNU Emacs is an extensible, customizable text editor—and more. At its core is an interpreter for Emacs Lisp, a dialect of the Lisp programming language with extensions to support text editing.

Brackets

Brackets

With focused visual tools and preprocessor support, it is a modern text editor that makes it easy to design in the browser.

Neovim

Neovim

Neovim is a project that seeks to aggressively refactor Vim in order to: simplify maintenance and encourage contributions, split the work between multiple developers, enable the implementation of new/modern user interfaces without any modifications to the core source, and improve extensibility with a new plugin architecture.

VSCodium

VSCodium

It is a community-driven, freely-licensed binary distribution of Microsoft’s editor VSCode.

TextMate

TextMate

TextMate brings Apple's approach to operating systems into the world of text editors. By bridging UNIX underpinnings and GUI, TextMate cherry-picks the best of both worlds to the benefit of expert scripters and novice users alike.

gedit

gedit

gedit is the GNOME text editor. While aiming at simplicity and ease of use, gedit is a powerful general purpose text editor.

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