Atom vs Spacemacs

Overview

Atom

Stacks17.0K

Followers14.5K

Votes2.5K

GitHub Stars60.8K

Forks17.3K

Spacemacs

Stacks190

Followers200

Votes86

GitHub Stars24.6K

Forks4.9K

Atom vs Spacemacs: What are the differences?

Developers describe Atom as "A hackable text editor for the 21st Century". 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. On the other hand, Spacemacs is detailed as "Emacs advanced Kit focused on Evil: The best editor is neither Emacs nor Vim, it's Emacs and Vim!". Since version 0.101.0 and later Spacemacs totally abolishes the frontiers between Vim and Emacs. The user can now choose his/her preferred editing style and enjoy all the Spacemacs features Even better, it is possible to dynamically switch between the two styles seamlessly which makes it possible for programmers with different styles to do seat pair programming using the same editor..

Atom belongs to "Text Editor" category of the tech stack, while Spacemacs can be primarily classified under "Tools for Text Editors".

Some of the features offered by Atom are:

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

On the other hand, Spacemacs provides the following key features:

Batteries Included
Nice UI
Excellent ergonomics

"Free" is the primary reason why developers consider Atom over the competitors, whereas "Advanced support for Vim key bindings" was stated as the key factor in picking Spacemacs.

Atom and Spacemacs are both open source tools. Atom with 49.3K GitHub stars and 12.1K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than Spacemacs with 18.1K GitHub stars and 4.45K GitHub forks.

Lyft, Typeform, and PedidosYa are some of the popular companies that use Atom, whereas Spacemacs is used by Agworld Pty, untapt, and Curbside. Atom has a broader approval, being mentioned in 836 company stacks & 725 developers stacks; compared to Spacemacs, which is listed in 6 company stacks and 15 developer stacks.

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Advice on Atom, Spacemacs

Andrey

Managing Partner at WhiteLabelDevelopers

May 18, 2020

Decided

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

539k views539k

Comments

René

Sr. Financial Analyst

Aug 21, 2020

Review

I have used and like them both... here's my take on what to use in your case.

Use whatever software your instructor is using when learning a language. It makes it simpler to start. Then change to whatever you like.
Use an IDE (Integrated Development Enviroment). For Java I'd pick InteliJ (because I have found the Jetbrains IDEs great) or Visual Studio as a second pick (because it's free for individual coders).
Pick your text editor: the Atom vs Notepad++, vs others question Both Atom and Notepad++ offer many features and add-ons, making it a long-disputed competition. This is what drives to chose between one and the other, and I have been alternating: On Atom: The good:

Good looking coding environment
Good autocomplete
Project focused structure to your files The bad:
Higher system resources usage
Slower loading time (if you are opening and closing)

Notepad++ The good:

Very light system resources use
Fast and simple, with decent code higlighting
Loads very fast The bad:
Not as pretty as Atom
Autocomplete and syntax checking is not that good
File-focused editing

458 views458

Comments

Shail

None at None

Oct 19, 2020

Review

Hi, I have used PyCharm, Sublime Text and Atom. PyCharm is very heavy and it contains many extra functions which have not any use for beginner. Atom has slow startup but after that is runs smoothly but not recommended for weak hardware. Atom has great community and bunch plugin support. You can manually install plugins in atom with you need. Sublime Text is really very fast and I think it can smoothly run on weak hardware. I personally using Atom on one computer and VScode on other computer both are great but VScode has better startup time.

At end IDE is not going to make you a pro. When I was beginner I used notepad and then Atom for working fast. I used a simple text editor named MousePad for many months because I got syntax highlighting for mine very weak PC.

459 views459

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Atom	Spacemacs
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.	Since version 0.101.0 and later Spacemacs totally abolishes the frontiers between Vim and Emacs. The user can now choose his/her preferred editing style and enjoy all the Spacemacs features. Even better, it is possible to dynamically switch between the two styles seamlessly which makes it possible for programmers with different styles to do seat pair programming using the same editor.
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	Batteries Included;Nice UI;Excellent ergonomics;Convenient and Mnemonic Key Bindings;Great Documentation
Statistics
GitHub Stars 60.8K	GitHub Stars 24.6K
GitHub Forks 17.3K	GitHub Forks 4.9K
Stacks 17.0K	Stacks 190
Followers 14.5K	Followers 200
Votes 2.5K	Votes 86
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 Can be easily Modified 1 No longer maintained	Pros 14 Advanced support for Vim key bindings 12 Discoverability 10 Easy setup 10 Never have to touch the mouse 7 Cross-platform
Integrations
GitHub	Emacs

What are some alternatives to Atom, Spacemacs?

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 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

Build and debug modern web and cloud applications. Code is free and available on your favorite platform - Linux, Mac OSX, and Windows.

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

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

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

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

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

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.