My Experience with Atom as A Vim User

My Experience with Atom as A Vim User

Historically, I am a Vim user. People know me as a very very heavy vim user. I have spent almost the last two years customizing my .vimrc file and I have parts of it mapped to the ways I think. Recently I have acquired both a Mac Pro and a Surface Pro 3, and my vim configuration didn’t work on them. For a while I had used Docker and the image I made of my preferred dev environment to shim and hack around this.

Then I took a fresh look at Atom, Github’s text editor that claims to be a replacment for Sublime. Since then I have moved to using Atom as my main text editor for programming in OSX and Windows, but still using my fine-tuned vim setup in Linux. I like how I have Atom set up. It uses a lot of (but not all sadly) the features I have come to love in my vim setup.

I also like that I can have the same setup on both my Mac and in Windows. I have the same vim-mode bindings on both my machines (I only customize so far as to add :w and :q bindings), and easily jump from one to the other with Synergy and have little to no issues with editor differences. I typically end up taking my surface out with me to a lot of places and will code some new ideas on the bus or in the food court of the mall.

Atom gets a lot of things right with the plugins I have. I have Autocomplete+ and a plugin for it that uses GoCode for autocompletion as I type like I have with vim-go and YouCompleteMe in Vim. Its native pacakge support and extensibility is bar none the easiest way to be able to add things to the editor I have ever seen.

But there are problems with Atom that are mostly based on my usage of text editors and my understanding of programming with Javascript, Coffeescript, HTML and CSS. Atom is a mostly Coffeescript editor, it does mean that at runtime I can customize almost any aspect of the editor, but I would have to learn one if not 5 more languages to be able to describe the layouts or interfaces I would like to add to this editor. It also being a hybrid between a web application and a normal desktop application means that I am afraid to add things I normally would such as raw socket support for being able to collaborate on a single document, PiratePad style. Additionally, the Vim emulation mode in Atom doesn’t support ex-style :-commands nor <Leader>, meaning that a fair bit of my editing is toned down and done more manually to make up for this.

I wish I could just use vim natively with my preferred setup on Windows, OSX and Linux, but for now Atom is the lesser of all the evils.

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Update: I am now atom-free on my surface pro 3