But Atom simply will not achieve performance competitive with Sublime while they are using the DOM. The DOM is too general-purpose for what is almost always just a grid of monospaced text. The overhead introduced by allowing plugins to render entire webpages inline with the text is just too much.
I want so very much to like Atom --- a Free text editor that isn't vim or emacs and is actually powerful enough to replace them, but the imperceivable latency manifests as a gradual accumulation of stress.
CSS is a bit annoying, but with evergreen browsers and flexbox it's getting very good—and even as annoying as it is, it's still mostly easier to work with than most GUI toolkits.
I often think of the browser as something like an X11 server. It doesn't matter how old you are; why don't you think it makes sense?
Mobile and micro-services will change that.
> why don't you think it makes sense?
Because I went through the evolution of using text based GUIs, Amiga, Atari and PC GUI toolkits, drawing UIs with the likes of Visual Basic, Turbo Pascal, Delphi and C++ Builder. To the modern ones of XAML, Cocoa, QML and so on.
The list is just a bit long to post here. Most of them provided a saner developer experience than HTML/CSS/JavaScript will ever do. Unless we throw DOM away and replace it by something more tailored to applications instead of rendering documents.
Even if the DOM gets replaced, the browser can hardly provide an integrated experience in terms of what any native desktop/mobile environment offers to its users in terms of immersion and interactivity between applications.
It is just no different than using Java with AWT 1.0 in the early years without native widgets and integration to the respective desktop APIs.
Cocoa and .NET produce good interfaces but are proprietary and only work on one platform. GTK+ is Free and "works" on all desktop platforms, but anyone who's used a GTK app on mac can tell you how awful it is (and it's really the only place that it's great is on GNOME-based linux DEs).
Qt is Free, and it has fairly good support on all platforms (even mobile), but making the interfaces look and work great on all platforms requires the developers to put a lot of work into custom UI elements (see how Qt programs look on GNOME or OS X when they use the default UI elements). It also requires developers to use C++, offensive to programmers who prefer hosted languages (although arguably better for those planning to port to mobile). But the C++ it uses is so far removed from non-qt C++, even requiring compiler plugins, that many C++ developers have qualms with the language it uses.
The web is programmer-friendly, cross-platform and Free. Writing a desktop app using web tech means it's relatively easy to port it to ChromeOS (or FirefoxOS if that becomes popular ever) or an in-browser app. It has the lowest performance of any of the mentioned technologies, which is only relevant for especially performance-sensitive apps (text editors) and mobile.
Really Qt wins out on technological merit, but web is comes in a close second, and there's actually a large supply of developers who know what they're doing with web.
Without having installers that include adware (Java) or that seem borderline-unsupported (X11/Quartz) or that require funny multi-stage compiling (Qt).
Only for developers that aren't savvy enough to know the multiple options to bundle the runtime or compile to native code.
Or the users that don't install Java from http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/jre8... or can't be bothered to read a dialog box.
> or that seem borderline-unsupported (X11/Quartz)
Since when is Quartz unsupported?
> or that require funny multi-stage compiling (Qt).
Since when do users compile GUI frameworks?
Cross platform UI is nothing new, there are much more options to choose from than those you listed, and browsers can hardly offer more than a 90's GUI experience.
It can be strategic even if limited to quick edits and for some subsets of the repository now. Anyway I can think of a GitHub augmented with an IDE and integrated with a CI and CD system with deployment to a Heroku. It could let you write code from pretty everywhere, occasionally even on a tablet or a large phone. Somebody will use it.
i love vim a lot (use evil in emacs), except vimscript. I hope oneday I could use neovim with atom/st2 as frontend.
Maybe not powerful enough to replace them but still worth a look http://foicica.com/textadept/
