Thanks to your enthusiasm for Atom and instructions for getting up and running, I have been using Atom more and more lately. I just want to note a few general difficulties I am having:
- Discovering packages — even thinking to look for some particular feature — is difficult.
- Many packages do similar things, and it isn’t clear which ones to load to get a useful and non-conflicting set.
- The most frustrating so far is the random assignment of keystrokes by packages. They:
- are difficult to learn
- difficult to discover
- conflict with many of my existing global KM keystrokes
- override or just don't support fundamental OS X keybindings such as
Endfor end of page - conflict with fundamental Emacs-based text editing commands built into the OS X Text Editing System which I have been using for more decades than I care to admit to
- conflict with other packages
I have been putting off spending the time to sort out all bindings and start pruning packages and customizing them until I had a good sense of which packages I want to use, but it is making me crazy. (The worst offender is ⌃B, which someone decided should insert a pair of braces, but to hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of developers — especially in Unix environments — means “back 1 character”.)
I don't even know how to find commands or their bindings (I don't think there is an apropos feature, nor a way to find out what a key is bound to and by which package.) I am hungry for suggestions about how to deal with all of this.
None of this is reason to give up Atom, but I am finding it very awkward to use and feel like I am dancing around it more than taking advantage of what it offers.