Agree. It's a tough decision for them -- I'm sure the "Hot New Text Editor" market has a decent chunk of money associated with it. But it's pretty hard to commit to a text editor that you can't open up and recompile.
EDIT: Plus, if an editor is going to join the ranks of vim and emacs in history (something which neither Sublime nor TextMate are on track to do) it has to be open source. Anything else and it's just another product.
I agree on the open source nature. However if this editor treats github as a first class citizen (while being free/open) then it does have value to github. This is especially the case for new github features introduced in the future.
There are very few people who would opt in to a editor for everything only to use it with Github. Most of the world's developers don't even have a Github account.
Tools work in a strange way. I recently saw a whole team of embedded developers use TextPad. They haven't heard of anything called 'vim' or 'emacs'. From their perspective its either a vendor supplied IDE or TextPad. One of them was even startled to see this shiny new thing called 'Sublime Text' when I was using it. He went out with enthusiasm, but was hardly able to convince any one to use it.
A code editor with first class prominent Github support is more likely to encourage creating Github accounts - it would just work. Compare to regular code editors which require jumping through various hoops (typically having to find relevant plugins, install them on all machines/users, and then figure out how to use them as they are extensions not core).
A pitch of "if you use this editor then all the team's work is automatically synchronized and available" is a very powerful sell.
There are open source text editors of all levels of "easy to grasp". I've contributed to one myself. With Atom I simply don't have the option, and that's unacceptable as a professional in this craft.
I agree, I'm just saying that if some capable people decide to stop working on Emacs, it would die. So sometimes I prefer a paid product because there is incentive to continue working on it. (Ok, not that the karma/love one gets for working on Emacs isn't good enough).
Vim is available on all (relevant) operating systems.
Vim doesn't require an invite.
Not for me. I do like to give new editors a try (fell deeply in love with LightTable just a short while ago), but OS X as main platform and yet another closed editor?
