We actually forked Atom and built an email app. It's worked surprisingly well!

I'm not sure if you're serious or not. If you are serious, I'm sure I'm not the only one interested in why and how it turned out :)

He's serious, it's https://nylas.com/n1. See https://www.nylas.com/blog/splitting-the-atom (i'm not associated with them)

I just... I just love it.

Can't seem to select all my mail to archive though. I have a bunch of unread mail and I would want to batch read them all.

Known bug unfortunately. It's related to how we paginate DB queries for the threadlist to make it super fast to scroll through. Hoping to fix it in the next few weeks!

For what is worth, I had the same problem with Mail.app on OSX today. Impossible to see what my unread mails were (3 unread mails lost in my 6k mails) and impossible to select all with C-A and mark everything as read.

Also another thing I'm used to in that kind of app, is scroll further than the top limit to update the list.

Nylas N1 uses a realtime streaming delta API that we developed, so there's no need to ever manually "refresh" the app. The entire data layer is a giant flux store which populates the UI immediately. More on that API here: https://nylas.com/docs/platform#deltas

We've actually considered adding this and just making it a no-op-- a placebo feature to help users transition.

N1 is the first desktop app I have used for email in more than 10 years and I love it.

Why a fork of Atom rather than a brand new Electron app?

We actually started building the app before Electron was released. They had just made the split to atom-shell and brightray.

Once Electron got it's footing, we migrated there. It's also easier for us to contribute upstream patches for things like touch events. (We launched swipe-to-archive a couple weeks ago.)

Atom is lagging behind Electron. It's still running on Electron v0.34.5 which was shipped in November of last year. They're trying to keep up, but the community of folks around Electron is growing fast.

If you're based in SF and interested in this, you should definitely check out the Bay Area Electron User Group: http://www.meetup.com/Bay-Area-Electron-User-Group/

presumably because it already has the panel editing features included.

Yep...when I first heard about Atom I felt the exact same way you did...."a chromium (web) based desktop app written in CoffeeScript/Javascript...what a freaking mess".

Then I tried it and was pretty much blown away on how nice it really is.

I don't have a problem with the JavaScript, in fact I think Electron (the app shell extracted from Atom) is quite a nice way to make apps. But Atom is just too slow to use all day for me.

Could you highlight some of the reasons you liked it?

* Cross-platform with a pleasing (to me) GUI. Specifically, I appreciate the ability to have multiple views including rendered previews of particular files.

* "Feels right". The ergonomics of the keyboard interaction Just Work for me.

* Excellent git integration (with plugins) which is frankly abnormal on editors that run on Windows as well as ix (or Windows at all - the git story on Windows is still pretty crappy).

Good plugin management and libraries of plugins.

Visual Studio has Git support built in...

> Cross-platform

Man, what a surprisingly useful comment. You have really changed how I feel about this subject 100%.

My most appreciated feature is having a user interface for plugin settings.

My favorite is noticing something weird, opening the inspector, and figuring out the issue quick. Console expressions, breakpoints, etc... it's a powerful environment. (Of my other 2 editors, Vim is fairly difficult to figure out and Sublime is a black box)

Being able to style whatever you want with css is handy too, though sometimes it's tough to figure out the right css selector to use.