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Atom was archived today

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Re: Atom was archived today

#71

Post by kiratp »

tikhonj wrote: post #34
dijit wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what value is that, over the website?

Two big ones I can think of: 1. Have your application look and act like a standalone application rather than a webpage—Chrome tried to support this with application shortcuts (or whatever they were called), but it never worked well enough 2. Give your application access to native APIs and capabilities that you can't get through the browser, like direct filesystem access

But it doesn’t act like an application. Most of the OS right click services, keyboard shortcuts, menu items are all missing. Accessibility tools don’t work.

Re: Atom was archived today

#72

Post by samtho »

paxys wrote: post #30
p-e-w wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For better, certainly. Electron has in particular been an enormous boon for Linux users, because it's so easy to make cross-platform applications now that even companies who wouldn't have bothered otherwise now have a Linux download. No way that apps like Slack would have a Linux desktop version if it wasn't for Electron.

The 1% Linux users may have benefited, but it came at the expense of the other 99% on Windows & Mac who had to give up native performance and UI on all their applications.

Because I totally need native performance on an app that primarily displays text, text entry, buttons, other form controls, and maybe a random image or two.

Re: Atom was archived today

#73

Post by PetahNZ »

philliphaydon wrote: post #23
umvi wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People hate on electron, but it's a pretty amazing piece of tech if you ask me. I can turn a browser game into a steam game with basically no effort which is nice because browsers change over time and electron helps you get a working offline snapshot of something you created.

> People hate on electron, but it's a pretty amazing piece of tech if you ask me. It really does come down to how people build on top of it. I tried opening a 2gb log file in Atom and it took like 10 minutes before crashing. VSCode on the other hand, while a bit slow, opened it and I could search quickly and scroll it without any issue at all. That was what caused me to switch.

Opening large files is a pretty niche case anyway. Even CLI tools like less and grep are slow with things like searching muti GB files.

Re: Atom was archived today

#75

Post by p-e-w »

esprehn wrote: post #32
p-e-w wrote: post #7

Sad to see this go. I was an early adopter of Atom, and I wrote two extensions for it, one of which while it was still in beta. The Atom developers made some technology choices that in retrospect were ill-advised, CoffeeScript being the worst of them and splitting everything into dozens of packages a close second. They tried to backpedal on both of these later on, but by that time VSCode, with its far superior engine…

Atom predated the LSP and leaned heavily into customizations with all the plugins running inside the UI thread (more like a traditional web page and 3p scripts). At the time they viewed the extreme customization support as a feature, and there was a thriving ecosystem of folks making plugins. That architecture has a major flaw though. A default install was fast, but a real configuration with all the plugins ended up…

VSCode is one of the greatest pieces of engineering of our time. It's really only when you compare it with Atom that you realize how great it is. Atom was built by incredibly smart people, who had full control over the platform and several years of head start, and they were still out-engineered by the VSCode team at every turn.

VSCode did almost everything right: The choice of TypeScript as the base language (with which VSCode has a symbiotic relationship), the limited, slowly expanding extension API, LSP, the monorepo, the monthly release cadence, the built-in terminal, and the list goes on and on. They turned Electron's strengths into super-strengths, and deftly engineered around Electron's weaknesses. VSCode is the greatest productivity tool in the history of software engineering, and it fully deserves the dominant status it has today.

Re: Atom was archived today

#78

Post by dmitrygr »

PetahNZ wrote: post #73
philliphaydon wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People hate on electron, but it's a pretty amazing piece of tech if you ask me. It really does come down to how people build on top of it. I tried opening a 2gb log file in Atom and it took like 10 minutes before crashing. VSCode on the other hand, while a bit slow, opened it and I could search quickly and scroll it without any issue at all. That was what caused me to switch.

Opening large files is a pretty niche case anyway. Even CLI tools like less and grep are slow with things like searching muti GB files.

> Even CLI tools like less and grep are slow with things like searching muti GB files.

In what universe?

I routinely use "less -n" to open terabyte-sized text files.

Re: Atom was archived today

#79

Post by rodw »

ComplexSystems wrote: post #8

For those looking for a good substitute, I've switched to Sublime Text and so far I've gotten it to pretty much a near-perfect replica of the original. Kind of surprising to me how much of the Atom UI was built to mimic the Sublime interface. I also tried VSCode, but was never really quite able to get into the interface the same way. For a while I tried customizing the interface with plugins like CustomizeUI, but Mic…

> was never really quite able to get the [VS Code] interface the same way

You're at least the 3rd person I've seen make that observation in this thread. I don't get how VS Code made this so hard, isn't it fundamentally built on a fork of Atom's core? The CSS and JS customization seemed more capable and accessible in Atom somehow.

I've heard only good things about the Sublime Text UX for literally a decade or more, but is it "hackable" in the way that Atom and VS Code are? Emacs-like hack-ability with less esoteric scripting (and a better UX out-of-the-box) is exactly what attracted me to Atom in the first place.

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