I tried Atom a few years ago and was impressed by the features, but it was such a resource hog that I ditched it immediately. As someone with web development experience amounting to zero, it seems strange to me that nobody is asking about the feasibility of porting it to less resource hungry Electron alternatives (Tauri? Neutralino? ...?). Tauri has made the front page lately and everyone praises it for being a much lighter alternative to Electron, so using it would seem the natural step, or am I missing something?
Atom was archived today
111–120 of 614 posts
Re: Atom was archived today
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
Everyone believes Electron "sucks" because it's mainly the apps that suck that are noticeably built with Electron. It's the "when you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all" phenomenon. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VofkquwmT40&t=29s >
When almost every app sucks, I feel like it’s at least partially a platform issue. (Disclaimer: I actually have RAM to spare, in constrained environments the situation might be different) VS Code is pretty much the only larger electron app I think is very well done. Discord is pretty good, but then it starts going downhill. MS Teams is mostly responsive, bottom-of-the-barrel apps like postman feel like you are on a t…
Many Electron apps literally are a wrapped or packaged version of some SPA-style web interface, and the UX reflects that, naturally.
But - beyond the base Chromium "footprint", which to be fair isn't negligible - you absolutely _can_ build high-performance, resource-conserving (and not degrading-over-time) applications with Electron.
It probably can't quite match the fully native UX or performance, but with a little care you can definitely get close enough (especially given how common actual web/browser-based apps are anyway). The trouble is Electron is already a "lazy" way to build desktop apps, so many teams probably don't give it the level of care it requires or deserves.
Disclaimer of my own: I maintain a media-rich, processing-intensive and performance-sensitive Electron-based app, so I may be defensive (or arguably informed) about the performance. But I can also consistently achieve 40 to 60 FPS rendering of dynamic graphics (full-screen) and audio (multi-channel) simultaneous with non-trivial, near-real-time input signal processing, on typical hardware, across platforms, just using Electron and standard web APIs. (And I'm just some guy working solo. A larger or more capable team would probably do it better.) The rest of the app's UI/UX is noticeably not native, but that's probably (but not entirely) more the result of _my_ limitations rather than Electron's.
Truly native apps are always going to work and perform at least a little bit better (in the general case) but IMO Electron (when done correctly) is at least on par with any other cross-platform framework you can point to.
It's a compromise, but it doesn't _have_ to be a major one.
Re: Atom was archived today
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can run vim and emacs in a gui app. I run neovim in neovide which imo is the best experience for vim these days. Vim's builtin terminal is good enough now that you can ditch running it inside tmux/terminal.
Vim and emacs do not adhere to platform conventions anywhere, unless your platform happens to be "emacs".
They're all terminal apps so I'm not sure why platform conventions would matter. Sure some people use GUI wrappers but most people primarily use them in terminals which have the same conventions everywhere, generally speaking.
Re: Atom was archived today
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
Predated VSCode version of LSP, the idea is at least as old as Lucid Emacs. > A central server uses an Objectstore database to tightly integrate compiler(Lucid C++ Compiler), editor(emacs), debugger(gdb), and browsers https://www.desy.de/user/projects/C++/products/lucid.html
Which demonstrates once again that doing something right is far more important than doing it first .
That's not always true, sometimes first (and worse) is better. VHS vs Betamax comes to mind.
Re: Atom was archived today
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 wh…
"VSCode is the greatest productivity tool in the history of software engineering" in a world where vi and emacs exist seems like a bit of an exaggeration, and I'm not even a fan of either (VS Code is my daily driver; I like my GUI editors and I like them to behave like normal apps on the platform I'm running).
Vim and Emacs cannot compare to VSCode when it comes to productivity. With VSCode, you type the name of any programming language in the extension search, click "Install", and you have a world-class development environment for that language ready to go. This is light years ahead of the traditional editors, and saves many hours of time.
Not to mention that VSCode has countless other productivity boosters built in which would require plugin hunting or fiddling with configuration files for Vim and Emacs.
Re: Atom was archived today
#116Earlier 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.
Electron is essentially an operating system that runs on every operating system, so you can target just a single OS and your application works everywhere.
Always bet on Javascript, isn't that how the saying goes?
Re: Atom was archived today
#117I'm still not convinced VSCode is faster and better. My Atom setup was never slow, the only thing that wasn't instantaneous was code completion. For me, it felt like VSCode came out of nowhere and surpassed Atom for inexplicable reasons.
Re: Atom was archived today
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
I started a job in 2018 and someone commented “what are you still on Atom for? Everyone has moved to vs code”. So yeah it’s been kinda dead for a long time now.
whoa, a whole 4 years ago!! ;-) i want to make a "kids today" joke/comment, but it's more of just the pace of trends/fads not the people per se. you show up at a new job and the people make comments, of course you change. i've never used Atom, so maybe it was a better thing to change, but i've been introduced to some very ingrained workflows that just no longer made sense on so many levels. you can come in guns blazi…
Somewhat unrelated, but why is it that when someone online writes an emoji with a nose, ie ;) vs ;-), I can immediately tell it's an older person? Was that something that was taught back in the day?
Re: Atom was archived today
#119Earlier 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.
Or another way to phrase it is that the experience sucks equally on all platforms, so you might as well switch to Linux.
This is my take, a Mac user since 68k who finds very little besides hardware appealing on the platform anymore. The only reason I’m not running everything in Linux at least in a VM at this point is time to migrate my dev environment. It’s a shame IMO but yep 20Electron is apparently the year everything might as well be Linux on the desktop.
Re: Atom was archived today
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I do actually, because it's a sad day when displaying a mere paucity of UI elements isn't performant.