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Atom was archived today

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Re: Atom was archived today

#141
post #75
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wh…

> VSCode is one of the greatest pieces of engineering of our time.

That must be one of the saddest things I read this month.

Re: Atom was archived today

#142
post #72
post #30

Earlier 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.

That's why to do that you need a full-blown browser that consumes enormous amounts of RAM and consumes 17% of CPU to display animated GIFs https://twitter.com/dmitriid/status/1486364312910368769?s=20...

Re: Atom was archived today

#143
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If we're talking about professional tools i'm not sure if setting it up as fast as possible is the best productivity comparison. All good tools need getting to know them, and setting things up yourself (eg. in vim) means you also know how to fix any issues that pop up in the future. Installing a vscode plugin for playing around is great, but it doesn't automatically make you a professional and stable production envir…

> All good tools need getting to know them

Wrong. Good tools don't require that. Imagine someone showed you a complicated mechanical contraption and told you "it's a type of hammer, much better than the 'non-professional' hammer, but you need to 'get to know it' first". That product would be dead on arrival.

Great tools are obvious in their base functionality and have optional additional layers that can be discovered if necessary. When you have to search the web to find out how to close the editor you just opened, because it works differently than every other program running on your system, you know you're using a bad tool.

Re: Atom was archived today

#144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven’t heard the fan of my M1 laptop since this summer, and I have multiple electron apps almost always running. Now, if I move the mouse a bit fast on my i9 laptop, it’s time for hairdryer mode. I think the silence depends more on the hardware than the software.

Tech has caught up! We need more bloat, web devs!

You will enjoy WASM.

Re: Atom was archived today

#145
post #36

Make no mistake... This project, Atom. Provided the runway that others copied, then improved upon (and on and on... with plenty of funding). Atom provided the seed, excitement and vision for what is possible on this platform, and should be proud of that fact.

I wonder if it played a part in Microsofts purchase of Github. When you look at things like code spaces, co-pilot and how VSC can now work directly on Github/Azure repositories without moving the code to "your machine", it seems like they found a good way to make Github (and Azure DevOps) more profitable through Atoms successor.

Re: Atom was archived today

#146
Can someone tell me why OSes can't do what browsers do? It seems to me that browsers are the OS of today so why not just skip the middleman and make it first class? It seems to be a layer that exists solely because the 3 competing OSes is incompatible and browsers just happen to be compatible (for how long?).

Re: Atom was archived today

#147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It like when i receive a text when no punctuation, i can tell it is a younger person. anyone using emoticons vs emojis should be the indicator in and of itself regardless if there's a nose or not. how many times did you have to push that number to get to the symbol? "huh?" you ask. shows me your age too.

Hah, bucking the trend there with your lack of capitalization.

that's too many pushes of the same button, so we all learned caps are a waste. also, e e cummings. ;) lol or is it :eyeroll:

Re: Atom was archived today

#149

I was a noob when Atom was new and I remember thinking it was unusably slow. Took a minute to realize that I had loaded my entire computer's directory, not just the project I was working on.

That's because it was (and is ) slow compared to true compiled applications. Just because VSCode has about 1000 tortured dev's making it usable doesn't mean its not fundamentally flawed on its face using a scripting language for text editing. https://medium.com/commitlog/electron-is-cancer-b066108e6c32 Spread the TRUTH - praise be compiled programs...

You can compile web tech to V8 bytecode and run it in Electron – how do you feel about compiled programs now?

Re: Atom was archived today

#150
post #72
post #30

Earlier 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.

Exactly. The truth is that over that last 15+ years _most_ of the apps that people use _most_ of the time are a perfect and natural fit for the web UI/UX: text, media, hyperlinks, standard form/window controls, with relatively modest standards of performance and responsiveness, etc.

Assuming developers avoid resource leaks (and to be fair some notable Electron-based apps tend to be both leaky and long-running) the main drawback of Electron seems to be the non-native look-and-feel. But that _could_ be worked around (for the most part) with some effort, and I suspect most users don't actually care that much. The web browser is still probably the most-used desktop app. The web look-and-feel is familiar and intuitive to users, even if it stands out a little from the UI of native apps.

Poor resource management aside, something like Electron is probably good _enough_ for most applications.

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