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Atom was archived today

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Re: Atom was archived today

#151
post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As I said, VS Code shows, that it certainly is possible to build performant electron apps. But I’m also saying, that electron is not fully innocent when almost every app built with it sucks.

And assuming you are talking about FATpick, it’s certainly a lot faster than Postman, at least the logged out part I looked at ;)

Re: Atom was archived today

#152
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.

I don’t know… things like vertically landing rockets, the Large Hadron Collider, inflating space stations, CRISPR, mRNA vaccines come to mind among many other things that surely surpass VS Code when it comes to engineering marvels.

Re: Atom was archived today

#153

It might sound controversial, but for me Atom was almost a 1 to 1 Sublime copy with worse performance and quality. It was slow and ugly. It’s only quality was that it was 0$. It was the first editor I’ve seen to choke when opening 1M file (it even had a warning that it’s a too big file - lol). There simply was not enough RAM in the world for this memory hog. I’m not really sad to see it go. It was another free toy of…

As an editor day to day yes you are correct. Sublime is the goat as far as performance. VSCode has become my primary editor because I work remotely via SSH but nothing can touch the lightness and latency of subl. I still run it in tandem with vscode for stuff that doesn’t require a remote conn. It’s an order of magnitude quicker than VSCode.

Re: Atom was archived today

#154

Earlier 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…

Oh you’ve been programming only for a few decades?

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. I’m actually a cosmic entity that views time as an artificial construct. When you’ve been around for centuries like I have, you’ll understand that trends/fads are mere points in the time space-continuum. Don’t get bent out of shape when you see one.

Re: Atom was archived today

#155
post #75

Earlier 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).

Of course a lot goes on but pre-LSP and post-LSP are day and night. There is now a huge amount of serious language tooling that _isn't_ locked up into one or several editors.

Now some might point out that LSP-based stuff is, like, bloat. Sure, OK. But there's a lot of motivation to do work that can pay off across the board. So much language stuff was based off of random regexes! It's hard to overstate how much better of an editor situation we are in than 10 years ago.

This isn't even getting into VS Code offering a way for you to put... one? two? files into a git repo and have that mean that opening the editor will spawn a container, _install itself in the container_, and run there while still having a native GUI for the actual usage of the tool. So much incidental complexity, gone!

One might point out that containers are a "big ball of mud" solution, but I vastly prefer that to big setup scripts that only half work. Here's to hoping we can shrink the ball of mud.

Re: Atom was archived today

#156
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…

Meh it's a second rate copycat in a shifty runtime.

There is nothing they've done with it that is notable or new, typical micro$oft nonsense.

Re: Atom was archived today

#158

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?).

Do you mean like ChromeOS?

Electron isn't popular just because it's cross-platform, but I think that is a big reason. The only other realistic option is Qt and that's looking increasingly dated.

Re: Atom was archived today

#159
post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Platform conventions matter because uniformity matters. It's a mystery to me why people just accept that in their (terminal) text editor, copying text uses a different shortcut than it does in their web browser. That is terrible usability, consumes brain cycles for no good reason, and is above all else completely unnecessary because modern alternatives exist that actually blend in with the system they're a part of.

You mean like yy versus ctrl+c? You can definitely use a Vim browser/OS extension but Vim does it that way because the creator, I suppose, perceived that his user interface is better than what's already there. And I tend to agree. I don't need uniformity if it'll be inefficient.

vi and emacs don’t follow desktop conventions because they predate desktop conventions (and vim of course follows vi)

Re: Atom was archived today

#160
post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Platform conventions matter because uniformity matters. It's a mystery to me why people just accept that in their (terminal) text editor, copying text uses a different shortcut than it does in their web browser. That is terrible usability, consumes brain cycles for no good reason, and is above all else completely unnecessary because modern alternatives exist that actually blend in with the system they're a part of.

You mean like yy versus ctrl+c? You can definitely use a Vim browser/OS extension but Vim does it that way because the creator, I suppose, perceived that his user interface is better than what's already there. And I tend to agree. I don't need uniformity if it'll be inefficient.

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