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Atom was archived today

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Re: Atom was archived today

#231
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

Reading such posts really makes me wonder how people wrote UNIX (up to V7) with just ed and an ASR33. And productive, they were.

I've seen some old timers on ACME who dislike even the "distraction" of syntax coloring with modern editor such as vim. I wonder how they would fare with something like MS VSCode.

Re: Atom was archived today

#232
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 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. Its good, but not that good. There are still some pretty basic features that full fledged…

Surprise, surprise, emacs was there before you: run one daemon, open as many windows as you'd like.

Re: Atom was archived today

#234
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

>With VSCode, you type the name of any programming language in the extension search, click "Install", and you have a world-class development environment

Very minor feature. It is not usefull unless you are constantly hunting for new languages.

>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.

This is only true if you are comparing default vim/emacs to VSCode, which would be quite unfair. Compare it to some vim/emacs distributions and list the differences.

Re: Atom was archived today

#235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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).

vi and emacs have certainly had more impact to date, but at the current moment VSCode far outcompetes it on every front. That doesn't mean that there aren't people who still prefer vi or emacs, the same way that some people still ride horses despite the fact that cars exist.

You seem to be implying that VSCode is "better" than Emacs or Vim, as cars are better than horses, but other than having wider adoption atm, I'm not sure it's "better" in any meaningful way.

Re: Atom was archived today

#236
post #18
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.

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.

The selling point of Electron is that it is cross platform, but that does come at a cost. The cost is essentially running a separate instance of Chrome for every application you run that is built with it. The runtime overhead for that is significant. It is a tradeoff that works for some applications, but there are a huge number of applications for which it makes them resource-sucking pigs that do not provide value significant enough to justify the resources they consume.

Re: Atom was archived today

#237
post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

This isn't even true on virtually any macOS terminal, which use Command-C (just like a web browser). The problem isn't the terminal, it is the operating system.

Re: Atom was archived today

#238
post #219
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and that's exactly what people hate about it: every application written in Electron lugs around its own copy of this OS. You can imagine why this might not be a good idea, especially for applications designed to run in the background, like the Slack client. For me, it was a godsend when Slack decided that my Linux version was too old to support and the client stopped working. Then I switched to the in-browser ve…

There are two sides to this. In the Electron case, it’s wasteful to some degree. Especially if the app is not doing much with files/storage etc. For VSCode it makes sense to not run in the browser but for Slack, not so much. But generally I feel like there’s too much overlap between OS, browsers, IDEs and language runtimes (JVM, V8/Node etc.). It gets worse if you add containers and VMs. I wonder how many garbage col…

> I wonder how many garbage collectors, file abstractions, JITs, databases, schedulers, GUI engines, indexers and so on are running on my machine

I tried to picture clusters of information as they moved through the computer. What did they look like? Ships? Motorcycles? Were the circuits like freeways? I kept dreaming of a world I thought I'd never see. And then one day …

Re: Atom was archived today

#239
post #150
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ma…

I have never, in my life, used an electron program that isn't irritatingly slow on my main computer. Yes, it's not something you'd probably call a fast computer (4th gen i3, 4GB ram), but this same computer doesn't drop a frame in equivalent native programs. Most of the time the CPU is almost idle.

I have nothing intrinsic against electron, and I'll take everything back if I see these "natural fits" actually fit.

Re: Atom was archived today

#240
post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hold VSCode to be at least equal to those achievements. Having used dozens of text editors and IDEs in the course of my programming career, I can appreciate how non-obvious it is for a piece of software this complex to work so fucking well all the time. And considering how many people are empowered by the productivity gains VSCode brings, I'd say that the real-world impact of VSCode is also much greater than that o…

You are saying an IDE (of which there are many wayyy better) is as equally important as a technology which helped save thousands of lives? Do you really think VSCode is an equally big achievement as building space stations? peoples lives are more important than a few hours of a programmers life getting used to vim (or any other non VSCode editor) EDIT: Even millions, and thats only one of thousand technologies that i…

The consensus is that it’s millions of lives, not merely thousands.

https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/covid-19-vaccines-saved-estimated...

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