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Atom was archived today

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Re: Atom was archived today

#271

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...

It's been a while when I've used VS code in production but on Linux the issues with Atom have been less from the very start and VS Code simply never delivered the performance increase everyone was talking about. Maybe because I never made it an IDE but used it as editor.

On Linux Atom simply was the "better" choice for a long time.

Re: Atom was archived today

#272
post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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…

How complex is VSCode anyway compared to the older days of Eclipse IDE compiling and building apps for Blackberry and Android. If VSCode was released circa 2010 it can't even compile a small J2ME application.

Re: Atom was archived today

#273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It sounds like your 8 year old computer can't keep with today's technology. If it's possible, might I suggest upgrading your computer? A more modern system would let you run Electron apps without being irritatingly slow. It seems silly that I had to upgrade my laptop in order to run a text editor, but it seems that's just the world we live in.

On one side, I agree that expecting an 8yo machine to keep up with modern workflows is silly, and that at some point even bill gates or whoever you attribute the famous 512kb RAM quote to had to admit they were wrong

Re: Atom was archived today

#274
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sublime is great! Ultra fast. I feel like VSCode will be as sluggish as Visual Studio eventually.

It is so noticeable how different they are in speed. I’ve worked in Sublime for many years now (and continue to for most projects) but will switch to VSCode whenever I want to hack on some Go, since the LSP stuff works so well there. I constantly find myself messing things up due to input latency.

VS Code team did some work on typing latency in the last few months, you might want to give the Insiders version a try.

Re: Atom was archived today

#275
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. That must be one of the saddest things I read this month.

It made me sad as well. It’s interesting that it did. I think it’s related to the fact that I read it in HN I guess, and what kind of commentary do I seek and enjoy when roaming around here. Although of course I respect the commenter’s opinion, and we can all politely disagree and have different points of view, for some reason when I read this one I felt a certain degree of sadness.

Re: Atom was archived today

#277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like your 8 year old computer can't keep with today's technology. If it's possible, might I suggest upgrading your computer? A more modern system would let you run Electron apps without being irritatingly slow. It seems silly that I had to upgrade my laptop in order to run a text editor, but it seems that's just the world we live in.

On one side, I agree that expecting an 8yo machine to keep up with modern workflows is silly, and that at some point even bill gates or whoever you attribute the famous 512kb RAM quote to had to admit they were wrong

Forgot to type the rest and can't edit for some reason.

On the other hand, vim or Emacs with all features I personally currently use in vscode come in at a fraction of the memory usage, and it is a bit dumb to have to use that much ram for slack or discord considering how light IRC clients used to be.

Re: Atom was archived today

#278
post #79

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, bu…

Atom extensions are like script tags added to the page, while VS Code runs all extensions in a single separate process and gives them a limited API.

That means that in VS Code actions like "right click to open context menu" or "type in Command Palette to filter commands" are instantaneous regardless of your extensions, as no extension code gets run. But extensions can't change the layout of the editor, or really do anything not exposed by the API.

If you want hack-ability there is an extension - https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=betterth...

Re: Atom was archived today

#279

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…

Atom being free was surely the main factor. But Sublime was also in a bit of a development rut back then. So Atom filled a bit of a void there.

Re: Atom was archived today

#280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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:

> that's too many pushes of the same button, so we all learned caps are a waste

No we didn't, because on a computer it doesn't require any meaningful extra effort (unless you're a lazy kid -> another age indicator), and pre-smartphones... texting actually used to cost money. You'd probably have a plan of some 1000 free text messages / month, or sth., which isn't that much if you're a teenager, given that a text messages was limited to ~140 characters (yes, that's where Twitter's limit came from - SMS compatibility).

Caps, instead of being waste, let you skip whitespace. Instead of writing "caps are a waste", you'd write "CapsAreAWaste" (and then possibly shorten it to "CapsRAWaste"). We'd cut the message length by some 20-30% this way, which mattered for longer messages - it would turn a 4 SMS long message into a 3 SMS long one. We'd of course optimize harder when we were close to message length boundary.

Being efficient with text messaging was a critical social life skill when I was young.

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