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Atom was archived today

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Re: Atom was archived today

#401

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VSCode is good but as someone who’s been writing software for nearly 40 years, I really feel you’ve over doing the compliments by a long long way. Compilers, operating systems, browser engines (unfortunately) and reverse engineering proprietary hardware/firmware are all significantly harder challenges than writing an IDE. in fact there have been excellent IDEs around for decades before VSCode came along. Yes the indu…

VSCode is good but as someone who’s been writing software for nearly 40 years, I really feel you’ve over doing the compliments by a long long way. I agree. Lots of people talk about how great VS Code is. But how many of them would sing that tune if they had to pay for it? VS Code's killer feature isn't customization or extensibility. Clearly it isn't speed or stability. It's price.

Well, it has to have something beyond price if it's taking by storm the editor arena that always has had great editors.

I think it has gained its place in the eternal emacs vs vim discussion, and that's a feat to be reckoned. In 15 years there will be other fancier editors but VS Code will still be there.

Re: Atom was archived today

#402

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I worked around some of the vscode folk, there are a lot of them there who do it out of love for the product and the betterment of developer tooling. Someone should write up the story of how it started, and how it got to where it is. The backstory is fascinating.

They may be making it out of love, but they’re not the ones giving it away. The ones who are giving it away are not doing it out of love.

Out of love for long term profits maybe ;)

Re: Atom was archived today

#403
post #386

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VSCode isn't the most complex of projects or most widespread etc. But from perspective of engineering a large project is about making 100s of small and large choices. In hindsight, lot of them are wrong. Take any software WinNT, Linux, Atom, IntelliJ, Adobe* you can now with all the extra information available today can find some decisions that were wrong. With VSCode these wrong decisions are very few and minor comp…

By your logic Sublime is an even higher feat of engineering since it made even better engineering decisions. Ultimately they’re both very fancy text editors, not ‘the greatest feat of modern software engineering’. I’d happily switch from Sublime to VScode or EMacs or any of the other umpteen code editors. I’d shudder to have to go back from Git to SVN. Even Mercurial seems milquetoast in comparison. Similarly, what a…

> I’d shudder to have to go back from Git to SVN.

What are some of the Git features that make a big difference to you? I use them on different projects and I end up using them both in the same very basic way (check out code, make changes, check code in).

Re: Atom was archived today

#404
post #75

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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 good but as someone who’s been writing software for nearly 40 years, I really feel you’ve over doing the compliments by a long long way. Compilers, operating systems, browser engines (unfortunately) and reverse engineering proprietary hardware/firmware are all significantly harder challenges than writing an IDE. in fact there have been excellent IDEs around for decades before VSCode came along. Yes the indu…

I think VSCode's impressiveness is less about the pure engineering challenge (although I do think even among popular, well-used IDEs there's a large differential in things like performance, which points to it not being a trivial problem), and more about making smart product decisions to strike a great balance between extensibility and performance / smoothness. There's not a singular big hairy problem to solve, but if you compare VSCode to other Electron apps, it's clear that the VSCode team really took the time to make sure everything was as performant and polished as possible.

And in terms of "well it depends on other technologies for it to work", this describes pretty much any innovation in software since the very earliest computers, including all the examples you listed.

Re: Atom was archived today

#405

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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".

Nor does VS Code, thanks to being a web page inside a native frame.

Re: Atom was archived today

#406

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Typescript makes VSCode very slow though. I remember the feeling when switched from Atom to VSCode it's wicked fast. And then Typescript happens, my macbook's fan keeps spinning from time to time.

AFAIK Typescript has no runtime impact on performance, the transpiled JS should be equally fast as the handwritten code

I think they mean the performance of VSCode editing a project with Typescript code in it. There's the runtime cost of VSCode checking the Typescript, providing intellisense, etc. (Not that I've ever had that runtime cost be noticeable to me. Maybe it's a real issue on certain codebases or workflows.)

Re: Atom was archived today

#407

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Both Sublime Text and Merge are great and well worth the price for me :)

I do not really see the point of Sublime Merge. Tried it a few times, but it just seems unnecessary. Is it just for people who want to avoid the CLI?

When you're dealing with multiple repos, projects, tasks, contributors etc, version control quickly becomes a very multi-dimensional thing. I generally prefer CLI software where possible, and will happily use vanilla git for personal projects, but once a certain threshold of complexity is passed, a good git GUI seems to add a lot of value.

Re: Atom was archived today

#408
post #229

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But with a crappy language.

again, like the JVM I am not particularly fond of Java (I know I am not alone :-D).

There are other choices. One of my planned projects over the Christmas break is to use Scala for a personal project.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_JVM_languages

Re: Atom was archived today

#409

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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.

I know this is not what you're saying, but when I read your post I start hearing an internal voice going something like:

Contribute more to e-waste! Pollute more! Consume! Consume!

A bog-standard 8-year old computer would be considered a supercomputer by the standards of the '80s, so at some point we ought to put some effort into making computers feel like the insanely powerful beasts they are. And Electron won't help with that.

Re: Atom was archived today

#410
post #390

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…

The first and last time I tried Sublime Text, it turned out to be impossible to properly have a file open in two editors (or tabs or whatever Sublime's term is): any changes made in one editor were only synchronized to the other editor upon saving the file. I really tried to like Sublime, but the lack of such a basic feature was a total no-go. That was several years ago, has the situation changed?

Multiple views into a single file have been supported for a long time; I believe as far back as ST2. Currently it's easily accessible by right-clicking on a tab and selecting "Split View".
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