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Atom was archived today

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Re: Atom was archived today

#491

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> nothing can touch the lightness and latency of subl There's this editor called vim. You should have a look.

For some people (like me), re-teaching muscle memory is a huge battle that takes years. Switching to an editor where you can't use the mouse as a crutch until you learn it is a non-starter.

vim has both terminal and gui builds. The latter supports the mouse.

Re: Atom was archived today

#492
post #122

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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.

> 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.

M-x cua-mode resolves this in Emacs. I don't use it, because I've been using Emacs for slightly longer than the CUA has existed.

Re: Atom was archived today

#493
post #259

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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…

Dunno, just getting VSCode to run and debug a project requires manually editing cryptic config files which is what almost any IDE does much better...

Indeed; while VSCode is held up as the "best ever IDE for everything, period", what those people gloss over is that they are web devs, not C++ hackers who need to be able to easily build projects (and have good, reliable syntax highlighting and autocompletion). In the rare occasion that I use VSCode for C++ development, I just use cmake from the built-in terminal because I really don't think VSCode is designed to build C++ projects.

Re: Atom was archived today

#494
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…

VS Code built on top of Atom’s team great work, which was open source (something that Microsoft was still grasping at the time). Not saying VS Code isn’t great, but they definitely learned from past projects mistakes and wins. Atom was one of the pioneers.

I feel like VS Code was a "learn from the mistakes of Atom" project in very much the same way C# was a "learn from the mistakes of Java" project.

Re: Atom was archived today

#495

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Except that VHS was released after Betamax, so second & worse video quality won that time. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VHS https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betamax

This IS an urban legend which deserves to die. VHS wasn't of discernible worse picture quality but provided much better usability at the same time.

VHS was of marginally worse picture quality, but for that small trade-off you got the huge benefit of being able to record a feature-length movie on one tape.

Re: Atom was archived today

#496

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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. 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.

VS Code is good, but not THAT good. It has unparalleled remote editing with the SSH extension, but the actual editor is beaten by Sublime.

I can buy that people like it, I don’t dislike it, but it also isn’t sliced bread. There’s peers in the market that are ahead in various ways, so VS Code isn’t the end all be all, even if it is cool.

Re: Atom was archived today

#497

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Yes, it’s not. It’s just free. What people mean when they say “I can’t believe how good this is” is: “I can’t believe how good this is for something I got for free” That’s not engineering excellence. It’s just engineering; being given away as a loss leader. Vscode is good and well maintained, but that’s because a lot of money is being spent making it so. Enjoy it; there’s no harm in taking money people are giving awa…

The thing to keep in mind with VS Code is that they built a new IDE on a rather humble platform, and somehow managed to leapfrog every other IDE in the market (for JS and Python anyhow) in terms of functionality while keeping performance good. It may not be a marvel of engineering, but it is a marvel for having strong product vision and top notch execution while also being well engineered.

For JS perhaps, PyCharm has a few tricks up its sleeve that I haven’t quite seen in VS Code, especially wrt debugger support.

That said, the Python IDE market has been sadly underfed for surprisingly long.

Re: Atom was archived today

#498
post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Dunno, just getting VSCode to run and debug a project requires manually editing cryptic config files which is what almost any IDE does much better...

VSCode is not tied to a specific language so the job of handling config files is left to the extension. Not every language has a fixed project structure so I think the major extensions have kept structure-dependent things out. In C++ for example there are CMake projects and GNU Makefile projects. Not sure why such extensions haven't bubbled yet. Other IDEs have their own fixed project structure and a project config file specific to their IDE. This means running and debugging is easier in their IDE if your project works in the specific way intended by the IDE, but this locks you to their IDE.

Re: Atom was archived today

#499

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…

It's unfortunate because all I want is a notepad with syntax highlighting and Atom with most packages disabled offered that. I don't need code complete, or a terminal, or extensions, or anything else VScode offers. I suppose now is a good time to write my own notepad :/

If you use windows, notepad++ is what you're looking for. It was my first love in terms of code editors, and I still haven't found an editor (besides vim, and probably emacs) that handles on-the-fly macro recording and playback like NPP has for decades.

Re: Atom was archived today

#500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think anyone tried to really make a standard, as far as I know. But even if they did, there's lots of reasons why some things take off and others don't: putting in the work as you mentioned, whether it's any good, marketing, state of other tooling and tech, zeitgeist at the time ("timing"), etc. Would something like Go have taken off 20 years ago? I'm not so sure, the zeitgeist at the time was very much in th…

> But you know, putting in the work to write down a specification isn't really a marvel of engineering. It's ... just putting in the work. It's no marvel of engineering, but someone did put in the work, and others used it , more that can be said about many other things that might be "better engineered".

I never said they were "better engineered". I only wanted to refute that "VSCode is one of the greatest pieces of engineering of our time", which went to use LSP as an example in this (sub)thread.
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