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Atom 1.0

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Re: Atom 1.0

#121

Post by bluepill »

vowelless wrote: post #107
cnp wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the perspective of a web app developer it's just so modern. The language of the interface takes all of the (admittedly subjective) best-practice lessons that the web has taught us over the years and embeds them directly in, and then lets you hack them apart however you wish -- simply. Code editing works without a thousand inconsistencies, and then you have things like embedding your terminal directly with ease (…

I haven't looked at Atom yet, but can it parse the vimrc file to load the right settings?

Atom's vim mode is a joke. No ex mode, you need another plugin for that ... which is kind of clunky.

Re: Atom 1.0

#122

Post by cnp »

bluepill wrote: post #113
jonahx wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the main advantages that atom gives you over native vim?

None. Atom's installer is a huge download, and the editor is much slower ... It also consumes much more memory and written in coffeescript. Takes a long time to start up ... just a few things on the top of my head. It's a great initiative though so that's already a good point.

I just timed it and it was less than 5 seconds. I would suggest giving 1.0 a spin before you judge.

Re: Atom 1.0

#124

Post by steego »

jerf wrote: post #60
joefitzgerald wrote: post #42

The killer feature of Atom to me is the ease with which it can be extended (via packages) and the openness to community contribution on core features. That's not a knock against any other editor (some of which share similar characteristics in this regard) – it's just what draws me to Atom. It's super easy to hack on and contribute to.

It's the Cycle of Bloat. 1. Develop tool. It's small and fast and minimal! Woo! 2. It's easy to modify because it's so small! Woo! 3. Look, there's a budding ecosystem of packages! Woo! (Let's not talk about the fact the packages exist precisely because the original product wasn't big enough.) 4. Oh dear, some of them conflict, a lot of them suck. Well, here's some winners, let's pull them into the core. Now the base…

I disagree with your characterization. Take jQuery for example.

    1. Small, fast and minimal.
    2. Easy to create plugins.
    3. Budding ecosystem and explosion of plugins.
    4. Conflicts ensued and some plugins got pulled into the core project.
Eventually, the growth of jQuery tapered off as the project stabilized. Not only did the size taper off, it got smaller as well. After nearly 10 years, we're talking about a payload of 30K minified and gzipped. https://mathiasbynens.be/demo/jquery-size

The cycle of bloat doesn't always take hold if your team is disciplined and dedicated to keeping it small. You simply can't expect to your 3.0 to be as small as your 1.0 because it's very unlikely you're going to know upfront how people are going to use your software.

Re: Atom 1.0

#125

Post by lvillani »

MozMorris wrote: post #84
veidr wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it still fares very poorly when matched up against ST3 (or Textmate 2, or basically any high-quality native editor). It is slow slow slow, and has lots of little quirks which are clearly a result of the wacky way they decided to build a text editor. BUT .... it is way, way better than it used to be. I keep it installed and use it from time to time, to let it update itself and see how it has grown. It clearly has…

Sorry be that guy who posts his specs and disagrees... :-) Running on a stock mid-2011 Air w/ 4GB Ram plus a Thunderbolt display. If it was slow, I would have switched or upgraded my machine sometime ago. Things that are slow to me are waiting for node-sass to compile on save, server-side code reloading, npm installing... and so on.

It highly depends on your usage pattern.

I usually have one long-lived instance of an editor for the project/thing I'm focusing on, but I also frequently fire up "temporary" instances for one-off editing jobs, from the terminal.

The difference between, let's say, "subl ." (launch Sublime Text in the current directory) and "atom ." is staggering: Sublime Text starts instantly with a boatload of plugins; Atom starts nearly instantaneously but then takes around 5 seconds to become usable, without plugins, after repeated runs.

(Speaking of specs, I'm on a late 2013 Retina MacBook Pro, 16 GB of RAM)

Re: Atom 1.0

#126

Post by erokar »

Mahn wrote: post #98
geoffharcourt wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's really only a problem if you're contributing to the core, right? You can write your own packages in JS, and if you're just a user of the editor I don't see how that matters.

Sure, but it's not the same, on one side I'd like to read the core and hack it on my own terms, on the other I'd feel more comfortable writing packages if I could just read the core and see how things work under the hood. I'd like it to be a "hackable editor" as it touts itself, but as it stands right now it's a "hackable editor if you are comfortable with CoffeeScript".

It will take you less than a day to learn to read CoffeeScript if you are familiar with JS.

Re: Atom 1.0

#127

Post by kajecounterhack »

omouse wrote: post #49
joefitzgerald wrote: post #42

The killer feature of Atom to me is the ease with which it can be extended (via packages) and the openness to community contribution on core features. That's not a knock against any other editor (some of which share similar characteristics in this regard) – it's just what draws me to Atom. It's super easy to hack on and contribute to.

Welcome to what I've felt with Emacs since I first used it. Might be time to work on some tutorials and examples to make Emacs easier to hack on and contribute to...

I've felt largely the same about vim. I think atom is the GUI'ed equivalent of excellent extensible minimalist command line tools.

Re: Atom 1.0

#128

Post by lojack »

geoffharcourt wrote: post #66
Mahn wrote: post #56

I really want to like Atom but it's such a pity that they went for CoffeeScript instead of plain ES5/ES6.

That's really only a problem if you're contributing to the core, right? You can write your own packages in JS, and if you're just a user of the editor I don't see how that matters.

Sure, you can write your own packages in vanilla JS. Unfortunately though all of the documentation (and most packages themselves) are all written in coffeescript. Basically, the only way you can write a plugin in Javascript is if you already know Coffeescript (at least enough to read it).

It's just one extra barrier of entry for non-coffeescript developers. I personally thought about writing a simple plugin, went to the documentation and realized it was all in coffeescript with no JS option, and gave up. I simply don't have the mental capacity to learn another language that probably won't be around in 10 years.

Re: Atom 1.0

#130

Post by VeejayRampay »

cnp wrote: post #76
wodenokoto wrote: post #57

A lot of people complain about the slowness of the Dom/JavaScript backend, but I see a lot of potential for some really cool things, like integrated juPyter notebooks, semi wysiwyg rendering of latex and markdown and maybe drawing rendering trees or other creative things.

Honestly, its not slow anymore between their React integration and this: http://blog.atom.io/2015/06/16/optimizing-an-important-atom-... . Feels ~95% native.

Until you search and replace with regex that is. Jest aside, it's a great editor, thanks to everyone involved.
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