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Atom was archived today

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Re: Atom was archived today

#391

Post by donatzsky »

throwntoday wrote: post #344
szastamasta wrote: post #132

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 :/

SciTE is pretty good in that role.

https://www.scintilla.org/SciTE.html

Re: Atom was archived today

#392

Post by k__ »

PurpleRamen wrote: post #384
_cenw wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd credit Sublime Text with that.

TextMate might have a word here.

Yes.

Few of my friends were using Macs and used TextMate. That was years before Sublime was even released.

To me it Sublime was a fast, but clunky alternative to TextMate that ran on PC.

Then came Atom, Brackets, and finally VSCode.

Re: Atom was archived today

#393

Post by krageon »

flohofwoe wrote: post #361
wokwokwok wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's not like commercial alternatives are automatically better though, see Visual Studio ( some aspects of VStudio are still better than VSCode, but VSCode has caught up fast, and as IDE for multi-language projects it is already better - the only important feature that's still inferior in VSCode compared to VStudio is the debugger integration). If the current 'trajectories' remain roughly the same, VSCode will leave…

Debugger integration has always been the killer differentiator for IDEs.

Re: Atom was archived today

#394

Post by krageon »

rtpg wrote: post #342
Beltalowda wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LSP is nice, but it's not an engineering marvel. It's just a text protocol. It's not even a great text protocol; it's okay , but not great. There's been lots of "LSP-like" protocols over the years, even decades, it's just that none of them really became a standard (partly because no one actually invested the time in writing one, and it just used an "ad-hoc protocol"). And of course the general concept of "process A c…

The thing is it successfully had work put in so that it’s a standard. “They did a thing that basically no one succeeded in doing” is, imo, proof of something.

It's proof of nothing but popularity, which isn't indicative of quality in the least.

Re: Atom was archived today

#395

Post by nigamanth »

p-e-w wrote: post #7

Sad to see this go. I was an early adopter of Atom, and I wrote two extensions for it, one of which while it was still in beta. The Atom developers made some technology choices that in retrospect were ill-advised, CoffeeScript being the worst of them and splitting everything into dozens of packages a close second. They tried to backpedal on both of these later on, but by that time VSCode, with its far superior engine…

VSCode is owned by Microsoft, ever since Microsoft bought GitHub in 2018 it was bound to happen. The two text-editors had the same audience therefore Atom was bound to get shut.

Re: Atom was archived today

#396

Post by progman32 »

viridian wrote: post #379
rahen wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Having worked with a handful of terminal CLI purists I'm convinced most of the people who bang the drum hard for vi and emacs aren't nearly as productive as they think they are, and instead evangelize it largely for some mixture of these reasons: 1) They have a strong preference for keyboard only operation 2) It serves as a cultural cachet, or shibboleth, to signal how elite and pure a developer they are 3) they wish…

I find that many people "banging the drum hard" for a text editor are falling for the same kind of faulty thinking.

In my experience, the only situations a colleague has been slowed down in a significant way by their choice of editor seem to boil down to two categories: - Haven't put in the time to actually learn the tool (i.e. using vim purely in insert mode, or VSCode as a plain text editor, constantly going back to a file manager to find and open files) and get stuck in a particularly horrible workflow. - Burn hours daily fiddling with their setup, chasing perfection.

Neither of these are typically caused by the tool itself. At the end of the day... I'm confident most devs can be quite effective using just DOS EDIT or Notepad if pressed.

As for me.... unless I'm doing something specialized, I catch myself trying to eke out that last 1% productivity boost from my editor and ask myself... is this really the best thing to be messing with? Usually, it's not. Honestly, writing documentation or doing a quick prototype is much higher return.

Re: Atom was archived today

#397

Post by nigamanth »

rodw wrote: post #52
skyfaller wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or another way to phrase it is that the experience sucks equally on all platforms, so you might as well switch to Linux.

Everyone believes Electron "sucks" because it's mainly the apps that suck that are noticeably built with Electron. It's the "when you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all" phenomenon. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VofkquwmT40&t=29s >

For real, just because Electron takes up additional space doesn't mean shit. Discord, VSC, Teams, Slack, and Skype are built with Electron, all inspired by Atom.

Re: Atom was archived today

#398

Post by Emigre_ »

capableweb wrote: post #359
Emigre_ wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sublime Text is a fantastic editor. In my opinion it deserves more popularity.

Sublime Text definitely had it's moment in the spotlight, at one point (around 2012-2014) it was basically the only editor I saw people using, besides emacs/vim which has its diehard fans (including myself). Most of those people are using Visual Studio Code today instead, although in comparison, VS Code is very bloated and slow. For fun and giggles, here is a comparison of the Google popularity between Sublime Text,…

I also like emacs, Vim and NeoVim a lot… I guess I probably prefer them over Sublime Text. I like the fact that Sublime Text is performant, written in C++, and the product of the work of a guy, not a corporation. I’m happy to pay for stuff I like. It’s a pity that it’s closed-source, though…

Re: Atom was archived today

#399

Post by npigrounet »

p-e-w wrote: post #75
esprehn wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Atom predated the LSP and leaned heavily into customizations with all the plugins running inside the UI thread (more like a traditional web page and 3p scripts). At the time they viewed the extreme customization support as a feature, and there was a thriving ecosystem of folks making plugins. That architecture has a major flaw though. A default install was fast, but a real configuration with all the plugins ended up…

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…

It's great software but really far from being the greatest of all time.

Re: Atom was archived today

#400

Post by opan »

wokwokwok wrote: post #257
steve1977 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> VSCode is one of the greatest pieces of engineering of our time. That must be one of the saddest things I read this month.

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…

Vim and Emacs are free. This seems like the norm to me.
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