Live data from Hacker News

Atom was archived today

github.com

471–480 of 614 posts

Re: Atom was archived today

#471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly I’m not a fan of VSCode as a user. It’s too generic and lacks identity (too powerful to edit simple configs); it auto-updates every time I start it; it’s too complicated to configure; JSON is ugly and it’s 2022, why not favor GUI configurations? If my goal is to program in language X then I should be able to grab a product and get started without fuss. VSCode is a whole lot of fussing about. That being said,…

As far as I know most configuration can be done through GUI. You have both JSON and GUI views of the preferences. It seems the GUI is automatically generated from the JSON-schema that validates and gives autocomplete to the JSON editor.

VS Code has the power of emacs and an autogenerating UI which maps to the configuration files. To me, that’s the easy way out—make the UI map one-to-one with the data underneath, obviating the burden of considering the UX of each configuration path, and missing out on the benefits of good UX.

Re: Atom was archived today

#472
post #57

I'm a happy user of Atom as my daily driver for basic note taking and scratch pads. Even though it's being sunset, I look forward to using it for years to come. Perhaps it will have a good fork one day, but honestly it works great as-is. Sometimes software reaches a point where it just works, and you appreciate not having a team that wants to change everything.

There’s already an attempt to keep it going https://pulsar-edit.dev/

Today they just announced V1.0 of their backend: "This Backend Server supports all documented and undocumented endpoints that were originally available on Atom, and should support all interactions with APM, PPM the Atom application, the Pulsar application, and any other unknown 3rd party services that integrated with the backend. Essentially it should look like nothing has changed."

https://github.com/pulsar-edit/package-backend/releases/tag/...

So that's progress.

Re: Atom was archived today

#473
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…

I know people shit on VSCode but in my humble opinion, VSCode single handedly destroyed Atom. Far superior tool, 100% free and adoption growth was crazy.

Re: Atom was archived today

#474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 dunno, I'm not convinced that a compiler or OS is a harder problem than an IDE. "Turns out humans are complicated and making computers do things they want is hard."[1] UX design is not only a whole complicated field in its own right, it imposes additional technical constraints that interlock with UX ones in complex ways. (E.g., VS Code's plugin API is architected the way it is partly to limit the ability of a plugi…

I think a "compiler" isn't too bad — certainly easier than an IDE by a long margin. An optimizing compiler OTOH, can be a bit of a beast. Because the optimization passes self-interact, on every line of code, repeatedly, any small error in the passes can dramatically amplify (or cancel out!). It means the level of quality of the optimization passes is (by necessity) much, much, much higher than plain old SW. It's just ... very tedious.

Re: Atom was archived today

#475

I didn’t quite understand the loss of Atom until I authored https://ghuntley.com/fracture about VSCode. Now I deeply care about ensuring programming languages do not outsource their LSP development to Microsoft and enable them to capture the ecosystem as is happening in python.

Thanks for the article.

VSCode is dead to me. I don't want to use development tools which allow a corporation to constantly inject it's agenda into my work.

Re: Atom was archived today

#476
post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Having used Atom and VS Code on an old laptop in college, VS Code definitely does a better job when you throw it a large file, a first-gen i5, and 4GB of RAM. Likewise, at my first internship, I tried sublime on my work computer, which they had clearly just grabbed from the storage room (Windows 7! In 2018!). Sublime exploded into a million pieces. My point is this: if we're being honest, all Electron-based editors s…

I honestly don't get that use case, I don't open large files in a text editor usually. But I agree that atom sucks in that degree.

Maybe slow never was the problem is kinda what my point is. In the end it's just an editor for text.

Re: Atom was archived today

#478
post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'll take Java over JavaScript any day, but that's just a personal preference of course

> I'll take Java over JavaScript any day

Well sure, and I would choose to be hanged rather than broken on the wheel, but I’d rather neither.

Fortunately, Armed Bear Common Lisp runs fine on the JVM.

Re: Atom was archived today

#479
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…

There is a solid alternative, though. Pulsar. Atom was kind of dead, but it still had a small, dedicated fanbase including myself. Hopefully Pulsar will be able to keep the project alive as long as us Atom fans use it

Re: Atom was archived today

#480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an editor day to day yes you are correct. Sublime is the goat as far as performance. VSCode has become my primary editor because I work remotely via SSH but nothing can touch the lightness and latency of subl. I still run it in tandem with vscode for stuff that doesn’t require a remote conn. It’s an order of magnitude quicker than VSCode.

> 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.
Post reply on HN