The State of Atom's Performance

At this point, they would have saved themselves time by implementing it in C from the beginning.

Because their direct statement, at the end of the day, just unilaterally shifts blame to Electron for something that is partly their fault. So while they do have improvements in 2017, and it's great to see their steps for the future, they still have a fundamental issue in not admitting that they are slower than their direct competitors, who also are burdened by the same issues Atom is saying are the reason for their performance.

I imagine you use arrow keys too.

Wait.

If your JavaScript is only going to execute in 1 version of the V8 engine forever why use JQuery?

Serious question. I’m not a huge JS Develoler but when I dabbled I was told JQuery was there to soften the differences between browsers.

I want to believe!

I want to like Atom so badly. I really buy into the features it offers over my beloved Sublime Text (3). I want the connectivity to the greater community, the ease of styling, and the ease of extension. I want everything Atom claims to offer!

In my last year of switching from Sublime Text 2/3, I have pretty much just gained one thing: cooler language syntax styles. I havent actually taken advantage of all of the ideas behind atom - I guess, when it comes to the grind, Im not interested in them enough to actually take advantage. When it comes to how I use my code editor, I seemed to have focused only on my career's needs, and not the joy of customizing, extending, and contributing back (to the code editor's community, that is).

What is important to me is productivity. In my year of using Atom, I lost a lot of productivity. First I lost lots of productivity configuring Atom to be in a similar state to how I use Sublime Text 3. That wasnt hard, Atom is just different, so there was some learning that distracted me when I wanted to focus on work. Thats cool, I can accept that for any "next big new thing." Then I lost a lot of productivity due to things related to package-management systems, configuration issues, and I had to wipe and reinstall a few times as it was easier to get back to work than to figure out what tidbit of an advanced feature I was misunderstanding. Then I lost a lot more productivity after package updates broke other packages (mostly language syntax stuff, but enough to be a big distraction when coding). It felt like getting into ES6 JS for the first time after only using jQuery - except in Atom's case, it was a tool getting in the way of me working.

I also really loathe all of the git-integration features, though they sounded great at first. I am constantly having to git reset and git checkout etc because I diddnt realize I had the @#$%ing sidebar in focus instead of the text area for the zillionth time. I diddnt realize when I was trying to select and delete text with a keystroke, that I deleted files from the sidebar view yet again. So on and so forth - its given me a major fear of using the software as misclicks and such lead to pain that I have to undo via my terminal. Dont get me started on how bad its auto indent or copy paste intelligence is... and again, zero of these issues with ST3.

Atom might be "free," in theory, but it cost me many hundreds (possibly low 4-figure number) of dollars worth of billable hours in my 2017 fiscal year.

Ive probably lost a cumulative total of 4-5 billable hours to Sublime Text in my whole life, and that was usually to Sublime's wonky updating patterns.

Id really like to like Atom, but Im "thiiiiiiiiiiiiiis close" to deleting it off my work machines and going back to Sublime Text 3. It has taught me that productivity it way more important to me than modern web-enabled features.

Here is to hoping 2018 is a better year for the Atom IDE, as my relationship with it has about 1-more incident worth of tolerance left.