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Sunsetting Atom

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Re: Sunsetting Atom

#591

Post by galaxyLogic »

nathansobo wrote: post #346
wpietri wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ooh, this is interesting. It sounds like you learned a lesson here. Could you say more about what prompted the change? I once talked with a Firefox engineer who felt like an initial urge for openness left them with a lot of API surface area that locked them into a lot of design choices. Was it something like that for you as well?

Very much so. As the first Electron app we were so excited about people being able to do anything they imagined. It was cool but ended up really constraining us. This time we really want to drive our API based on the most important things people actually need to extend. We need to navigate the trade-offs more intelligently.

This is important, think about the whole Web. Too many ways of doing things and too much backwards compatibility needed for tools to develop further.

I always cringed at languages like Perl and also Groovy where the pride of the language designers seemed to be that there are so many ways to do the same thing.

Re: Sunsetting Atom

#592

Post by aniforprez »

nop_slide wrote: post #425
joshstrange wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just got access to this the other day and I'm excited to try it out!

My initial experience loading a python project was disappointing. I don't know if I didn't configure it right but auto complete and syntax highlighting didn't seem to work properly.

Isn't it just a frontend with the actual language servers and the whole IDE back end running somewhere else? At least that's what I thought it was from their announcement. Sort of like GitHub codespaces

Re: Sunsetting Atom

#593

Post by zamalek »

nathansobo wrote: post #253

Founder of Atom here. We're building the spiritual successor to Atom over at https://zed.dev . We learned a lot with Atom and had a great time, but it always fell short of our vision. With Zed we're going to get it right. Written in Rust, custom native UI framework, engineered to be collaborative. Just starting our private alpha this week, so the timing of this announcement feels quite fitting. Here's a talk I gave l…

> Just starting our private alpha this week

I'm holding thumbs, I have been massively excited about your elevator pitch since your original announcement. Good luck!

Re: Sunsetting Atom

#594

Post by mmcnl »

nathansobo wrote: post #385
sdfhdhjdw3 wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humble question, I don't mean to sound confrontational, I ask of genuine curiosity: Why not contribute to VS Code instead? For Julia, Atom+Juno was excellent. It was the first time I could select+run on a proper IDE (I was coming from python+notebook). To me this was revolutionary. Then I discovered VS Code, so Atom+Juno stopped making sense. You seem to be a very competent developer, so why not just contribute to VS…

Our goal is to build something substantially better than VS Code.

What is your definition of better?

Re: Sunsetting Atom

#595

Post by easrng »

foldor wrote: post #573
theteapot wrote: post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I code mostly in domain-specific, esoteric, private languages, no stdlib or docs, and no online resources to learn from. Jesus, who are you?

My guess based in my experience would a MUMPS developer for someone like Epic or Meditech. That code gives me nightmares whenever I see it.

Still can barely believe MUMPS is real tbh, first saw it on TDWTF and I thought it was a joke at first.

Re: Sunsetting Atom

#596

Post by chrisseaton »

dymk wrote: post #502
nathansobo wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We plan to monetize collaboration. Zed is a collaborative platform disguised as a world-class code editor.

How often do developers want to edit the same file, at the same time, and have those updates occur in real-time? I see this as a compelling feature for something targeting the use cases of, say Google Docs, where multiple people are contributing to an outline document or a business plan at the same time - but for code, I don't quite see the appeal.

Do you never pair?

Re: Sunsetting Atom

#597

Post by neoneye2 »

ravedave5 wrote: post #503
nathansobo wrote: post #253

Founder of Atom here. We're building the spiritual successor to Atom over at https://zed.dev . We learned a lot with Atom and had a great time, but it always fell short of our vision. With Zed we're going to get it right. Written in Rust, custom native UI framework, engineered to be collaborative. Just starting our private alpha this week, so the timing of this announcement feels quite fitting. Here's a talk I gave l…

Please be aware of the second system effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect

Also implementing undo for a big project is tricky. If the user switches to another file, collapses/expands things, runs a plugin, auto-formats some code, and then undoes things.

What will undo be like for a collaborative editor?

Re: Sunsetting Atom

#598

Post by galaxyLogic »

gibbitz wrote: post #500
rjh29 wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO the killer thing is performance, VSCode starts fast and is smooth to write with. It blew away the older set of Electron-based editors. They work tirelessly on performance every release and it shows imo. Allowing extensions without destroying perf isn't easy either.

This is why I continued to use sublime text all the way up to capitulating to TypeScript. Code was slower because of all the intellisense. I've had Code freeze on me a few times. Something that I don't have happen in Sublime or Vim. If you have a lot of RAM and work on a current mainstream OS it may seem smooth, but it's still using 400mb of RAM. May as well use Eclipse or WebStorm FWIW. That said I'm using VSCode no…

Part of it may be just Windows. I use Windows a lot to move files and folders around and the File Explorer is something I constantly need to wait on to respond. The Windows as GUI is not very responsive in my experience.

Re: Sunsetting Atom

#599

Post by mmcnl »

vlunkr wrote: post #435
skohan wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Electron is both an amazing enabling technology, and also an artifact of the sad state of affairs for computing platforms. One could imagine a world where strong standards have been established which would allow you to easily deploy lean native applications across a wide variety of platforms. Instead we ended up in this bizzare world where if you want to maintain a desktop GUI app, you either need a large team to sup…

Agreed. I know Electron isn't ideal, but as a Linux user, I have a pretty hard time complaining. In the pre-electron world, something like Slack for linux either wouldn't exist, or would be several versions behind other platforms and have some goofy UI that didn't match the rest of your desktop. At least we have it and it works.

It's easy to criticize tools that actually exist. Makes you forget about all the tools that haven't made it to your computer.

Re: Sunsetting Atom

#600

Post by zamalek »

mwcampbell wrote: post #365
nathansobo wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When we started on Zed the Rust UI framework space was much younger. In absence of a mature solution that met our exact needs, the simplest path for us was to build it ourselves. We're too far into things now to change at this point.

Fair enough. Hopefully when you're ready to work on accessibility in your UI framework, AccessKit [1] will be ready. I'm hoping to have usable Windows and Mac implementations by the end of this year. [1]: https://github.com/AccessKit/accesskit

Accessibility is a peeve of mine (for no other reason than sympathy). Thanks for your work on this.
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