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Sunsetting Atom

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Re: Sunsetting Atom

#701

Post by jw14 »

franciscop wrote: post #374

Totally understandable, but the justification in the first paragraph of "Why are we doing this now?" seems a bit self-inflicted: • Atom has not had significant feature development for the past several years • (thus) Atom community involvement has declined significantly • (thus) we’ve decided to sunset Atom Feels a bit weird in that sequence to blame the community. Just say that YOU have abandoned the project since Mi…

I checked back regularly for years to look for signs of life in Atom. There weren't any.

Last blog? 2019.

None of the releases did anything interesting. I work in Vue.js and needed that toolchain to work well, it never did with Atom.

So they're blaming the community for something they decided years ago and kept deciding every week when no resources were allocated.

Also, Zed isn't filling the void Atom left. Rust is interesting. Collaborative editing, not so much. Electron's lack of speed doesn't prevent VS code from fading into my workflow and being the most popular editor. I would still like an alternative because I don't think Microsoft should have the whole market.

Re: Sunsetting Atom

#702

Post by girvo »

polote wrote: post #690
ClawsOnPaws wrote: post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, Please don't forget about accessibility. Getting this right from day 1 will make your life a lot easier in the long run. If I remember correctly, I was never able to use Atom with a screen reader. Hearing custom UI already makes me nervous and I'm pretty sure I won't be able to use Zed with a screen reader either. Blind developers exist. Please don't forget about us. It's one of the few areas where we can actual…

It is normal to advocate for your needs but asking for it to be included from day 1 is weird. The same way you don't start a saas app with localization from day one. I'm not blind so for sure I won't really care about accessibility but honest question why not use an ide developed for blind people instead of using the same as non blind people?

It is not weird at all, and claiming that asking for accessibility to be considered is weird is frankly rude.

Approaches like yours are why people who are differently abled feel left out and like second class citizens a lot of the time.

Re: Sunsetting Atom

#703

Post by hx2a »

polote wrote: post #690
ClawsOnPaws wrote: post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, Please don't forget about accessibility. Getting this right from day 1 will make your life a lot easier in the long run. If I remember correctly, I was never able to use Atom with a screen reader. Hearing custom UI already makes me nervous and I'm pretty sure I won't be able to use Zed with a screen reader either. Blind developers exist. Please don't forget about us. It's one of the few areas where we can actual…

It is normal to advocate for your needs but asking for it to be included from day 1 is weird. The same way you don't start a saas app with localization from day one. I'm not blind so for sure I won't really care about accessibility but honest question why not use an ide developed for blind people instead of using the same as non blind people?

Please learn more about the needs of blind people before writing something like this.

Adding accessibility for screen readers is much more difficult to add later in the project lifecycle. Thinking about those design considerations early makes a big difference in how accessible it will later. If developers don't think about these things early, most likely the product will never be fully accessible, ever. Blind people have seen this played out before with other software products and know where this path leads.

(I'm not blind but have worked with blind developers. I'm not an expert in accessibility but I know enough to know how important it is to listen to accessibility needs)

Re: Sunsetting Atom

#704

Post by mongol »

ClawsOnPaws wrote: post #561
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…

Hey, Please don't forget about accessibility. Getting this right from day 1 will make your life a lot easier in the long run. If I remember correctly, I was never able to use Atom with a screen reader. Hearing custom UI already makes me nervous and I'm pretty sure I won't be able to use Zed with a screen reader either. Blind developers exist. Please don't forget about us. It's one of the few areas where we can actual…

Unrelated question: how does accessibility work on smartphones? Do you use something like a physical keyboard to interact with GUI elements in apps?

Re: Sunsetting Atom

#705

Post by giancarlostoro »

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…

I'm a huge fan of Text Editors, I've made a few basic ones myself. Thank you for creating Atom! For ages before Atom was a thing I grew fascination with using web servers for front-end UI and thereby using HTML / CSS for a local applications UI, I had seen this in SlickBeard and a few other usenet applications that used a web interface instead of a standard GUI interface to render a UI. I also remember a Google program that did this, though I can't recall the name. It might sound crazy to some to do it this way, but because the web server is localized to your system and your browser is usually responsive once open, every app I used that worked this way was always highly responsive and just worked.

I was dreaming of taking Vibe.d and CodeMirror and making something you could install as a daemon on any machine and code from anywhere. When Atom came out I was obsessed with it for a while, it was a whole other approach from what I was thinking of!

Did you ever do a write up on how you came to the thought of just taking a browser engine and turning it into your own sandbox and what that entailed in the earlier days? That seems like a fun story. Because of Atom we got great innovations that followed, for example Slack, Discord, VS Code, and the list goes on... and on... Heck POSTMAN! Which is probably used or has been used by every developer under the sun.

Re: Sunsetting Atom

#706

Post by uxcolumbo »

polote wrote: post #690
ClawsOnPaws wrote: post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, Please don't forget about accessibility. Getting this right from day 1 will make your life a lot easier in the long run. If I remember correctly, I was never able to use Atom with a screen reader. Hearing custom UI already makes me nervous and I'm pretty sure I won't be able to use Zed with a screen reader either. Blind developers exist. Please don't forget about us. It's one of the few areas where we can actual…

It is normal to advocate for your needs but asking for it to be included from day 1 is weird. The same way you don't start a saas app with localization from day one. I'm not blind so for sure I won't really care about accessibility but honest question why not use an ide developed for blind people instead of using the same as non blind people?

Wow… really? Accessibility is not just for blind users.

It’s also for users with poor eyesight, colour blind folks or folks with motor impairment.

It can happen to any of us and then you’d be glad that developers are taking accessibility standards seriously.

Re: Sunsetting Atom

#707

Post by scombridae »

tikhonj wrote: post #513
gosukiwi wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is interesting. I wonder how Emacs solves that, given that it's one of, if not THE most, extensible editor out there. I'd think that is a good thing, but never considered the drawbacks, besides performance and plugin interop that is.

Design-wise, Emacs is less an editor with an API and more a set of core editing concepts (buffers, strings with properties... etc) embedded into a flexible language. The core concepts have a native implementation that's hard to change, but they're simple and flexible enough that you can put them together to do all kinds of text-editory (or even not-so-text-editory) things. Everything on top of the core is written in…

Well, it's a doulbe-edged sword.

Causally linking glaring deficiencies (long lines, concurrency) to overriding virtues (extensibility) is a weak but common snow job aimed at emacs's critics who know nothing of emacs's internals. For this emacs critic who knows quite a bit about emacs's internals, I call you out.

There's only one reason for emacs's many wtf frailties. No one's paying to fix them.

Re: Sunsetting Atom

#708

Post by merlinran »

LocalPCGuy wrote: post #686
ghshephard wrote: post #678

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't use Visual Studio, so I'm intrigued as to what VS can do in 10 minutes that takes 2+ hours in VSC?

One example could be scaffolding out a CRUD app and DB fairly quickly. Even excluding scaffolding, VS can eliminate a lot of the boilerplate that takes time if you need to type it out yourself. Not saying you can't setup VSC to do those kinds of things also, but VS is a tools included solution out of the box. (I say this as someone who hasn't touched VS in a few years now, but used it daily for a few years before tha…

I would argue that boilerplates should be minimized in the first place. Regardless how fast it is to generate them, reading them over and over again together with the code human write is a huge waste of energy.

Re: Sunsetting Atom

#709

Post by cellis »

shp0ngle wrote: post #394
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…

I am honestly not sure why do people minify javascript in electron apps. It doesn’t really bring any advantage? You need to package whole Chrome with your app, the few MB you save with minification does not matter?? But people here can enlighten me.

Minification also does some tree-shaking, which results in unused branches and libraries being pruned ( and therefore not needing to be loaded into memory ) and a smaller source size. Some constants can be inlined, which leads to faster execution times as there is no need to wait for a variable to be bound as its value is just written directly into the source everywhere it appears.

Re: Sunsetting Atom

#710

Post by jw14 »

WorldMaker wrote: post #379
Atreiden wrote: post #38

Called this ~4 years ago when they were acquired by M$. But it's still really sad to see. I use it because it was trivial to CSS style it to match my Desktop. It's comfortable to me in a way that other editors thus far have not been. Are there other editors with this level of customizability? I know VSCode and Sublime support theming but from what I can tell it involves installing pre-packaged themes.

You can override any color you want in VS Code with a couple easy settings in your settings.json file: workbench.colorCustomizations and editor.tokenColorCustomizations https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/getstarted/themes#_custom... You have to package it if you want to make it easy for other people to install, but if you just want to play with it, just open settings.json and start feeding it colors.

I've made extensive use of this and it is a killer feature of VS code for me. Still, I wish it supported all of CSS like Atom did.
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