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Atom 1.18 released

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Re: Atom 1.18 released

#81

Post by Tarean »

swah wrote: post #55
parmesan wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I switched back to Sublime after a while, Atom was so slow to start, at least when I first tried it out in ~2014 (2015?). Sublime loads in like 100ms on all my machines. I'm also the vim kind tho, but when I browse large datasets and dumps I use Sublime.

I could never really enjoy vim in a graphical context - but whenever I have to edit inside a terminal I'm super productive with it. I also stay mostly on Sublime, and never liked vim emulation - my brain doesn't engage in vi mode there.

Out of interest, what is your issue with graphical vim? I quite like some of the neovim gui's since they have faster screen draw times and still allow access to terminals/repls/test results/whatever via term buffers.

Although I usually still use the terminal version because it removes the binary dependency when cloning dot files on a new pc and there aren't any major differences.

Re: Atom 1.18 released

#82

Post by Guillaume86 »

endorphone wrote: post #79
Hamuko wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the actual difference? As far as I can see, they're both poor text editors with bad interfaces, built on top of the horrible mess that is Electron. They're also both massive. VS Code takes up 235 MB and Atom takes a whopping 530 MB. Sublime Text is like 30 MB.

The whole Atom / VS Code thing is fascinating to me. Don't most denizens of HN already use far superior editors? My day is spent in Visual Studio (the real one) and IntelliJ IDEA, both of which annihilate those other options. And both of them are freely available, the latter available on everything. VS Code in particular seems to have a massive astroturfing campaign behind it. Every benign post that tangentially ment…

If you never enjoyed the experience of a lightweight editor or was never bothered by the sluggishness of heavy weight IDEs, fine but don't blame any praise you don't understand on astroturfing.

I use both VS and VSCode and I prefer using VSCode by far.

Re: Atom 1.18 released

#83

Post by [deleted] »

swah wrote: post #55
parmesan wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I switched back to Sublime after a while, Atom was so slow to start, at least when I first tried it out in ~2014 (2015?). Sublime loads in like 100ms on all my machines. I'm also the vim kind tho, but when I browse large datasets and dumps I use Sublime.

I could never really enjoy vim in a graphical context - but whenever I have to edit inside a terminal I'm super productive with it. I also stay mostly on Sublime, and never liked vim emulation - my brain doesn't engage in vi mode there.

[deleted]

Re: Atom 1.18 released

#84

Post by guessmyname »

geluso wrote: post #58
ainar-g wrote: post #4

Please, don't consider this a troll question (I personally am a vim kind of guy), but is there any reason to use Atom over VSCode these days? The sole reason to me seems that VSCode is developed by the "evil" Microsoft. Other than that, most people I know who tried Atom switched to VSCode or (back to) Sublime in the end.

Atom is free. Sublime costs $70. Plus, Atom comes with several lovely features Sublime doesn't have. Pay less, get more? Great deal! It's funny to catch friends looking at Sublime's payment popup window. I always joke, "oh, you're still evaluating?" Of course they're not evaluating. They're never going to pay for it. What a nuisance. Atom has excellent window management. It's very easy to drag a tab and split it half…

$70 is nothing compared with the performance that you get.

If you have a job (either as a freelancer or professional) you certainly should be able to afford to pay for a $70 license, if you cannot then maybe your problem is your salary. If you are a student, ask your parents for it. I have given away at least 8 single-user licenses to friends and fellow co-workers who had your mentality, and they are now happy SublimeText users.

The problem that I see with Atom IS NOT in the startup speed, which is something that many people complain about, obviously you can just open the program once in the morning and leave it running during the day... Oh wait! You cannot! Because the program is running on top of a full-feature web browser (and one of the most heavy ones) which means that during the day it will consume a significant amount of RAM. Do you want to listen to music while you write code? You got it! Atom will turn up your computer's fan for you so you can listen to the peaceful sound of air blowing at your CPU because the full-featured browser behind it is doing some crazy shit in the background.

I don't even care about the loading screen when you are opening large files, the major problem that I notice is keystroke lag, after the first hour or so I start to notice some lag between the input from my keyboard and the actual visual in the editor [1].

Some time ago I thought that GitHub would get tired about the criticism of their beloved project and deprecate it, but then they converted their Git client [2] into an Electron app. They are really invested into that technology. If I were one of their engineers I wouldn't mind to take a C++/Qt project alone just to be able to provide a resource-friendly program that people will love for its performance (as we do for SublimeText) more than for its plugin ecosystem and "beautiful" themes.

You know, the first thing that I do every time I need to install SublimeText into a new computer is to disable some settings, not because they are going to make the editor faster but because I really don't need them. But with Atom, I really-REALLY need to disable many built-in plugins because they are either tracking me or because they are genuinely slowing down the program (the GIT integration, for example). I configure SublimeText to my needs because I want to, I configure Atom to my needs because I need to.

[1] I am sure there will be someone in the replies saying that they don't notice any lag, they will even include the amount of RAM in their computer as if it was relevant (no, it is not, it's a code editor, it should be fast). The fact that it runs well in your computer doesn't means the problems don't exist.

[2] https://desktop.github.com/

Re: Atom 1.18 released

#85

Post by w14jeremy »

ainar-g wrote: post #4

Please, don't consider this a troll question (I personally am a vim kind of guy), but is there any reason to use Atom over VSCode these days? The sole reason to me seems that VSCode is developed by the "evil" Microsoft. Other than that, most people I know who tried Atom switched to VSCode or (back to) Sublime in the end.

One of these days I'd like to write my own plugins. VS Code plugins (last I looked) aren't permitted to have a UI. Microsoft has neatly defined what kinds of plugins you may want to write (language support plugins and some others) and you can't go outside those lines.

I like how this protects VS Code performance, but if/when I decide to write my plugins I want the flexibility to augment the editor's UI.

Also, I think it's easier to write/tweak themes in Atom.

Re: Atom 1.18 released

#86

Post by allover »

endorphone wrote: post #79
Hamuko wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the actual difference? As far as I can see, they're both poor text editors with bad interfaces, built on top of the horrible mess that is Electron. They're also both massive. VS Code takes up 235 MB and Atom takes a whopping 530 MB. Sublime Text is like 30 MB.

The whole Atom / VS Code thing is fascinating to me. Don't most denizens of HN already use far superior editors? My day is spent in Visual Studio (the real one) and IntelliJ IDEA, both of which annihilate those other options. And both of them are freely available, the latter available on everything. VS Code in particular seems to have a massive astroturfing campaign behind it. Every benign post that tangentially ment…

Seems fairly obvious to me why VS Code would be popular with web devs like myself. It has a built in JS debugger and lots of web-related stuff works out of the box (TypeScript, JSX etc). Also the fact it is built in JS means it's easy to extend in JS, so the plugin community is already very healthy. The Vim mode is pretty damn good too (first editor to tempt me away from Vim since I learnt Vim).

I don't think there's any astroturfing/fishiness at all. If anything the opposite, they've had to overcome the negative association with MS, and to some small degree Electron. They seem to have done that by 'making a good thing', that everyone who tries is somewhat impressed with.

You mention Visual Studio and IntelliJ. Two obvious downsides with those - former is only on Windows, the other is relatively expensive. I tried IntelliJ Webstorm once, seemed good but I never really got a good enough feel for it before my trial ran out, so never tried again shrug.

Re: Atom 1.18 released

#87

Post by Tarean »

v1n337 wrote: post #47
ssijak wrote: post #43

I really wanted Atom to work. But in the end, it is just to damn slow, takes too much memory, and hogs on large files. Now, I find vscode to be very much what I need for javascript/typescript/html/css work.

Isn't VSCode Electron based too? After reading this article[1], I've shunned desktop apps using Electron, because it just seems wasteful in terms of memory. I've switched back to Sublime. [1] https://josephg.com/blog/electron-is-flash-for-the-desktop/

I am mostly ok with it with vscode because it is very responsive, leaner than a full IDE but still offers a lot of IDE like features for a wide variety of languages.

Vscode is comparatively young but it might already have the broadest support for things like semantic completion/go to source/step debugging and being written in electron might have played a part in that.

Re: Atom 1.18 released

#88

Post by Tarean »

endorphone wrote: post #79
Hamuko wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the actual difference? As far as I can see, they're both poor text editors with bad interfaces, built on top of the horrible mess that is Electron. They're also both massive. VS Code takes up 235 MB and Atom takes a whopping 530 MB. Sublime Text is like 30 MB.

The whole Atom / VS Code thing is fascinating to me. Don't most denizens of HN already use far superior editors? My day is spent in Visual Studio (the real one) and IntelliJ IDEA, both of which annihilate those other options. And both of them are freely available, the latter available on everything. VS Code in particular seems to have a massive astroturfing campaign behind it. Every benign post that tangentially ment…

I use Intellij for java and vim for most other languages. I started using VS Code more often recently because it is really easy to set up ide like tooling for smaller languages in it. Vim usually involves manually configuring plugins and possibly setting up environment variables.

Emacs probably also could fill this niche but whenever I try I run into things like term mode that clash with evil in horrendous ways.

Re: Atom 1.18 released

#89

Post by SippinLean »

marcoms wrote: post #15
Etheryte wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who switched from Atom to VSCode some time ago, I'm yet to find anything that VSCode doesn't have – are there any notable examples where Atom is ahead of the curve or is it just that it has more plugins?

UI themes, and a much more cohesive default theme

VS Code has full UI theming now. I've personally never used a default theme on any editor.

Re: Atom 1.18 released

#90

Post by SippinLean »

jbergens wrote: post #11
ainar-g wrote: post #4

Please, don't consider this a troll question (I personally am a vim kind of guy), but is there any reason to use Atom over VSCode these days? The sole reason to me seems that VSCode is developed by the "evil" Microsoft. Other than that, most people I know who tried Atom switched to VSCode or (back to) Sublime in the end.

Because you are used to it? Why change if everything works. It takes some work to re-learn all keyboard shortcuts, for example.

There's a VS Code extension to implement all the Atom keyboard bindings
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