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Atom 1.18 released

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Re: Atom 1.18 released

#91

Post by SippinLean »

Hamuko wrote: post #14
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.

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.

>with bad interfaces

VS Code's interface is nearly identical to Sublime's, with some nice sugar in places that are helpful (optional GUI for keybindings and extensions).

For debugging and version control VS Code's interface OOTB is leaps and bounds above Sublime's.

>VS Code takes up 235 MB

Meh I have 16GB of RAM on my old computer. Or do you actually just mean HDD space? Who cares about 200MB in that regard?

Re: Atom 1.18 released

#92

Post by veidr »

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/

Yes, but while Sublime is still way faster, there's not much human-time-perceptible difference between Sublime and VS Code, and there's still (even in this new 1.18) a huge difference between Atom and the other two.

Sublime (or really any competently-designed native editor) does indeed use way less memory for any text-editing task than any Electron-based app. But memory is fast. VS Code shows that an Electron-based app can exhibit performance basically equivalent to a native app at most tasks (other than opening that initial window, where it's still an order of magnitude slower).

So I think the performance problem with Atom is more Atom than Electron.

(Still, though, if you only have 16GB RAM, you probably don't want to use more than 4 Electron-based apps.)

Re: Atom 1.18 released

#93

Post by SippinLean »

gri3v3r wrote: post #23

I prefer Notepad++. On Linux, Geany is a viable alternative.... If I need an IDE, I will get an IDE. I want my text editor to be as lightweight as possible. This was not the case with Atom.

Notepad++ was nice back in the day but it's easily among the worst editors now.

Re: Atom 1.18 released

#94

Post by atiredturte »

I used to love Atom, the plugins were perfect and I could customise it to do exactly what I wanted. However, even on a fully specced macbook air, it just became too slow. I moved to VS Code because it had the speed I needed with the customisability that I wanted. Hopefully this Atom update increases performance though, I really liked that editor :)

Re: Atom 1.18 released

#95

Post by endorphone »

Guillaume86 wrote: post #82
endorphone wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you never enjoyed the experience of a lightweight editor or was never bothered by the sluggishness of heavy weight IDEs

Neither Atom or VS Code are lightweight. Both feel absolutely glacial compared to those other IDEs (including even IDEA that is atop Java). This mythology that they're "light" isn't remotely founded in reality.

Regarding astroturfing, your claim is exactly the sort of claim that seems suspicious. If Visual Studio or IDEA is scary (if I was setting my son up with something simple to play around with web development), sure use something superficially simpler, but the claims of lightness are outrageously detached from reality.

Another comment mentioned a negative association with Microsoft, and I'm going to say it's that association that yields the pseudo-astroturfing -- lots of developers who threw their hat into the Microsoft stack, and now that they have something that is open source-y and cross platform, they advocate it for legitimacy. It's an option, sure, but the over the top gushing for another Electron-based editor is surreal.

Re: Atom 1.18 released

#96

Post by Callmenorm »

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.

There is one guy building vim-mode-plus on atom and it feels way better than the vim plugin of vs code. Also, atom has seen pretty solid performance improvements recently. It now doesn't have much lag for me when I'm working with Elixir.

Re: Atom 1.18 released

#97

Post by RobAley »

atiredturte wrote: post #94

I used to love Atom, the plugins were perfect and I could customise it to do exactly what I wanted. However, even on a fully specced macbook air, it just became too slow. I moved to VS Code because it had the speed I needed with the customisability that I wanted. Hopefully this Atom update increases performance though, I really liked that editor :)

I've had no particular performance problems (well, nothing I couldn't live with), and recent versions have improved things in various areas. It doesn't look like this version has much in the way of performance enhancements, but the next version, 1.19 (currently in beta) has a raft of stuff that should perk thinks up a bit.

Re: Atom 1.18 released

#98

Post by addicted »

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 have Visual Studio installed, but still use VS Code often.

They serve different purposes, and VS Code is much nicer for web style development than Visual Studio is, which feels far too heavy.

And though VS 2017 has improved this, Visual Studio is a pain to use for non proj/sln based projects.

I am primarily a VIM user, but there are many times where the GUI niceness of VS Code, combined with it's relative light weight makes it a good option.

Re: Atom 1.18 released

#100

Post by rspeer »

edraferi wrote: post #22
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.

> What's the actual difference? I believe Intellisense is VScode's best differentiator. It provides very good autocomplete.

I use VScode currently (for Python) but I'm not entirely satisfied with it.

How do you set up this very good autocomplete? The official Python plugin (by Don Jayamanne) seems kind of bad at autocomplete and related features. I get autocomplete that:

- Autocompletes random stuff because I pressed "enter" or "down"

- Tries to autocomplete comments

- If I tell it to autocomplete only on tab, then it will sometimes autocomplete and sometimes insert spaces; the faster I type, the more I get spaces

- Pops up enormous tooltips for function docstrings that are taller than my entire code window

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