
Managing the Deluge of Atom Issues - ingve
http://blog.atom.io/2016/04/19/managing-the-deluge-of-atom-issues.html
======
lpsz
As much as I liked the idea of Atom, giving it a genuine try for about six
months, I ended up going back to trusty Sublime Text. Why? As a developer, I
think it's silly to make my computer do more work than necessary, to take up
more CPU and battery than needed. And, the subtle non-native sluggishness
always seemed to reduce the usability, ever so slightly, not also counting the
occasional "the editor has frozen" prompts.

Admittedly, Atom's background color is hands-down more eye pleasing with its
slightly blue tint. Fortunately Sublime is skinnable.

~~~
bollockitis
I too abandoned Atom after a few month trial period. It has potential, but it
just had so many issues that, upon opening Sublime Text again, I heaved a huge
sigh of relief. That's not to say Atom is bad, but even now it's a bit rough
around the edges.

I love the theme though. It's probably the only time I've opened an editor and
didn't immediately look to change the theme. If I'm not mistaken, it's called
"One Dark" but I could never find a good Sublime or Emacs clone.

~~~
oblique63
I haven't directly compared them to atom recently, but I've found these emacs
themes to be pretty comparable:

[https://github.com/jonathanchu/atom-one-dark-
theme](https://github.com/jonathanchu/atom-one-dark-theme)

[https://github.com/NicolasPetton/zerodark-
theme](https://github.com/NicolasPetton/zerodark-theme)

[https://github.com/nashamri/spacemacs-
theme](https://github.com/nashamri/spacemacs-theme) (not really an atom/dark-
one clone, but pretty good nonetheless)

------
ericjang
I for one, absolutely love Atom. I (sincerely) thank GitHub and the surplus of
VC cash that allows projects like these to happen at places like GitHub.

Except for the sub-native speed, Atom basically offers everything that high-
quality commercial text editors (BBEdit, Coda, Chocolat, early Textmate ) used
to offer. On top of that, it's open-source, is free with no limitations, and
totally cross-platform. It comes with a minimap, for goodness sake!

I currently use a mix of both ST and Atom, depending on my mood.

~~~
jasonvorhe
Except for Chrome OS. Boy, I would drop any Macbook for a Chromebook Pixel if
it could run Atom without tinkering.

------
steveklabnik
Managing issues in big projects is a lot of work. I wrote a blog post about it
a few years back: [http://words.steveklabnik.com/how-to-be-an-open-source-
garde...](http://words.steveklabnik.com/how-to-be-an-open-source-gardener)

Slow and steady wins the race, as well as making triage a part of your
process. Leave it too long and the weeds overgrow.

------
fapjacks
Like just about everybody else it seems, I use Sublime Text. Every year or so
since I first heard about Atom, I give it a couple weeks. It has really come a
_long_ way since pre-1.0 days. It is very usable and doesn't crash nearly as
often. However, there is strange behavior that ends up pushing me back to ST3.
Over the years I've developed a "bullshit cutoff point" after which I stop
using an application. If a distro/app/site/whatever is making me spend hours
on getting it working/fixed/performant/whatever, I go back to what works until
some months down the road. I think Atom is very close to being a top-tier
editor, but not quite yet "better" than Sublime for my purposes. I do think
that it's just a matter of time, though, that an army of developers will
eventually surpass one developer (as long as its not mismanaged, and Atom
certainly isn't). So for me, Atom's day is still yet to come, but I do think
it will come.

So for example, multiple panes and session/editor restarts should be
_flawless_ for me to give serious consideration to an editor. If there is even
one bump in the road, I judge extremely harshly. And problems/bugs with panes
and remembering my session is what pushed me back to Sublime this spring. I
should be able to drop whatever I'm doing, restart Linux, and when it boots
back up, start the editor and it will be as though nothing happened, including
multiple unsaved tabs. Atom has a lot of trouble with this.

------
scrollaway
I've done a lot of foss bug triaging and I found that tags are essential to
managing incoming bugs.

Have lots of tags/labels and tag _every_ bug as soon as they are filed with at
the very least a basic component (this is where machine learning could help a
lot). Unlabeled bugs tend to get lost; labeled bugs can be looked at by
someone who's familiar with the area (and relabeled if needs be).

If your product is very popular make sure to tag support questions and similar
as soon as possible with their own label as well.

------
trollian
Maybe they should switch to bugzilla or phabricator or jira or something.
Github issues don't scale well to complex distributed projects. Chrome just
open sourced their monorail project that's designed for this kind of project
too. Lots of great choices out there.

~~~
muricula
Atom is made largely by GitHub. You're right a more sophisticated issue
tracker may be in order, but I don't think they'd do that.

~~~
Touche
It seems strange to me that Atom is experiencing the same sort of troubles
that occur with large multi-project projects and they don't seem to be aware
that their tooling should accommodate that.

One thing that is blatantly obvious would be a organization wide issue
tracker. That alone would alleviate the "which project do I file this against"
questions and give the project owners an easy way to see the issues for all of
their projects.

I work on a few projects that are actually multi-org, so even that wouldn't be
enough for me, but would be a darn good start.

~~~
Can_Not
> organization wide issue tracker

Does anything like github/bitbucket/gitlab support this?

~~~
sytse
GitLab allows you to show issues from a milestone in multiple projects (but
one group). See [http://doc.gitlab.com/ee/workflow/milestones.html#groups-
and...](http://doc.gitlab.com/ee/workflow/milestones.html#groups-and-
milestones)

------
hokkos
Speaking of issues, I got bored of Atom crashes (at least with the last
version your work is no longer thrashed), and I came back to Sublime.

~~~
zacmps
What OS? I've had no problem on both win 8 and arch, though on an admittedly
powerful computer.

------
alexforencich
I have tried atom a couple of times, but ran in to some very annoying
rendering issues - tearing while scrolling, dark backround flashing white when
changing tabs, especially with the minimap - as well as general lag and
sluggishness. Sublime is just so much smoother and easier to use.

------
sigzero
If they made it easy or easier to work being a proxy at work, I might stick
with it. Currently sucks.

