
Atom 1.9 and 1.10 beta - seanwilson
http://blog.atom.io/2016/08/01/atom-1-9-and-1-10-beta.html
======
krisdol
For once, on an atom release thread, can we have a discussion about atom and
this release rather than endless threads about folks preferring vscode or
sublime?

~~~
nkg
Seems like no one is giving love! I enjoy Atom and I use it daily (I do
website at some webagency).

It is fast, even with Photoshop, Indesign, and multiple Chrome tabs opened.

Pros: its handy and has so many addons. Not crippled with useless toolbars
like Eclips-y editors.

Cons: Sadly, it's still missing a "go-to-method-declaration" feature (did I
miss something? ), and is awfuly buggy when editing over FTP.

~~~
vikrantvm
Absoltely agree. Love the UI, add-ons(love the terminal add on). I agree go-to
decalaration needs to be fixed. There are a couple of packages that try to do
it, but none of them do a good job. Atom needs to fix this on priority, it's a
basic feature that must work out of the box. I have got this working by
manually generating ctags(installed with brew) and then using the same go to
declaration option. Works like a charm like it should have :)

~~~
gansai
which terminal addon do you use? As I am extremely interested to use terminal
within Atom.The other day, I was using terminal-plus and it seems to have some
issues.

~~~
vikrantvm
Terminal plus is pretty sweet, works well for me!

------
hartator
I have participated a bit in the Atom.io open source repository, but now I am
back to Sublime. It's so fast and reliable compared to Atom.io.

~~~
boromi
Wholeheartedly agree. I just tested this new version out.

I really keep trying to use Atom, but it's just unacceptable currently when
compared to Sublime. Very slow startups and laggy. This new version takes 5-10
seconds before I can start coding, that's far too slow. With every update I
keep hoping things are faster, but only marginally so. VS code loads in less
than 3 seconds and is a lot more snappy.

I don't understand why they don't address this issue as the highest priority
problem. It's by far the most complained about issue. If the MS guys can make
VS code launch that fast I don't see anything holding back Atom (save maybe
coffeescript :P (tongue in cheek)).

~~~
shocks
Why is waiting 5-10 seconds for your editor to open such a problem?

~~~
coldtea
For the same reason waiting 1-2 minutes for your laptop to boot is.

Also because people often open/close tons of small files during the day
instead of opening a project and working on it for hours.

Plus, the slugginess extends beyond startup time, into working with large
files (were large = puny for other editors' standard) and other activities.

~~~
shocks
When my laptop is booting I'm usually fetching coffee. Most of the time I just
crack the lid, it wakes up, and all my editors are still running anyway. I
probably boot an app like Atom once or twice a week. Plenty of tools I use
(PHPStorm, vagrant boxes, VMware) all take way longer than 5 seconds to load
and that has no noticeable impact on my productivity or happiness.

It seems silly to me for someone to adopt a strategy of opening/closing Atom
(instead of reusing an open instance) and then complain about how long it
takes to boot. You don't park your car at red lights and turn off the engine,
then complain about how long it takes to pull away when the lights turn green.

> Plus, the slugginess extends beyond startup time, into working with large
> files (were large = puny for other editors' standard) and other activities.

This I totally get. If this is someone's use case, they probably shouldn't be
using Atom.

I don't mean to rail on you in particular, I just always found the "oh it
takes so long to start" complaint to be a silly one. It's such a minor thing.
Atom is really good for a bunch of use cases, it's a shame that people write
it off for this stupid reason.

~~~
brandonbloom
I fetch coffee when I want coffee. I don't plan my schedule around waiting for
things that have no reason not to be completely instantaneous. I avoid any
tool that takes longer than 100ms or so to start up. Anything slower than that
is completely unacceptable at this point in the history of computing.

> It seems silly to me for someone to adopt a strategy of opening/closing Atom
> (instead of reusing an open instance) and then complain about how long it
> takes to boot.

That's not what happens. They looked at the tool, stated it doesn't meet their
needs, explained why, and then _did not adopt the tool_. The Atom folks can
decide they don't want those users or they can address their abominable
startup time, but you can't suggest "change how you do everything" and hope to
win friends or users.

------
tomatsu
Each time there's an Atom release announcement, I check if they've finally
fixed AltGr.

They didn't. Most non-US keyboard layouts are still broken.

~~~
pier25
They? Atom is a collaborative effort, you can fix that yourself.

~~~
tomatsu
> _you can fix that yourself_

I can't and neither can you.

You can't go back in time and tell them that they shouldn't use Alt+Ctrl for
any of the built-in shortcuts.

You also can't get rid of those shortcuts.

You also can't finalize that UI Events spec and just land those features in
Chromium.

They could have gotten rid of those shortcuts, but they decided against it.

Anyhow, Chrome 51+ (current stable is 52) does support the required part of
the spec now.

[https://jsfiddle.net/1zhcpj8a/](https://jsfiddle.net/1zhcpj8a/)

I do get:

    
    
      Alt AltLeft
      AltGraph AltRight
    

Which means you can now easily and _accurately_ tell if AltGr was pressed.
This release of Atom could have fixed it.

------
janus24
> Electron upgraded to v0.37.8

The official website of electron [1] says that the current version is 1.3.1

Can someone explain why atom uses a 3 months old version ? [2]

[1] [http://electron.atom.io](http://electron.atom.io)

[2]
[https://github.com/electron/electron/releases/tag/v0.37.8](https://github.com/electron/electron/releases/tag/v0.37.8)

~~~
soupshield
Found some info on this:

> 0.37.8 is actually a 1.0.1 version of Atom so it's not THAT old. The only
> difference between 0.37.8 and 1.0.0 release is the remove of deprecated API
> that were not flagged as such in 0.37.8 release. Reason why Atom only
> incrementally updates electron is to minimize application breakage due to
> Atom project's size. [0]

> We decide to update to a new version of Electron when there is an
> enhancement or bug fix that version would enable that would benefit Atom
> users. Because updating to a new version of Electron is non-trivial,
> sometimes we skip versions until there is a clear benefit that justifies the
> cost. [1]

[0]
[https://github.com/atom/atom/issues/11967#issuecomment-22550...](https://github.com/atom/atom/issues/11967#issuecomment-225507742)

[1] [https://github.com/atom/design-
decisions/blob/master/electro...](https://github.com/atom/design-
decisions/blob/master/electron-update-procedure.md)

------
ArmandGrillet
Drag and drop layout management is really a nice addition, you can have the
same result on any text editor but doing a drag and drop feels natural.

Atom is still taking too much time to start compared to Sublime but I now use
it for everything except large files, the overall UX is better and new
features are added regularly.

------
diegofdominguez
I switch to vscode, better support for debuggers, fast compared to atom, and
extensions available are great

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ascotan
I moved to atom from sublime and really love it. However, it's s l o w . . .
Not only the start up time, but on non trival projects it lags attempting to
code color the file and periodically lags up to 5 seconds on save.
Nevertheless, even with the warts it's pretty neat.

~~~
krisdol
What plugins have you got installed? And what OS?

------
vonklaus
I don't want to criticise it too much as it is completely free, so I will
simply say that it would be hard to convince me to try it for a third time.

Microsoft VSCode is my editor, and it took me a long time to adopt it. They
lacked a lot of features, but in the end delivering a few features that worked
extremely well and adding the important ones as they could (thanks for tab
support) won me over. Shipping a broken kitchen sink just turned me off. It
had critical flaws that made either me, or the editor and my sometimes unsaved
code, rage quit. I have used it cumulatively about 6 months over thd last 2
years.

Tl;dr at least as far as text editors go, 99% correct with a narrow feature
set beats 75% stable witha wide one.

------
sotojuan
Well now it loads pretty fast for me! I use Atom for Elixir and Elm as their
plugins are better than those for Sublime.

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Somasis
They still don't have a way to build a release without a network connection.
Which basically means any secure (builds in sandbox) source-based distro can't
package it.

------
fivesigma
I love atom, I use it daily and it is my editor of choice for web stuff.

But think of how many software abstractions/levels each line of atom code has
to go through. I mean, each keypress probably produces in the order of 100
million CPU instructions in the metal (number pulled out of my behind but you
get the idea) just to display a single character. Is this what progress looks
like?

I guess there's a balance between developer comfort and software efficiency.

------
BilalBudhani
I've been developing ReactNative since past few months and hence, I've been
using Atom as my default IDE with Nuclide. I agree that Atom is slower than
Sublime but once you tweak some settings and get a sanity hold on your plugins
then you will get a significant improvement in performance.

------
omginternets
Does it still use _A Terabyte Of Memory_ ?

~~~
randomsofr
Unless they start using native code it will always be like that.

~~~
halokonrad
VSCode from Microsoft is also wrapped in electron and uses a fraction of what
Atom is consuming. Not being native has nothing to do here.

~~~
PSeitz
The memory consumption is a magnitude larger in JavaScript than native.

[http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64/compare.php?lang...](http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64/compare.php?lang=v8&lang2=gcc)

~~~
philtar
So what?

There are javascript editors that don't use as much memory as atom. What
you're saying is irrelevant.

~~~
PSeitz
So if this is hard to understand, the conclusion, in simple words:

the memory consumption for a javascript editor will be a magnitude bigger than
native.

In my example 66Mb Sublime vs 620MB VS Code (no plugins)

~~~
philtar
halokonrad isn't talking about sublime. He's talking about Atom vs VS Code.

------
seanwilson
Blog post about the release:
[http://blog.atom.io/2016/08/01/atom-1-9-and-1-10-beta.html](http://blog.atom.io/2016/08/01/atom-1-9-and-1-10-beta.html)

"The following is a summary of improvements we have been testing on our beta
channel and that are finally landing in Atom 1.9.0. :rocket:

\- Display Layers, which are going to bring speed improvements as well as new
features like free-form folds (via the Fold Selection command) and an improved
soft-wrapping algorithm.

\- Electron Upgrade (v0.37.8), which features many performance improvements
and enables efficient ligatures rendering on all the platforms.

\- Drag and Drop Layout Management, that provides a very intuitive way for
organizing the workspace.

\- Enhanced Reliability When Saving Files, which minimizes the risk of losing
files when a hard crash occurs.

\- Shell Commands Compatibility On Windows, that makes the atom command
compatible with both Cygwin and Msys."

~~~
ipedrazas
You see, people would have traded happily all those improvements for only this
one:

"It is super fast!"

------
ilaksh
Atom would be way cooler if it was a projection editor like projectured.org.
Or was available online.

