
Atom 1.33 - l2dy
https://blog.atom.io/2018/11/28/atom-1-33.html
======
cribbles
I use Atom daily for work, and I am overall satisfied with the editor and its
ecosystem, in particular the mammoth improvements the core team has made
toward addressing speed issues that plagued the editor in prior years. I
haven't tried the new GitHub integration features in this package, but they
seem cool.

That having been said - Atom devs, if you're reading this, _please_ put a
priority on fixing the auto-update / 'Restart and Install' feature on
macOS.[1] If it's not fixable, please remove the option and offer a
workaround.

It's gotten to the point where I now simply download the Atom update in
browser and manually replace the package binary in my Applications folder,
knowing the auto-update will fail.

[1]
[https://github.com/atom/atom/issues/2860](https://github.com/atom/atom/issues/2860)

~~~
joshka

       $ brew cask reinstall atom
    
       ...
       
       atom was successfully installed!

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marsrover
I'll admit that I haven't used Atom in a very long time, but to be it just
seems like a worse version of VS Code.

I don't think I've ever introduced an Atom user to VS Code and they stick with
Atom. Every one of them switches.

~~~
pictur
vscode gives me the impression of a shitty microsoft product.

~~~
willio58
Have you actually used it? I'm by no means pro-microsoft but vscode is a joy
to use.

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temporallobe
I really love Atom over any editor I’ve ever used in the past, but damn it can
be slow, so I hope this update addresses some of that. I mostly use it for
writing code because of the extremely intuitive editing features, advanced
regex, and beautiful syntax highlighting. However it can’t handle really large
files like logs and such because it tries to prase everything and consumes
tons of memory. For that nothing seems to beat Notepad++ on Windows (written
in C!). One thing to remember is that Arom is an Electron app and as such is
essentially a browser application, which sadly could never be as fast as a
native app.

~~~
pjmlp
Notepad++ is written in C++.

[https://github.com/notepad-plus-plus/notepad-plus-
plus](https://github.com/notepad-plus-plus/notepad-plus-plus)

------
jammygit
Is Atom developed by microsoft now? It would be weird for them to invest in
developing both editors in the long run, considering how much crossover the
two have.

Is the contributor community strong enough that it would keep going strong
regardless? I'm not sure how many contributors were from Github vs elsewhere

~~~
nycdotnet
In his Reddit AMA, the new GitHub CEO said he wanted to keep working on both
going forward.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/AMA/comments/8pc8mf/comment/e0a235q](https://www.reddit.com/r/AMA/comments/8pc8mf/comment/e0a235q)

------
zachguo
I haven't used Atom for more than a year. Is the performance better now?
Faster than VS Code? Would it still crash if I accidentally opened a 100mb CSV
file?

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esdott
Anyone know what light ui/theme they are using in the demo/screenshots here?
Is it simply the packaged atom light theme? It looks beautiful.

~~~
rjplatte
At the risk of heresy, I agree. It looks really clean and appealing.

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hit8run
I wish they could get Ruby working in Atom out of the box. I still can‘t
believe how weak the tooling is in the Ruby on Rails world. Even Jetbrains
fails miserably. Why on earth can‘t we have decent code completion in Ruby?!
If the human brain can tell what will be available why can’t my computer.

~~~
coder543
I don't think even the human brain can consistently figure out what's going to
be available in Ruby.

Oftentimes, the only way to know is to set a breakpoint, run the code, and
inspect it at runtime. This is why the tooling sucks even more for Ruby than
most dynamic languages, and the code completion and static analysis will
almost certainly always be worse than the equivalent tooling in a statically
typed language where more things are knowable.

If you feel so strongly about tooling, I recommend learning Kotlin, Go, or C#,
all of which offer incredibly strong tooling with essentially perfect code
completion, jump to definition, and real time code analysis.

~~~
hit8run
I once did a web-project in Go just for the tooling. What I gained there was
lost in the verbosity and the write everything from scratch mentality when it
comes to webdev in Go.

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omaranto
I would expect that with the new TreeSitter parser (and other improvements)
Atom now feels faster than VS Code. Is that the case?

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tbirrell
Does Atom work with mounted directories yet? Especially sshfs? I'd love to go
back to Atom, but unfortunately, last time I tried to use it, it had massive
indexing problems when working through mounts.

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Avi-D-coder
How does performance compare with VS code? How does Vim mode compare?

~~~
GeordiePowers
The vim plugins in atom completely blow VSCode's out of the water. It's split
up into two packages ('vim-mode-plus' for most of vim, and 'ex-mode' for
handling ex commands), but they work together very well.

In my experience (which certainly does not reflect everyone's), Atom wins in
performance these days, too. Startup time is a bit slower, but once it's
running it's quite snappy. It feels... less like a webapp than VSC does, if
that makes sense.

------
Beefin
I like the flexibility and customization of Atom but god damn they need to get
off the RAM-hogging process that is Electron...

~~~
melling
People complained about Emacs memory usage for decades. Then one day 8 MB
wasn’t a lot of memory.

Everyone knows Atom uses a lot of memory. At some point in the very near
future, it will no longer be important.

My five-year-old Mac has 16 gigs of RAM. I won’t buy another that has less
than 32 gigs.

~~~
josteink
> Everyone knows Atom uses a lot of memory. At some point in the very near
> future, it will no longer be important. My five-year-old Mac has 16 gigs of
> RAM. I won’t buy another that has less than 32 gigs.

As a counterpoint, my 3 year old laptop has 8GBs if memory, my server 12gb and
none of them are maxed.

My next unit won’t have more than 16gbs, because that would be an absolute
waste.

Maybe use less Chrome and Chromium/Electron based shit, and you’ll find out
how _insanely much ram_ 8GBs actually is?

~~~
Klathmon
Is it a waste if it's getting used?

I know this argument tends to become a bit philosophical, but if (ab)using
memory the way that browsers or Electron does means that programs can be
written faster, be safer, and can run on more platforms, then is it really
being wasted?

Sure, it's not _runtime efficient_ in many cases, but that's not the only
thing that matters, and it's pretty far from the top priority for many.

I quite frankly make a ludicrous amount of money doing software development.
Spending even $1000 on an upgrade to my machine that makes me 1% more
productive would end up paying for itself in less than a year.

For me, RAM isn't something I worry about, I have 32GB in this system and i'm
not anywhere near maxing it out at my current day job (and for what it's
worth, my atom instance that i've had open for about 3 days now is taking up a
combined 432mb of memory at this moment, Android Studio is sucking down a
whopping 1.5 GB. In my experience the "ram usage" of Electron is blown wildly
out of proportion, it's really not that bad to be honest). Atom makes me more
productive, so I use Atom, and the memory usage could greatly increase and it
wouldn't impact me at all.

Some people work differently, they either aren't as fortunate as I am and
can't afford the fancy hardware (or can afford it but simply don't want to buy
it, which is okay!), or just prefer working in an environment which starts up
faster or uses less resources, or anything else. For them there are other
editors, other IDEs, other software they can use.

None of them are objectively "bad" or wrong, they just prioritise different
things.

