
Atom Editor for Sublime Text Users - klosk
http://blog.daniel-klose.com/technology/atom-editor-for-sublime-text-users/
======
kgtm
Too bad that the Atom developers seem to be completely disrespectful of
Windows users. They impose arbitrary rules that go against the philosophy of
the OS and users' common sense:

* They don't allow the user to select where to install Atom, instead proposing mucking with symlinks, while at the same time crying "simplicity". Uhm, yeah...

* They don't understand what portable software is, and refuse to provide a self-contained installer (settings and all). They propose setting a global environment variable to point to the settings directory instead. Seriously?

If you want to release software for multiple platforms, you should get off
your high horse and show some respect.

Link:
[https://github.com/atom/atom/issues/7095](https://github.com/atom/atom/issues/7095)

~~~
j-pb
If you want to use somebody else's software on your system show some respect
and do it yourself, instead of demanding it like an entitled brat.

It's not their fault that windows still cooks its own soup while the rest of
the world is *nix.

Be happy that people support your backwards OS at all, because lets face it,
windows is horrible for developing anything not .net .

~~~
shocks
> windows is horrible for developing anything not .net

That is such bullshit I don't even know how to start responding to you.

~~~
dang
That's not an ok comment to post here. Its parent wasn't, either.

Comments on Hacker News need to be civil and substantive. Please follow the
site guidelines, which are linked at the bottom of every page.

~~~
j-pb
Edit to make comment more civil and substantive while retaining its content,
can't apply it anymore though. (versioned comments without edit lock would be
nice)

" I don't see how having a philosophy and applying it into software they
develop is disrespectful. If anything, I find it disrespectful to demand
change to something they publish free of charge in such a tone, after all you
are free to fork and adapt their work however you please.

Additionally it is not their fault that the windows philosophy clashes with
the unix world, which is something I'd hold microsoft accountable for.

Unix tools are hard to get right on windows, see git, which basically installs
its own userland on windows. I wouldn't judge them for picking a way and
sticking with it. "

~~~
shocks
In the interest of being more civil and adding to my comment too, I agree with
most of what you have said.

I only disagree with the snarky Windows development comment. :) Visual Studio
is hands down the best IDE I have ever used. The DirectX API is very nice
(just ask any game developer and they'll tell you how much of a pig OpenGL is
to work with). I use OSX at work and Windows at home, I much prefer
development on Windows.

------
ivoras
Atom still has an inconvenient bug: if you use an European keyboard layout on
Windows, one which maps important characters like @ and <> to an "AltGr +
something" chord, you will be in pain as Atom uses a lot of Ctrl+Alt+something
keyboard shortcuts for its functions, and that appears to be non-rebindable,
so there is no clean way to get those characters in Atom! The canonical
solution for this on the Windows platform is to never use Ctrl+Alt shortcuts,
ever.

~~~
Guillaume86
Have you tried [https://atom.io/packages/keyboard-
localization](https://atom.io/packages/keyboard-localization)?

I used the auto keymap generation feature (you just type the caracters that
have issues in a textbox and it generates/saves a keymap) and I don't have
problems with my fr-FR keyboard anymore.

~~~
ivoras
Yes, it apparently fixes some problems for some layouts (notably, the German
and French ones), but not for others (including my layout...).

------
Osmose
Honestly, what made me switch to Atom from Sublime was how easy making a
package is compared to Sublime.

For years I used Sublime with a customized fork of some emacs-like package
that mimicked emacs' open-file behavior. However, because Sublime seems to
limit how you can show things to the user and the documentation for making
packages is mediocre, I was stuck with showing a list of filenames in the
status bar, which scales to like 10 filenames at most.

When I finally decided I was going to Atom full time, I decided to take a stab
at making my own package for opening files as I couldn't find anything that
did quite what I wanted. Within hours I had forked and adapted an existing
package to do exactly what I wanted[0].

It's shocking to me just how easy it is to make a package, especially if
you're already familiar with web development. Within the past month and a half
I've published 4 different packages[0], probably only spending about two weeks
total time working on them.

I'm confident that, as the performance issues that some people hit are ironed
out, this flexibility will make Atom hugely popular.

[0] [https://atom.io/users/Osmose](https://atom.io/users/Osmose)

~~~
coldtea
> _I 'm confident that, as the performance issues that some people hit are
> ironed out, this flexibility will make Atom hugely popular._

It's a DOM based editor -- and they already did 2 rounds of optimizing the
rendering. The performance issues wont be ironed out in the foreseeable
future.

~~~
mchahn
> It's a DOM based editor

According to google, javascript will soon be able to go around the DOM for
situations like this. An example was shown at codeconf recently.

------
muktabh
I have tried to use Atom many times. It is built in open - source spirit and
has a very friendly community. So I download every release which is even
slightly talked about and try it (including 1.0) , and every time I end up
wishing it was faster like Sublime and switch back. I code in Python/Go, both
of which have very exhaustive plugins in Atom, but it turns out autocompletes
are noticably slow. I do not mind if I type a few characters and they appear a
bit later on screen, but like 5 seconds after pressing enter <I use enter for
autocomplete> is kind of unfair, esp when you see things happening almost
spontaneously in Sublime.

However, I would like to say that it is getting better (version 1.0 is way
better than the first one I tried) and has the potential to become the next
emacs. But its not right now there. I will not wait till then to switch, but
unless Atom gets faster, I am not taking a plunge. I think Sublime is the
undisputed leader for me till this happens.

~~~
snarfy
Have you tried Adobe's Brackets editor? It's similar to Atom (uses chrome +
node) but much better performance, IMO.

I refuse to use any editor with a noticeable delay when I type. My 7mhz Amiga
500 did not have a delay when typing, but some how Atom manages to cause lag
on my 8 core 3ghz machine.

~~~
13years
I'm currently using Brackets mostly because it performs much better than Atom.
Interestingly, in some cases according to this, it even beats Sublime.

Comparison of Atom, Brackets, Sublime, VS Code
[https://github.com/adobe/brackets/issues/11093](https://github.com/adobe/brackets/issues/11093)

------
paublyrne
I liked it when I downloaded an early release, but I didn't see any reason to
change from Sublime Text.

Atom has the advantage of having many people working on it, as opposed to one
in the case of Sublime Text, so perhaps in time will ship features I didn't
know I wanted. Will try again.

~~~
mercer
My rationale for stay with Sublime Text is that it's still a lot faster than
Atom, and I've found it to generally be more stable. But I'll probably switch
to Atom once it has a significant number of features or plugins that make it
worth the 'cost' in performance.

~~~
Numberwang
I'd recommend Visual studio code as an alternative.

It is great.

[https://code.visualstudio.com/](https://code.visualstudio.com/)

~~~
adarmatic
Isn't Visual Studio Code just Microsoft's fork of Atom?

~~~
giancarlostoro
They use the underlying core, but the code is their own. One benefit I see is
that Microsoft gets to provide bugfixes to Electron that Github may find
useful. As well as Microsoft may just end up porting some of their products
(Office) based on their experience learned by developing for multiple
platforms.

------
kp25
Atom v1.0 is lot better than beta releases, but not as good as Sublime. Atom
is open source unlike Sublime which is closed source, so in the long run atom
is definitely going to be the winner. For Now, Sublime is much better than
Atom and there is lot of gap in terms of performance. Lets hope, Atom gets
better & better with releases.

~~~
coldtea
> _Atom v1.0 is lot better than beta releases, but not as good as Sublime.
> Atom is open source unlike Sublime which is closed source, so in the long
> run atom is definitely going to be the winner._

No, it's just going to remain open in the long run. That's the guarantee from
Open Source. Not that it will be "the winner".

GIMP hasn't matched Photoshop in ages, Gnome and KDE are not up to par with OS
X and Windows 10 even after all these years, OpenOffice never matched Office
in speed and stability, the list can go on...

~~~
kp25
Agree with you, No Arguments about that. With Github being behind the Atom,
just being positive that it might actually win over sublime.

------
Puts
Almost 70M download for a text editor? Madness I tell you!!

~~~
orkoden
emacs 24.5 is 59 MB in gzip.

~~~
abc_lisper
But emacs will do everything!

------
danso
edit: I realize OP says that he admits all the Atom packages are ports from
ST, and he isn't really arguing for Atom > ST, just that "I guess I just
wanted to try something new and so far I'm quite happy with it"...I guess I
was thrown off by one of his initial statements:

> _Atom 1.0 will greet you with a nice splash screen on start. The first you
> will notice is that Atom is actually a lot more user friendly than Sublime
> Text._

...and then he proceeds to explain how you have to dig through two menus to
enable the basic "Preview Tabs" menu.

\----

I appreciate the writeup but the OP doesn't seem to be experienced or
knowledgable enough about ST to make a reliable judgment.

The very first feature he mentions is "Preview Tabs":

> _Preview Tabs allow you to open files, have a look at the code and then open
> another file, whilst automatically closing the previous one, if no code
> changes have been applied._

Doesn't Sublime Text have this feature? You click on a file in a project and
its name will appear italicized in a new tab, indicating that it's not quite
open. Click on another file, and that new file will take the previous file's
spot. Double click a file name and the tab title will no longer be italicized.
What am I missing here? Even if ST didn't have this feature...this seems like
a weak feature to start off a piece about why Atom is different/better than
Sublime Text.

All of the plugins that OP mentions seem to already exist in ST. OK I can't
say that for sure, since I haven't tried every single one, but this is what OP
says about the Pigments plugin:

> _Now this is actually something I never managed to do in Sublime Text, but
> in Atom it just works. Pigments pulls in the HEX, RGBa or HSL value and
> applies it as the background colour of your code. Great if you’re like me
> and can only tell the colours of two values, #000 and #fff…_

This is a feature of the popular ColorHighlighter package (which also has a
built-in color picker):
[https://github.com/Monnoroch/ColorHighlighter](https://github.com/Monnoroch/ColorHighlighter).
ColorHiglighter does not highlight all colors by default, but perhaps OP
didn't read the README where it says you can enable that feature in the
standard Tools dropdown?

~~~
klosk
Hi, Sorry to confuse you. The post is actually meant to be for people who come
from ST and move over to Atom. There is no particular useful feature I am
aware of (except maybe the git integration) that requires everyone to make the
switch. I just wrote this post to show how I use Atom now and that it
basically capable of everything I liked about ST. It's not really this is
better than that, it's just that I have now two editors that work great for me
:)

------
potomushto
I've been using Atom (now Nuclide) for a year. It's reasonably good. I believe
in something like `react-native-desktop` based editor. Only JS Threads + UI
Native Thread. It's a huge task to implement all these APIs, yes, but I
couldn't imagine how fast and responsive Atom would be without Chrome inside.

~~~
akhilcacharya
Something like that would be amazing, the worst part about Atom for me is the
battery life hit I take on my rMBP.

------
rezand
This is a easy switch for me since I really never got into learning the
advanced stuff sublime can do and for the bulk of my work I'm hopping in and
out of the terminal. Though I'm sure there are plenty of devs that will hold
onto sublime to the grave.

------
shiggerino
All this chasing from one notepad clone to the next is such a waste of time.
Pro tip: it's a dead end if you want a sane computing environment.

~~~
Retra
New people are born every day, and when they are deciding what tools to use,
they should try to pick the best ones, not the ones that you personally aren't
willing to invest in.

------
anonymous344
I was reading this that now way gonna be some "new kid" editor better than
sublime text. And i was right, it was not about being better just trying.

Sublime text is AWESOME! ty for everyone that has contributed to it

~~~
josteink
Sublime text is closed source. I don't think you should expect too many
contributors.

I don't get the craze about atom honestly, but at least it's open source.

~~~
pjmlp
Aka, don't pay for it.

