
Atom 1.6 Released with Pending Pane Items, Async Git and Top and Bottom Bar API - ingve
http://blog.atom.io/2016/03/17/atom-1-6-and-1-7-beta.html
======
pugio
I love the concept of Atom and have a lot invested in its success. That being
said, I switched back to Sublime because of the responsiveness, and here's
why:

Programming (for me) is a craft. When I'm in the flow of coding, there's a
conversation between me and my program, mediated through the editor (and my
REPL). Even a subtle typing lag is enough to subtly disrupt that flow state –
the speed of thought and text no longer coincide, and that slight, almost
subliminal perception of delay build into a sense of frustration and just
being out of sync with my program.

It's a problem that's most noticeable in its absence. Like when you go to the
gym for the first time in a while and realize "oh, yeah, this feeling is what
I've been missing", switching from Atom back to Sublime feels... right,
refreshing.

For a great analysis of typing latency, and why it's important, see:
[https://pavelfatin.com/typing-with-pleasure/](https://pavelfatin.com/typing-
with-pleasure/)

(I am happy Atom is still moving forwards, though, and eagerly await the day I
can switch fully from Sublime. Easy modification of ones own tools is another
big component of my personal programmer-as-craftsman ideal.)

~~~
threatofrain
I've had the same feeling about the startup speed issue, but with javascript /
typescript, I've found that Visual Studio Code occupies the middle in startup
performance, and I've found the "intellisense" information to take a load off
the mental difficulty of work and memory.

So now I use Sublime to make quick edits, but for anything longer, I use
Visual Studio Code.

~~~
baldfat
Visual Studio Code is built on electron and both are javascript running in
chromium and I still don't understand the difference in performance between
VSC and Atom.

Here is a conversation about VSC better performance. It was an interesting
read
[https://github.com/atom/atom/issues/10188](https://github.com/atom/atom/issues/10188)

I have tried both and both are slow and sticking with Vim and RStudeo.

------
DigitalSea
The new features and updates are great, but the one thing holding me back from
using it is the fact it is extremely slow and laden with performance issues.
Anyone who has ever attempted to open a file with a lot of lines of code will
attest to the fact that Atom has issues.

Ironically, Microsoft's open source Visual Studio Code editor is based in part
of some aspects of Atom and it has exceptional performance and is a great
editor in comparison. They need to focus on fixing the slowness. VSCode proved
that Electron is not the bottleneck but rather Atom's code itself is.

~~~
timr
I simply don't understand the appeal of the thing. To a person, everyone who
raves about it says, essentially _" just like Sublime Text, but in
Javascript!"_, and yeah, that seems right. Just like Sublime Text, but in
Javascript...and plagued with the performance problems you'd expect from
Sublime Text, written in JavaScript. There's not really a killer feature that
makes me want to switch from the editor I use already.

I must be getting old, because _"...but in JavaScript!"_ is not a selling
point to me. I _don 't care_ what language my editor is written in, except
that I'd prefer it to be written in whatever language allows the developers to
implement its features in a performant and scalable fashion.

(I really love the downvotes for disagreement. Perhaps, if you like the thing
so much, you could explain _why_ , instead of just trying to silence people?)

~~~
AlexMax
> Perhaps, if you like the thing so much, you could explain why

I am an avid Atom user who acknowledges how slow the thing can be. None of the
slowness on my end approaches any of the horror stores in these threads, but
for me, opening the program from a cold boot takes long enough for the wait to
irritate me, the first time I save any file after opening the program takes a
second or two, and opening a new window takes a second or two.

However, I stick with Atom for a few reasons.

First, Atom is like Sublime Text, but nicer. It has real settings pages! It
has a built-in package manager! And although you might consider the fact that
it's written in what is essentially a web browser to be a downside, there is a
huge upside in that packages can create interfaces with that flexibility that
Sublime Text simply can't match - compare something like this
[https://atom.io/packages/php-debug](https://atom.io/packages/php-debug) with
Sublime Text's best-effort
[https://github.com/martomo/SublimeTextXdebug](https://github.com/martomo/SublimeTextXdebug)
. Not only is trying to assemble an interface out of text buffers not as
flexible as a webpage, they also tend to be brittle and break in odd ways if
you do any window manipulation on your own - this is actually a complaint I
have about Emacs and Vim as well. Also, it just feels like Atom's plugin API
is more complete in general - I remember there being a Sublime Text package
that required making a copy of your theme so it could add its own styles, and
I haven't seen anything similarly hacky in Atom yet.

Second, Atom is open source. I had bought both Textmate and Sublime Text and
both of those editors had updates slow to an absolute crawl to the point where
it felt like the developer had abandoned them. I feel like Atom being open
source makes it less likely to be abandoned completely, especially considering
how vibrant the community that has sprung up around the editor.

~~~
rezistik
Having a real settings page and a real package manager are Atom's main draws
to me.

I tried to switch back to Sublime after being annoyed with the performance of
Atom but kept running into configuration issues and really really disliked
having to read documentation on how to configure the damned thing.

~~~
unfamiliar
I've actually tried a couple of times to make a graphical settings manager
package for Sublime, but the second problem of not having an interface beyond
text buffers has made it a bit of a non-starter.

------
rodgerd
I have been ignoring the Atom hype because "geeze a programmers editor written
as a big blob of JavaScript on my desktop that sounds like a dumb idea".

Then I tried it and it's wonderful and magical.

~~~
grinich
We actually forked Atom and built an email app. It's worked surprisingly well!

~~~
pyre
Why a fork of Atom rather than a brand new Electron app?

~~~
grinich
We actually started building the app before Electron was released. They had
just made the split to atom-shell and brightray.

Once Electron got it's footing, we migrated there. It's also easier for us to
contribute upstream patches for things like touch events. (We launched swipe-
to-archive a couple weeks ago.)

Atom is lagging behind Electron. It's still running on Electron v0.34.5 which
was shipped in November of last year. They're trying to keep up, but the
community of folks around Electron is growing fast.

If you're based in SF and interested in this, you should definitely check out
the Bay Area Electron User Group: [http://www.meetup.com/Bay-Area-Electron-
User-Group/](http://www.meetup.com/Bay-Area-Electron-User-Group/)

------
segphault
I really wish there was a way to use Atom in client/server mode. I'd like to
leave a headless session running on my home Linux server and be able to attach
to it from work. Right now, I use SSHFS to mount the remote directory so I can
edit locally, but it leaves a lot to be desired.

Considering that Atom is all just Node and Chromium under the hood, it's
surprising that there's no way to run at is as a server.

~~~
jwcooper
Check out nuclide.io. It's built on top of atom by Facebook. I haven't tried
it, but one of its features is remote development using client/server.

~~~
seanp2k2
Unless I'm misreading, parent is talking about something like X11 where the
heavy lifting happens on the "server" side and the client is more of an
interactive viewer. Nuclide is cool but it looks like the client / server
stuff is for doing live development where the code lives on e.g. A web server.
This is a thing in other IDEs too (such as IntelliJ), and it's a useful
feature, but it doesn't get the main workload off the "client":
[http://nuclide.io/docs/features/remote/](http://nuclide.io/docs/features/remote/)

Edit: Actually, running atom over X11 could work if you have some beefy remote
machine / AWS workspace. You could even use Nuclide's remote capability above
to connect _back_ to your laptop to edit local code, remotely, using a local
client and running atom on the X11 server. Not that this is sensible or _not_
ridiculous, but if you really need that c4.8xl to run your text editor, it's
possible.

------
jasonbarone
Has anyone given Atom a lengthy comparison in performance on a Macbook Retina
versus non-retina machines?

I've owned 3 Macbook Retinas to date and every single one has had sluggish
behavior in many apps. Google Chrome and Electron apps seem to fall into that
mix for me. I've yet to give Atom a lengthy test on a non-retina machine, but
I can say that I definitely get the performance issues with Atom in regards to
app and document behavior and type latency. Plugins just make it even worse.
In fact, some plugins like linters and live markdown preview bring Atom to a
point where it's literally unusable.

What the Atom contributors have done is quite amazing and the app has come a
long way. I'd go as far as saying it has everything I want in an editor for a
front end developer. I would use it as my primary editor if the type latency
could disappear.

As of right now I basically just keep Atom up to date with my SublimeText
preferences and give it a try on each release.

------
azeirah
I really hope they'll improve the discovery of third-party plugins, the
repertoire of available atom plugins is insane, yet finding something you want
is still a /lot/ harder than with sublime + package control...

------
lotsoflumens
I use Atom (the beta channel) every day - it has become my favorite editor
because of all the nice support for different languages.

It could be a bit faster, but I'm confident that it will get better.

I also made the mistake of opening a large data file (100 MB) with it one day.
I won't try that again :-)

------
code_research
If you like it when editors are fast and lightweight, have a quick startup
time, are able to load really big files (e.g. database dumps) without any
problems and generally do not distract you with random annoying things while
you are working on code, then you will be happy that development on geany is
going on - there was a new release [0] this month!

Yes, of course there are several [1] packages, e.g. for Ubuntu [2] - so you do
not have to waste your time checking for a new version, downloading it via
your browser and installing it manually, like it was done in the last century.

I am not affiliated with geany developers in any way, I am just not a follower
of the new-old church of bloatism.

[0] [http://www.geany.org/Main/20160313](http://www.geany.org/Main/20160313)
[1]
[http://www.geany.org/Download/ThirdPartyPackages](http://www.geany.org/Download/ThirdPartyPackages)
[2] [https://launchpad.net/~geany-
dev/+archive/ubuntu/ppa](https://launchpad.net/~geany-dev/+archive/ubuntu/ppa)

------
mikerichards
Despite Atom's shortcomings that everybody knows about, I really like it and
use it frequently. It has a huge number of high quality plugins (and some not
so high).

That said, eventually I see myself moving to vscode. Text editors are meant to
be opened and closed frequently, unlike an IDE. So I typically will have atom
opened for various tasks, but will use vscode to "check out" a file. vscode is
also written in typescript and something that I'm very interested in. I'd
probably move to vscode for a bunch more tasks if it had a decent vim plugin.

In some kind of ideal world, vscode could use atom plugins, but I know that's
probably a recipe for disaster with huge instability issues.

I'd really love for Atom and VSCode to actually come together one day in the
not too distant future. I think it makes sense to pool resources in the
"Electron editor app" ecosystem.

But congratulations to the Atom team, nonetheless. When things work, it's a
very pleasant experience....especially considering the technical roots it
comes from.

~~~
tombert
I don't know that I fully agree; I leave my Vim instance open for literally
days at a time in a tmux session, which works somewhat as my "IDE". Much as
I've heard I'm only supposed to do this with "real" IDE's, I have yet to
really notice a single drawback.

------
modulus1
Lack of MRU tab switching and preview tabs are two reasons I haven't switched
from sublime. Glad they are listening to requests.

~~~
tbrock
Dude read the change log, this is explicitly added in the new 1.7 beta.

~~~
spdustin
I believe he knows that, was acknowledging that those issues were blockers in
the past, and complimented the devs for listening to requests like his.

------
wyager
I don't really want more features for Atom. I just want it to be faster. Right
now it's incredibly sluggish compared to e.g. Sublime. Is there any hope on
this front, or are the performance issues intrinsic?

~~~
hacker_9
I see this comment every time an Atom post gets on HN. Are you sure it's not
just your computer specs? If Atom continually makes the HN front page then
many people must be using it just fine and like it? Personally I'm not sure
why we need another text editor of all things, but hey its made in javascript
which is hip at the moment.

~~~
izacus
A quad core, 16GB RAM rMBP with SSD should really be able to run a text editor
for a 500 line Python file without caret lagging behind typing :/

Sublime can do it easily, Atom still can't. Am I holding it wrong?

~~~
13years
I don't have any lag. Do you have lag with a plain text file? Does this happen
with default install no added plugins? I recently was editing a 10M log file
with no lag.

I've had problems sometimes with all these editors with occasional bad
performing plugins.

------
aesthetics1
>> File types can be easily associated with Atom now it registers itself so it
can be associated with file types. No more need to hunt for atom.exe

This is great! I've had to associate with atom.cmd for quite a while now,
which has been a bit annoying.

------
cyber
For the people complaining that it's slow: what plugins are you running?

My contribution: Community packages used most often: api-workbench, fonts,
language-sql-mysql, term3, vim-mode Others: dash, export-html, language-
docker, linter, markdown-pdf, markdown-preview-plus, markdown-preview-plus-
opener, markdown-scroll-sync, markdown-writer, stash-tabs

------
unfamiliar
My biggest problems with Atom:

    
    
        Too slow, especially with large files
    
        All the plugins I seem to want to use are constantly broken
    

My problems with Sublime:

    
    
        Confusing json settings hierarchy
    
        UI not extensible enough, plugins try their best
    

I wish one camp would fix these so I can finally settle.

------
jessegreathouse
It just locks up my MBP until I eventually close it just like atom 1.5 did.
I've never understood the point of this editor, however to be fair, I've never
been able to use it without severe performance issues. I can run 8+ instances
of jetbrains without even breaking a sweat but running atom out of the box is
a non-start.

------
anhtran
My choices:

    
    
      - Jetbrains' IDE for heavy projects.
      - Sublime Text for single file editing.
      - VSCode (new coming for me): very good UI/UX, fast and free. Good choice for agile projects.
    

Sorry, have no place for Atom.

------
pedalpete
Seems like the biggest complaints are around performance. I'm assuming Atom
(and VS Code, etc) are using asm.js or some other library to get them close to
native performance. Anybody have thoughts on that? or am I completely wrong?

~~~
desuvader
Atom is (almost) like any normal web app from a performance standpoint. Runs
on electron.

No asm.js magic here.

------
pikzen
[https://github.com/atom/atom-keymap/issues/37](https://github.com/atom/atom-
keymap/issues/37) is still open.

Yet another broken release for half of the world.

~~~
asantos3
Oh yeah, lets just wait a few months for chrome to release KeyboardEvent.key
and then ship a new release.

------
atrudeau
Is there any way to port Atom to run in the browser through a webserver? My
work flow is autossh + tmux + Vim so that I can work from any computer on my
server. If Atom had something similar I'd be interested.

------
stared
When it come to performance - on Atom (on OS X, with Git Plus) it takes me min
10 sec for git add-commit - versus instantaneous when using command line.

I am still using it, but delays really break the flow.

------
namelezz
"Block Decorations" worries me as I experience slowness in my browser whenever
there are lot animated Gif pictures. Will Atom suffer the same thing?

------
santiagobasulto
I really like Atom, but it kills my battery. I got a macbook pro mainly
because of the battery life.

------
nkg
The pending pane feature is really an improvement, because I found myself
closing tabs way too often.

------
betenoire
that's beautiful... suddenly I resent my decade long addiction to a certain
other editor. kinda.

Does anyone have experience using vim-mode?

~~~
segphault
As a longtime Vim user, I've been pleasantly surprised with the quality of
Atom's Vim bindings. Text navigation and pane management bindings mostly work
as expected. You get multiple registers for yanking etc. That's the extent of
what you get, however. There's no emulation for the colon prompt, no macros,
and it obviously doesn't support any Vim scripting.

I've been happy with Atom after transitioning from Vim, but there are still a
few pain points. One that's particular annoying is that Atom's search/replace
is very poor compared to the power I'm used to having with :%s.

~~~
bronson
If vim-mode doesn't go quite far enough, make sure to try vim-mode-plus.

Adreed, I miss %s pretty much every day. Also tabular.vim -- tried a few but
haven't found an Atom equivalent yet.

~~~
cname
I just did %s/a/b and it worked. I think you need to install the ex-mode
plugin.

------
erikb
While I agree with most people that Atom is kind of unresponsive, don't you
think that we have talked about it enough? Stop acting like you are the first
person to notice. Since its first release that is the major complaint point.
They either can't or don't want to do anything about it. Deal with it.

