
Atom now opens files larger than 2MB - vruiz
https://github.com/atom/atom/releases/tag/v0.208.0
======
andrewchambers
This is 2015, 2MB files shouldn't be news worthy for a text editor. We seem to
be bloating software faster than hardware improvements can offset it.

~~~
mseebach
This has nothing to do with bloat. While unimpressive not to be able to open
files larger than 2MB, it's easy to see how and why such a limit came about,
and as Atom seems to be styled as a text editor for programming, not really
unreasonable, as very few human-created text documents get anywhere near 2MB.

~~~
dagw
_very few human-created text documents get anywhere near 2MB._

True, but as a programmer i very often generate and need to view files greater
than 2MB.

~~~
errtnsd
This.

Not to mention log files which commonly consume megabytes.

~~~
bradleyland
Nitpick inbound.

You shouldn't open log files with an _editor_ unless your intent is to edit
the file. There are a whole host of tools (grep, less, awk, sed, etc) useful
for parsing and exploring log files.

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lelf
Atom changelog could be a good parody media (except that it’s not)

There was this little gem a while back:

“Fixed an issue where Atom would to fail to launch from directories that
contained a file named undefined or null.”

~~~
josteink
That's pretty golden, but I like my jokes sourced. Do you have a link for that
particular change-log entry?

~~~
anilgulecha
[https://github.com/atom/atom/releases/tag/v0.150.0](https://github.com/atom/atom/releases/tag/v0.150.0)

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lewisl9029
I've been trying out Light Table recently, and it seems to have no problems
with large files (and generally feels much more snappy in use compared to
Atom).

I just tried a bundled 3MB+ .js file and it loaded practically
instantaneously. Even opening a 10MB+ .mp3 file (for science!) didn't result
in any delay longer than a second. Whereas opening the same files on the
latest Atom took a good 5 seconds for the .js and 10 seconds for the .mp3 (and
it looks like Atom had to give up on doing syntax highlighting on the .js
file, whereas Light Table did not). These tests were all performed on a rather
modest Core M processor, so YMMV.

AFAIK, both Atom and Light Table are built on Electron and web technologies
(Light Table uses ClojureScript but at the end of the day they both compile
down to HTML/JS/CSS).

So my takeaway from this is: Atom's performance woes are most likely _not
intrinsic to the web-based platform it 's built on_, but are rather results of
implementation flaws of Atom itself.

[http://lighttable.com/](http://lighttable.com/)

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georgerobinson
I once made the mistake of trying to edit a 50MB SQL file in Sublime Text. It
took about 10 minutes to open. Once it had, every edit I made, every line I
scrolled froze Sublime Text for another 2 to 3 minutes. I can only presume
Sublime Text reads and renders the entire file at once, re-rendering on each
edit, even if your window only shows 100 of the 10,000 lines. I love Sublime
Text, however it is just impossible to use for large files. I suppose this is
why we have stream editors like sed.

~~~
josteink
Funny how "untrendy" editors like Emacs (from the 70s!) handles 50MB files and
larger without even raising an eyebrow, while all the "modern" editors seem
crippled when asked to to do the same things.

I'll stick to what works, thank you.

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stephenr
I just don't get the appeal for these not-really-native editors.

I bite the bullet and use a Java based IDE because frankly there are very few
good ones that _aren 't_ Java based and support the languages I use, but if
you're just using it as an _editor_ there are plenty of native apps for Mac,
Windows and Linux.

~~~
Brakenshire
The attraction is having one editor on all the platforms which developers use
(this is one of the few market niches where the users are seriously split
between Windows, Mac and Linux). That means it can always be installed no
matter what platform you're on, and justifies more effort than would be
possible on any one platform, which may cover only a third or a quarter of the
market. Also, I wouldn't say there's a clear distinction between an IDE and an
editor. People want a modular program, which starts simple, and can be
upgraded when the upgrade becomes useful or necessary.

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not-a-hipster
Does this joke of an editor still spy on you with Google Analytics? Things
like this (and MongoDB) really make me want to get out of this industry. The
amount of pointless wheel-reinvention that goes on simply due to fashion and
short attention spans is (or ought to be) scandalous.

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beardicus
Well. The comments here so far are about what one would expect. We're well on
our way to making a 2MB+ file of "LOL USE VIM/EMACS" comments.

I've been using Atom for a bit now. I like it. I started out with vim but it
never really stuck. I still use vim bindings in Atom for basic
movement/yanking/pasting et cetera, but I admit, I am a GUI using creature and
I like to grab the mouse every once in a while.

I rather enjoy the fact that I can poke at my editor just using a basic
understanding of web development technologies. I enjoy that Atom was easy to
set up and install plugins, unlike the dozen different ways you can/should
customize vim. I already have a much more tweaked environment with Atom simply
because slogging through .vimrc and vim bundles (even with vundle) was a major
pain for me. I've never run into performance issues or the 2MB file limit
(yes, I do have to deal with log files, but opening them in a text editor is
not part of my workflow).

Clearly, others have different skills and priorities and Atom doesn't work for
them. That's great. I'm glad there are options out there. Vim isn't a giant
pile of shit just because it doesn't work for me.

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jokoon
I find it crazy that we still struggle to have simple things like a decent
text editor. Speaks volume on the average quality of software in general.

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anirudt
A +1 for Notepad++ on this note.

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bnastic
Cute emoji in commit messages, along with this sort of achievement... OK,
seriously, what is the Atom's raison d'être?

~~~
Ygg2
So you can edit your files on GitHub?

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castell
Which text editor do you use to open and edit 100+MB files (on Windows, Linux,
OSX)? Which text editor can handle a 100GB text file and has a fast search and
replace function?

On Windows notepad.exe, wordpad and notepad++ aren't really prepared for that
task. Helpful would be an editor that streams in only a small part of a big
text file.

~~~
not-a-hipster
ed, by Ken Thompson. It's actually extremely useful for this one specific task
of editing particular lines in a large file. There's also sed if you want to
perform arbitrary search and replace.

