
Atom Reaches 1M Active Monthly Users - joefitzgerald
http://blog.atom.io/2016/03/28/atom-reaches-1m-users.html
======
grinich
The most fantastic thing about Atom to me has been the underlying technology--
specifically Electron, which is a novel combination of Chromium and NodeJS.

We at Nylas built an email app that originally was a fork of Atom, and now
runs on Electron (which is evolving way faster).
[http://github.com/nylas/n1](http://github.com/nylas/n1)

I honestly think that Electron is the future of desktop software, and it all
started with Atom. Hats off to those folks for continuing to invest in this
project!

(also, zcbenz is a complete badass who doesn't get enough credit)

~~~
sz4kerto
> I honestly think that Electron is the future of desktop software

I like your software but this statement makes me sad -- it's really not a
great situation where a desktop software is written in a language that's not
exactly great (to say the least); it runs on the top of countless abstraction
layers that make the product comparatively very slow. I have 20 CPU cores and
64G RAM, and Slack starts much slower (!) than MS Word 2016.

~~~
grinich
Thanks for the kind words!

If there's one thing consistent about software, it's that things always get
faster. People had a similar sentiment about Java (sloowwwwww), and yet now
the JVM is pretty amazing and powers a huge part of the world.

We know N1 isn't as fast as something written in C++, but we're not super
worried about it because this is likely the slowest that N1 will ever be-- and
yet lots of people are still using it every day! V8 and CPUs will continue to
get faster and faster each year, and we'll also improve the codebase.

Our main objective was to make N1 easy to extend by today's developers. And
(whether you agree with it philosophically or not) JavaScript is leading the
way for the future of programming. So it's the right choice to use in this
regard.

For reference, check out the NPM growth:
[http://imgur.com/R8UjESZ](http://imgur.com/R8UjESZ)

(Also, I think React might be the biggest UI programming paradigm shift in
like 15 years. Not specific to JavaScript, but we're also betting a huge
amount around that vs. traditional MVC architecture.)

~~~
grinich
As an aside, I don't believe the Slack app is taking full advantage of
ElectronJS. It's essentially still just a wrapped webapp. (They run the same
version in the browser.)

Full ElectronJS apps can use something called ASAR which effectively creates a
super efficient bundle for loading application code at launch. More here:
[https://github.com/atom/electron/blob/master/docs/tutorial/a...](https://github.com/atom/electron/blob/master/docs/tutorial/application-
packaging.md)

~~~
mchahn
> Full ElectronJS apps can use something called ASAR

That was a major reason Atom went from unbearably slow to start to reasonable.
I wonder if the Atom github people pushed the Electron github people to do
this.

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nish1500
Just switched over from Sublime to Atom yesterday. Couldn't be happier. The
community around Atom is active, and exciting, much unlike Sublime Text.

I hope subsequent updates make it faster, since ST still has an edge there.

~~~
bithush
How is Atom for non-web languages such as C?

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samueloph
Well, I'm no professional yet but I'm finding it pretty good coding in C while
using the proper lintian together with clang, I also use the package script,
which allows me to run the code from within the editor. If you give enough
tweak, I believe it can be a pretty usefull IDE. Didn't try any gdb
integration yet.

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transcranial
Congrats! Atom may not be perfect (no editor is), but it's constantly and
consistently improving, which is a lot more than one can say about most other
editors.

For those who use Jupyter: there's a package called Hydrogen that let's you
run your code directly within Atom using Jupyter kernels (not just python!).
To me, that's the perfect example of the power of a hackable editor.

~~~
matt4077
Is there a way to get Jupyter-style layout as well? I'm intrigued by the idea
of completely different style of writing code where, essentially, comments
become first-class citizen and include markup (markdown rendered immediately
when the cursor leaves the comment or even rich-text editing), diagrams, links
etc.

I tried to implement it but Atom just wasn't there at the time. The new block-
level decorators should make it possible.

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saberworks
Is anyone else creeped out that this desktop application phones home every
time you start it? Is this just the new normal now?

~~~
smarx007
It checks for updates automatically, so I think that gives them the stats,
same should be valid for Sublime.

~~~
tlrobinson
Atom actually uses Google Analytics too:
[http://i.imgur.com/bXwEDes.png](http://i.imgur.com/bXwEDes.png)

~~~
taylorfausak
You can disable the analytics from within Atom by disabling this package:
[https://atom.io/packages/metrics](https://atom.io/packages/metrics)

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amykhar
This is the first time I've opened a discussion about Atom where all the top
posts weren't about how horrible and slow it is. Has it gotten better, or have
people who know better just given up on this editor?

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grinich
It has gotten WAY faster.

~~~
hccampos
Still not fast enough, especially when you have VSCode that is built with the
same technologies and performs way way better. Atom can and should be faster.

~~~
grinich
> Atom can and should be faster.

I bet the core Atom team would agree with you. :) You should join the Slack
channel and dive in. Pretty smart+driven group of people working on it.
[http://atom-slack.herokuapp.com/](http://atom-slack.herokuapp.com/)

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tombert
I'm actually kind of happy about this. While I don't personally use Atom at
all, I think it's good that an open source editor is getting extremely
popular.

Much as I like Sublime Text, the fact that it's proprietary has prevented me
from using it.

~~~
shmageggy
> Much as I like Sublime Text, the fact that it's proprietary has prevented me
> from using it.

Same here, and when I recently ran into some built in limitations with gvim
regarding its inability to easily deal with proportional width fonts, I
switched to Atom. I've been really happy so far -- the vim mode plugin is
nice. Atom isn't perfect, but it's good enough for now, and the extensibility
model makes me confident that it will just keep getting better.

~~~
cormacrelf
Why would you want proportional width fonts in Vim? Forgive me for asking,
it's probably pretty obvious to you.

~~~
shmageggy
For non-code writing such as academic papers, notes and things written in
markdown. All of which feature a mix of code, math, and plenty of prose. I
don't love writing prose in monospace, and I also don't love using multiple
tools for one task, and I also don't love using the pointer on the laptop (as
oppposed to navigation keys in vim-like environments). With Atom, I can kill
all of these birds with one editor.

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superplussed
The only thing that keeps me from using Atom, and I admit that this might seem
trivial, is how much I hate the delay before the syntax highlighting loads.
Somehow it's an immersion-breaker for me, and a deal breaker. Anyone know if
this issue is being worked on?

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vdnkh
Is it me, or are there _horrible_ stability issues on Windows 10? I cannot
have more than one editor open without one of them crashing. This is an issue
on 3 of my W10 machines.

~~~
ardzoht
It is definitely not you, having issues as well, that's what has been keeping
me from jumping the ship from Sublime Text.

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tambourine_man
I just now tweaked my vimrc to be a bit nicer on remote ssh servers. Atom
seems to be getting cooler every day, but I just can't see myself parting from
Vim. Not yet anyway.

Another thought just stroke me as well: everywhere I look I see Atom, it seems
like almost everyone has adopted it. If that _everyone_ is just 1M, our world
is very small indeed.

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qz_
Atom is very nice. The Emacs of 2016.

~~~
dguaraglia
Except for the whole "run anywhere with a terminal", "high quality packages
with decades of bugfixes" and "pretty much extensible in every way".

(I'm a Vim user myself, but I feel like comparing Atom to Emacs is a big...
optimistic. People keep complaining about how slow Atom is, how much memory it
hogs up, etc. I think it needs at least a few more years of maturation before
being able to call it "the Emacs of X")

~~~
vdaniuk
>People keep complaining about how slow Atom is, how much memory it hogs up,
etc

Which is exactly what people have been saying decades ago about Emacs, aka
"Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping".

~~~
dguaraglia
The difference being that, functionality-wise, you don't get anything from
using Atom over, say, Emacs or Vim. High memory and CPU utilization is a
tradeoff I'm willing to take for the added benefit of running IntelliJ or
Visual Studio, because as environments they do way more for certain code bases
than either Vim or Emacs could do. But Atom? Not so much. "It's made of
Javascript and HTML" is not an advantage (to me) worth the memory and lag.

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wnevets
The fact that this is still a problem blows my mind.

[https://github.com/atom/atom/issues/5901](https://github.com/atom/atom/issues/5901)

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PhilipA
What are the main reasons to choose Atom over e.g. Visual Studio Code?

~~~
erokar
Ecosystem, but not much more. Code is faster and has very good intellisense
for JS. Though it's still in Beta it's been very stable and a pleasure to use.

~~~
hccampos
Indeed, the VSCode intellisense for JS is amazing, especially after the latest
February release.

~~~
vbit
Given it is open source, couldn't Atom just re-use VSCode's intellisense?

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ConAntonakos
One of the only reasons I haven't fully moved over to Atom is due to its SFTP
support. Any recommendations? I'm definitely considering switching from ST.

~~~
vbit
SSHFS?

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homero
It's awesome but I just can't give up my pspad

------
revelation
Can you imagine, Notepad celebrating 1 billion monthly users?

~~~
charliedevolve
A program bundled with every copy of Windows, ever? Yes, that would be silly.

