
Atom 1.0 - mrbogle
http://blog.atom.io/2015/06/25/atom-1-0.html
======
bdcravens
Congrats to the team for reaching this important milestone.

I'm a Sublime license holder, but I use Atom as much as I can, because the
more open source can win, the better.

However, yesterday I was doing some complex regex's (porting a random sql dump
file into a seeds.rb), and Atom kept dying, whereas Sublime was pretty much
instantaneous.

I'm not doing the usual "Atom is slow" drum beating, but saying some
undertones of the announcement make me worry a bit. I hear discussion of
things like Electron and "social coding" as the future, and I'm hoping that
means that no one considers 1.0 to equate to the core editing experience being
finished. It's not, and I hope the Atom team continues to iterate before
moving on to new features.

Being able to open files larger than 2MB isn't sexy, but it's necessary.
Having to hard-kill my editor because the save dialog is trapped on my other
full screen session that it won't let me get to deserves more than a "but it's
open source" response.

tl;dr congrats team and your core users want the best editor possible over
bells and whistles

~~~
pudquick
Sorry for side-jacking this comment - but which version of Sublime, may I ask,
and what OS?

I'm using Sublime 2 on OS X and large files + regular expressions are
generally a cause for pain.

Do you have any default settings changed like disabled document preview or
similar?

The only thing I generally feel is a _champ_ at regular expressions + insanely
large files on OS X is TextWrangler/BBEdit. In fact, I keep TextWrangler
around specifically for the large file excellence experience which I
(currently) don't receive on Sublime Text 2.

~~~
brianpgordon
Upgrading to Sublime 3 can't hurt...

I don't have issues with large files on OS X.

~~~
pudquick
Is the beta stable enough to use regularly?

~~~
freditup
Yes, I would say it is quite stable. In fact, in the ST blog it says: "Sublime
Text 3, while still technically in beta, is the recommended version of Sublime
Text to use." [0]

[0]: [http://www.sublimetext.com/blog/articles/sublime-
text-3-buil...](http://www.sublimetext.com/blog/articles/sublime-
text-3-build-3080)

~~~
pudquick
Thanks :) I'll give it a whirl!

EDIT: WOWOW

Major difference! Definitely sticking with 3!! Thank you :D

 _Extremely_ fast in comparison to 2.

------
harperlee
Wow... just downloaded the windows installer version and it autoinstalled
itself wherever it chose fit, without questioning, it installed shortcuts on
the start menu, placed itself on an already bloated contextual menu on several
file extensions as an Open option, instead on "Open with...", etc.

I usually install software on my user folder on the work laptop, as I don't
have enough priviledges. This time the installer worked, but why override the
questions to the user, like install location, etc.? There's a standard for
Windows installers, why did they ignore it? Not cool.

~~~
steve-howard
I don't know if this has changed, but when I tried Atom and didn't like it, I
discovered that there was no uninstaller. Hooray for deleting context menu
entries by hand in the registry.

~~~
wnevets
One of the first things I've noticed after trying out the new release, very
annoying.

~~~
jules
Thanks for the heads up, I was about to try Atom but I'll wait until this is
fixed.

------
joefitzgerald
The killer feature of Atom to me is the ease with which it can be extended
(via packages) and the openness to community contribution on core features.
That's not a knock against any other editor (some of which share similar
characteristics in this regard) – it's just what draws me to Atom.

It's super easy to hack on and contribute to.

~~~
jerf
It's the Cycle of Bloat.

    
    
        1. Develop tool. It's small and fast and minimal! Woo!
        2. It's easy to modify because it's so small! Woo!
        3. Look, there's a budding ecosystem of packages! Woo! (Let's
           not talk about the fact the packages exist precisely because
           the original product wasn't big enough.)
        4. Oh dear, some of them conflict, a lot of them suck. Well, 
           here's some winners, let's pull them into the core. Now the
           base system is that much better! Woo!
        5. Repeat 3 and 4 a few times.
        6. Crap, this tool is all bloated and slow. I'm going to go
           create a small, fast, minimalist solution!
    

Repeat indefinitely.

See also: "minimalist web framework", "minimalist Linux distribution",
"minimalist programming language".

~~~
coldtea
Do people believe that having access to packages and add-ons makes an editor
(or whatever else) "bloated and slow"?

First, whatever you don't use, it's not even loaded in memory.

Second, bloated is all about having tons of options you don't need or use. Not
about adding stuff you DO need piecemeal.

Third, bloat is mostly a UI thing, not a "number of add-ons" or "too many
lines of code" thing. Programs don't get slow because they are "bloated" with
extra code (if it doesn't run, then it has 0 effect on their speed). They get
slow because they are badly programmed (e.g. loading one big text file all at
once in memory instead of having a paging system).

The availability of tens of thousands of packages hasn't made Emacs "bloated",
much less Vim or ST. Or even installing those packages doesn't make those
editors feel bloated.

Whereas something like Eclipse was bloated from the start -- because it was a
very heavy design with tons of abstractions layers, ton of built-in options
and visual clutter etc, created on a GCed language with frequent stops on
larger codebases etc. That's even without any third party plugin added, just
the Eclipse Java SE core packages.

~~~
jerf
"Do people believe that having access to packages and add-ons makes an editor
(or whatever else) "bloated and slow"?"

... no? Hate to dismiss your entire message that way (I mean that seriously),
but...

People appear to be assuming a great deal more universality than I could
possibly have implied, since I don't believe it's a universal problem anyhow,
and never addressed scope. It's just a cycle that definitely exists in some
domains.

It's gotten to when I see something described as "minimal" I tend to just roll
my eyes and move on. Especially when combined with accusations, veiled or
otherwise, that something else is "bloated", which at this point I tend to
just assume is a meaningless feeling word with no real technical content. Yes,
that includes when used in the context of "cycle of bloat"; this is a cycle
endlessly recurring, yet has very little technical content. Mature text
editors are, to a first approximation, all the same. (Yeah, there's some
differences, but, meh.)

~~~
baldfat
Well I hate to also semi-dismiss your message, BUT when certain add-ons are
essential to using a tool like Atom it makes it slow and bloated.

For example I use vim, and when I tried Atom I threw on two Haskel add-ons and
my system was unusable. Then I removed the add ons and my 7 year old desktop
on OpenSUSE just lagged away. I than went to my other old desktop all in one
and that lagged away just at typing (This was a month ago) and adding anything
to Atom slowed down so much that typing was lagging let alone any feature.

------
reledi
Congratulations GitHub and Atom team!

Atom is my favourite editor for coding in, and it just keeps getting better.

I introduced my team to it today (pre 1.0 release, this is a nice surprise)
and they were surprised by how pleasant the experience was - just a few minor
hiccups. We've tried a bunch of editors and usually stick with Sublime because
it's easiest to use while pairing, but I think that will change now.

Sorry for the tough HN crowd, you can never please them.

Here's to Atom 2.0 <3

~~~
techpeace
Hear, hear! Well done, GitHub! This will be an invaluable resource for the
software development community for years to come. Congrats on 1.0.

------
joshburgess
I've gotta say, honestly, I'm preferring Visual Studio Code over Atom simply
due to the fact that it seems MUCH more stable and lightweight. Atom is very
visually appealing, and I'm a fan of the project, in general, but it
constantly freezes up and crashes on me. I think I'll be sticking with VS Code
& Sublime.

~~~
bad_user
Funny, as VS Code is based on Atom.

~~~
wisew
VS Code is not based on Atom - it's built on Electron, the app framework Atom
is also built on, and uses some of the same Node packages Atom developed.

~~~
bad_user
Electron was extracted from Atom and was originally named Atom Shell. I don't
see your point.

~~~
wisew
Electron was also not extracted from Atom - it was always extracted as atom-
shell. It was just rebranded as Electron. Atom ≠ atom-shell.

~~~
bad_user
Maybe we aren't speaking the same language. Here's what it says on
electron.atom.io:

 _" Initially developed for GitHub's Atom editor"_

So what are we talking about?

~~~
rplnt
"for" does not equal "as part of".

------
discreditable
I find it to be a bit depressing that software bloat has advanced to the point
that we have text editors plagued with performance issues.

~~~
lispm
Thirty years ago people complained that GNU Emacs needed 8 megabytes of RAM.

~~~
peatmoss
"Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping"\--Seems quaint now, doesn't it?

~~~
TheSoftwareGuy
A little, but at least it could open an 8mb file, not to mention a 2mb file...

------
cnp
I made the switch yesterday not knowing 1.0 would be released today, and I am
seriously psyched. Their Vim bindings are now good enough, and there are tons
of tweaks you can do to make them better (which will inspire more people to
contribute). I found a few bugs here and there related to installing /
removing packages (just checked and 1.0 fixes them), but nothing major, and
was able to migrate my mammoth .vimrc configuration file over over the course
of an afternoon, with everything I need having already been developed by the
community. Super fast, too.

Also! I was able to create the colorscheme of my dreams in about 15 minutes,
thanks to to the dev tools integration.

~~~
jonahx
What are the main advantages that atom gives you over native vim?

~~~
bluepill
None.

Atom's installer is a huge download, and the editor is much slower ... It also
consumes much more memory and written in coffeescript. Takes a long time to
start up ... just a few things on the top of my head.

It's a great initiative though so that's already a good point.

~~~
cnp
I just timed it and it was less than 5 seconds. I would suggest giving 1.0 a
spin before you judge.

~~~
rhodysurf
Thats still a long time for a text editor though. Sublime, Vim, gedit, etc are
all instantaneous.

------
ahoge
Eh. Why is 1.0 out already? Keyboard layouts which use AltGr are still broken.

E.g. I can't type '@', '\', and 'µ'. Yes, I can't write metadata annotations
or escape some characters.

~~~
hello_there
I'm running Atom 0.116.0 on Xubuntu and AltGr works perfectly fine. My
keyboard layout is Norwegian.

~~~
ahoge
Norwegian with Sámi has a lot of collisions. With the regular Norwegian
layout, the only collision should be µ (M + AltGr).

------
Mahn
I really want to like Atom but it's such a pity that they went for
CoffeeScript instead of plain ES5/ES6.

~~~
geoffharcourt
That's really only a problem if you're contributing to the core, right? You
can write your own packages in JS, and if you're just a user of the editor I
don't see how that matters.

~~~
Mahn
Sure, but it's not the same, on one side I'd like to read the core and hack it
on my own terms, on the other I'd feel more comfortable writing packages if I
could just read the core and see how things work under the hood. I'd like it
to be a "hackable editor" as it touts itself, but as it stands right now it's
a "hackable editor if you are comfortable with CoffeeScript".

~~~
erokar
It will take you less than a day to learn to read CoffeeScript if you are
familiar with JS.

~~~
chris-at
Coffeescript is a very polarizing language. Most people appear to either love
it or hate it vigorously.

[https://discuss.atom.io/t/why-
coffeescript/131](https://discuss.atom.io/t/why-coffeescript/131)

~~~
pluma
CoffeeScript was released in a time when ES6 wasn't yet a thing as far as most
developers were concerned. It was also a time when JS saw a huge influx of new
developers coming from other languages. CoffeeScript itself draws heavily from
Ruby (and some Python), which explains why it was rapidly adopted by the Ruby
community and became part of Rails (just like Sass replaced CSS).

When I first revisited JavaScript after a long time writing Python code, I was
quite fond of CoffeeScript because it let you pretend you're not actually
writing JavaScript and because it enabled a lot of idioms that didn't exist in
vanilla JavaScript.

CoffeeScript is decidedly not an extension of JavaScript. It doesn't build on
existing JavaScript idioms and just add syntactic sugar (partially because
many idioms of modern JS simply didn't exist at the time and there was less
consensus about them) -- it substitutes idioms from Ruby and Python and
implements their syntax, all the way down to changing how variables are
declared and how the equality operator behaves.

CoffeeScript is written for programmers who understand JavaScript but don't
want to write JavaScript when creating JavaScript code.

Thanks to Babel.js ES6 (now ES2015) is now a thing. Most of the new things
CoffeeScript brought to the table for JavaScript programmers are now satisfied
by the language itself or syntactic extensions supported by Babel. There is a
well-understood and well-defined class syntax, there are arrow functions and
tons of syntactic shorthands like method literals and object/array
destructuring. What's more, because these are now officially part of the
language, Babel itself just serves as a stopgap while we wait for the JS
environments to catch up.

Outside its original use case of allowing Ruby programmers to avoid writing
JavaScript, CoffeeScript is obsolete and (at least in terms of hype and
momentum) dead. It has outserved its usefulness and has given way to more
specialised languages (e.g. ClojureScript) and Babel.

It's unsurprising that Atom core is written in CoffeeScript if you consider
that GitHub is and always was predominantly not a JavaScript company but a
Ruby company. It is heavily invested in the Ruby world and CoffeeScript is
part of the Ruby world more than it is part of the JavaScript world.

I'm not sure whether CoffeeScript's role in the Ruby world will change anytime
soon, but outside that microcosm, it has become irrelevant and is quickly
fading into obscurity. It served a useful purpose at the time and it has
certainly influenced the development of ES6 but other than allowing Ruby
programmers to avoid writing JavaScript it's just no longer worth bothering
with.

Also note that at the time everybody was trying to replace JavaScript with new
languages (which were either supersets of JavaScript (like TypeScript), shared
a common subset with JavaScript (like CoffeeScript) or did something else
entirely (like ClojureScript)).

Babel is part of a general movement towards unification. Babel out of the box
has support for JSX and type annotations (which are already just defined in
terms of extensions to JS). Google's AtScript has been redefined as an
extension to TypeScript (which in turn seems to be moving towards redefining
itself as an extension to JS). I think this is a far more productive
development than everybody trying to create their own compiled-to-JS language
from scratch.

In a nutshell: I don't hate CoffeeScript, but I consider it a major smell when
evaluating libraries and projects. If it's written in CoffeeScript it might as
well not be written in JavaScript at all.

------
sneak
I had initially dismissed the whole thing as folly as JavaScript is really
stupid, but I had someone install Atom the other day and came to learn that it
is really quite an impressively great editor these days.

The ease of finding and installing themes and plugins is unparalleled.

Considering trying it for a week or two as my daily driver (with vim mode, of
course.)

------
Walkman
Atom is the ONLY editor which cannot handle my keyboard layout properly so I
can't write brackets :D ([]) I reported it on the first day when the alpha
came out, still no fix for this. Let me put it this way: I CAN'T WRITE
BRACKETS IN A TEXT EDITOR. LOL

~~~
omegote
I can't use half the keybindings in my spanish keyboard lol.

~~~
harperlee
I'm on a spanish keyboard and it works for me {çñ¬#%|ª}, etc. so there might
be something that you can do!

------
drvortex
I am loathe to install something like Atom with a 4MB limit on file size and
80 MB install size when Sublime Text does the same or better in a 8 MB install
package with no limits.

~~~
zevyoura
Do you really do your work on a computer where an 80MB install is a problem?
No argument on the file size limit.

~~~
drvortex
Yes, I program on a netbook. I find the resource limitations useful in writing
programs that are very efficient. I do mostly scientific programming, so if it
runs on my netbook, it flies on my cluster.

------
smaili
Just downloaded and opened Atom for the first time, and I have to admit the
look and feel is amazing! Fantastic job to all those involved!

However, one thing that stands out to me, the file size of Atom.app is 203MB!!
How in the world can a text editor be that large? Compare that with MacVim,
which is about 27MB.

~~~
guywithabike
What problem does the extra 176MB present to you when you likely have 256+GB
of disk storage?

~~~
paracyst
This kind of reasoning is exactly why we have even more bloated, crap software
these days

------
franciscop
I am a paying customer of Sublime Text, but I will give Atom a try. They both
seem really similar feature-wise, but Atom is open source, something I care
about. Also is based on web technologies, which is really cool (although I've
heard it's not so fast).

~~~
serve_yay
I would concur with all of that. It's very similar to sublime, to the point
that I can't really justify switching. If you care about open source that is a
compelling aspect, though.

It pains me to say this as a JS dev, but I think basing it on web tech was a
mistake. It makes the app slightly, but noticeably, less responsive. Just
recently they posted a big long thing about getting scrolling to be fast. I
dunno, I feel like if such things are an issue in 2015 you may have made a
mistake.

~~~
WaxProlix
What did they get out of that decision anyway? There was a moment in the blurb
film where the narrator says, "Atom is based on JavaScript - so it's easy to
use!"

What? I don't get the value proposition.

~~~
schneidmaster
The primary purpose was to make it easily hackable - since the whole thing is
JS (actually CoffeeScript) and webviews, creating views and stuff is as easy
as making a website.

That said, I think I care more about performance. Sublime Text is just
unbelievably rock solid.

~~~
JonnieCache
_> creating views and stuff is as easy as making a website._

Making websites is a huge pain in the ass though. Why would I _invite_ the DOM
into my life?

~~~
drew-y
Honest question, what is wrong with the DOM? I'm a self trained web developer
so I don't really know anything else and I'd be interested to hear what the
better philosophy is.

~~~
JonnieCache
Manipulating it is very slow, because of the way it is designed. It is not
intended for building dynamic GUIs, it's for laying out text high quality
text, once, on pageload. This is the other problem, the box model (even
flexbox) is just not suited for designing GUIs.

So few websites are pure text these days, you inevitably end up needing loads
of GUI widgets and the DOM is simply not suitable for laying them out in a
sensible way. It takes ages, and css layout 'rules' are so hard to predict.
You shouldn't have to be a guru to just put some fucking boxes in a row.

Try building a desktop app using any mature constraint-based layout system,
and you'll see what I mean.

This is how java does it:
[https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/uiswing/layout/visua...](https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/uiswing/layout/visual.html)

As you can see, pretty much every css framework is actually a hacky attempt to
replicate a GUI layout pattern from 20 years ago, and you have to turn
backflips in order to convince the DOM to do it performantly.

------
mattdeboard
For anyone wondering, Python indentation of new lines inside lists, tuples,
etc. is still broken ([https://github.com/atom/language-
python/issues/22](https://github.com/atom/language-python/issues/22)).
However, it looks like hitting tab at least allows you to manually indent the
line, which is a passable bridge until it works properly. Auto-indent will
completely remove any manual indentation, however, which seems like something
that should be fixed.

------
engi_nerd
Is it still limited to only editing files < 2 Megabytes? For most people that
is not a showstopper, but it may be for some.

~~~
romanovcode
No, recent patch increased the limit to blazing 4 MEGABYTES!

~~~
hugozap
People editing files longer than that are certainly in the minority.

~~~
debaserab2
Of course, but if you find yourself in one of these instances of editing a
large file (search and replacing database dumps is a common use case for me),
you'll be disappointed. It's easy to argue that should be left to command line
tools, but ST3 actually does a pretty good job at this.

------
hitlin37
i have been using it for 3-4 months now and its getting there each month.
Sometimes the plugins fail but this could be because of the rapid development
cycle of atom. On the positive side, its a good text editor, easy interaction,
plugin install super easy. A downside is that its not easy on your ram though.
Consumes more than what vim would do. But overall, if you need a modern
editor, this is the way forward.

~~~
melling
How well does it support other languages other than JavaScript? Will I be able
to do mobile Android and iOS development at some point, or Haskell, Go, etc?

~~~
danhardman
I regularly work on Go projects with Atom using the go-plus[0] plugin

[0] - [https://atom.io/packages/go-plus](https://atom.io/packages/go-plus)

~~~
irq-1
Looks like it's not working just now:

    
    
        Searching packages failed: atom.io is temporarily unavailable, please try again later.
    

Also, install Mercurial before the go-plus package. See "Missing Tools" near
the bottom of the page.

------
jokoon
Have they fixed the sluggishness ?

The installer is almost 10x times as large as the sublime text installer.

Please leave "web technologies" where they belong.

------
jmtucu
I don't know why, but is very slow on my computer and I have 8Gb of RAM / i3
This message appears everytime
[http://i.imgur.com/hTZixD8.png](http://i.imgur.com/hTZixD8.png)

~~~
mrcwinn
Slow on mine too, even scrolling. Sublime, on the other hand, is super fast.

However great the community might be, this is a flawed concept. Native apps
are better for certain things today. This is one of them.

------
octref
Congrats!

I started using Atom a year ago, but at that time it was very unstable and the
performance sucks so I switched back to Vim.

This 1.0 still has something to pine for: some of the essential packages are
still not updated for the 1.0 API (vim-mode, etc), and when processing large
files it still slows down significantly, but as they say, it's now a good
foundation to build upon.

~~~
tw04
I get the impression that the large file issue isn't ever going to be fixed.
Every time there's an update to Atom posted here on HN, and I ask about it, I
get down voted into oblivion. It's a bummer too - I love the interface, I love
the package, but the refusal to address opening large file makes it a non-
starter for me. (No, I don't want to have two separate workflows for reviewing
log files and writing code).

------
solveforall
I was lucky enough to get a key to use Atom when it first came out. I was not
very impressed at the time, with its limited capabilities, so I ended up
switching to Brackets for a while.

Later in my search for an editor that handles EJS, I rediscovered Atom. It
really has improved since it first started. AFAIK, Atom and Sublime are the
only editors that handle EJS. I also use Atom to edit JS, JSX, gradle, and FTL
which work well as well. Still I stick to IntelliJ for most programming
languages since I haven't found a way to get code completion, reference
jumping, etc to work on Atom.

Very impressive work from the Atom team and the contributors!

------
swasheck
I so desperately want to like Atom (and Code), but I have a window refresh
issue with it ([https://discuss.atom.io/t/display-does-not-refresh-when-
focu...](https://discuss.atom.io/t/display-does-not-refresh-when-focus-is-
taken-off-of-atom-win7x64/15589)).

This issue is still present in the current release. It seems like a minor
annoyance but when it happens it really kills my productivity.

------
jscheel
I still haven't given Atom a go. Is it worth switching from ST3?

~~~
veidr
No, it still fares very poorly when matched up against ST3 (or Textmate 2, or
basically any high-quality native editor). It is slow slow slow, and has lots
of little quirks which are clearly a result of the wacky way they decided to
build a text editor.

 _BUT_.... it is way, way better than it used to be. I keep it installed and
use it from time to time, to let it update itself and see how it has grown.

It clearly has momentum, and computers clearly are getting faster... probably
one day the slowness of it won't matter. But it still matters today -- Atom is
noticeably slow on the fastest Mac notebook you can currently buy.

~~~
MozMorris
Sorry be that guy who posts his specs and disagrees... :-)

Running on a stock mid-2011 Air w/ 4GB Ram plus a Thunderbolt display. If it
was slow, I would have switched or upgraded my machine sometime ago.

Things that are slow to me are waiting for node-sass to compile on save,
server-side code reloading, npm installing... and so on.

~~~
lvillani
It highly depends on your usage pattern.

I usually have one long-lived instance of an editor for the project/thing I'm
focusing on, but I also frequently fire up "temporary" instances for one-off
editing jobs, from the terminal.

The difference between, let's say, "subl ." (launch Sublime Text in the
current directory) and "atom ." is staggering: Sublime Text starts _instantly_
with a boatload of plugins; Atom starts nearly instantaneously but then takes
around 5 seconds to become usable, without plugins, after repeated runs.

(Speaking of specs, I'm on a late 2013 Retina MacBook Pro, 16 GB of RAM)

~~~
MozMorris
Yup, that is totally where it is slow. Would be great if they could nail that.

I must be more tolerable to that startup time, perhaps I've even become used
to it.

------
grandalf
Congrats! I still prefer emacs but perhaps not for long (I use both day to
day)...

~~~
brlewis
I use emacs but might try atom when it's a true replacement possibility. How
can I know it's crossed the threshold?

~~~
grandalf
I'm really looking forward to emacs-like tab behavior and also now that the
rate of change will slow down we'll likely see the best quality extensions
rise to the top and stabilize a bit.

Also looking forward to seeing Facebook's fork of Atom for React...

~~~
jfb
I would have switched off of Emacs for some things ages ago if not for the
broken behavior of the TAB key when editing text in what seems like _every
other editor_. No, I do not ever want to insert a \t literal. Never. Ever. And
if I do, I can do it with a more ponderous key sequence. But I never do. On
the other hand, I need to indent a line to the correct tab stop perhaps a
BILLION TIMES A DAY.

Emacs has the benefit of decades of Huffman coding for its keystrokes, and I
appreciate that.

~~~
Sirenos
> Emacs has the benefit of decades of Huffman coding for its keystrokes, and I
> appreciate that.

Huffman coding, emacs, keystrokes, ...

what?

~~~
jfb
The most commonly used functions in Emacs are assigned to the shortest key
bindings.

~~~
Sirenos
Ah, that totally flew over my head. Thanks!

------
bobbles
Maybe something worth pointing out..

I wanted to download this but after clicking every link I still hadn't seen a
way to do it anywhere...

Obviously if I go to the homepage now the first thing I see is a big download
link, which is great.

I think a 'download' link on the site though would be good since if anyone
links ANYWHERE else it's hard to find.

~~~
bobbles
Also.. installing on windows, it just says 'installation failed, contact the
author'.

No idea where I'm supposed to look to find the installation logs, doesn't tell
you where they are...

~~~
bobbles
...defaults to install to AppData??

How do I get rid of this crap now?

No entries in the Windows Programs listing. IMO They really need to think if
this is a 1.0 ready release for windows...

------
BenjiSujang
It's only fashion. There're no hard facts why someone should prefer it to vim,
notepad++ or sublime or even a proper IDE like a Jetbrains product or Visual
Studio.

~~~
jjawssd
Correct

------
usaphp
I tried atom, the only thing I liked about it was design and color scheme, the
rest are superior in sublime text, so I just went ahead and created a
theme/color scheme for sublime which matches atom (1). Atom is laggy, even
basic file navigation using arrows can be slow sometimes (and I have a latest
retine macbook pro).

But the biggest issue for me is a battery usage, it reduces my battery usage
on RMBP15 by 2 hours compared to sublime text, I am mostly working from remote
places and having a good battery usage is vital for me.

[1] -
[https://www.evernote.com/shard/s21/sh/cc73487c-08c9-4937-ac6...](https://www.evernote.com/shard/s21/sh/cc73487c-08c9-4937-ac69-8070c9b253f5/6b957b0938a218f0/res/3d36bb47-b576-4df4-9f92-2d2e8a696b66/skitch.png)

~~~
jewbacca
> [https://goo.gl/tF6M4C](https://goo.gl/tF6M4C) – this goo.gl shortlink has
> been disabled. It was found to be violating our Terms of Service.

\----

For what an isolated anecdote is worth, I originally switched from Textmate to
Sublime because I preferred Sublime's default colour scheme. Not for any
trivial reason like features or "being in active development".

~~~
usaphp
First time I tried to use google shortening service and it let me down :) Not
sure what kind of violation they've found in a code snipped to showcase a
color scheme

------
zippy786
Seriously, creators of Atom, what feature did you not find in any of the
current text editors that you had to built one. Let's have a editor in every
language!!!

------
typedweb
Both emacs keybinding emulation packages are sub-optimal. One misses C-p, the
other misses C-e, both basic editor movement commands. Not impressed.

------
Yhippa
I have this way of picking technologies where I will try a bunch of them at
the same time and naturally gravitate to the one that works best for me. After
using Notepad++, ST2, and Atom I feel that Atom works best for me. I rarely
have to use Google to find out how to use some features and it's reasonably
snappy.

I do need to give Visual Studio Code a fair shot. Heard a lot of good things
about it.

------
niuzeta
I remember when Atom beta came out I was turned off because it (presumably)
didn't run on Windows(my workstation at the time).

Then I remember trying to give it a try once again a few months ago but gave
up because I've heard so many horror story about performance issues.

Now I'm willing to give it yet another try because of vim-bindings and
performance issue improvements. Is it at workable state?

~~~
BinaryIdiot
> Is it at workable state?

I would say so. I've used it as my primary code editor for several months now
and really enjoy it. Yeah occasionally you can tell it's a web app running on
the desktop but only because opening projects or large files is kinda slow
(also an occasional JavaScript error but I haven't seen those in a least two
months) but beyond that it works very well. Very speeding on my MacBook and my
HP Spectre.

The plugins are the best part and the primary reason I use it.

~~~
niuzeta
I see. Thanks for the input; I'll give it a try.

------
mparramon
I wrote a small guide to set up Atom for web development:

www.developingandstuff.com/2015/04/setting-up-atom-for-rails-development.html

------
LoSboccacc
what's up with name reuse these days. atom (the syndication format) may be on
the verge of becoming obsolete, but it's also forgotten and irrelevant already
to warrant a name reuse?

~~~
sehr
Is anyone really going to be confusing a text editor and an outdated rss
format

~~~
treve
How is it outdated? Atom is absolutely everywhere and there's no replacement,
or a need for it.

~~~
sehr
I suppose I meant the concept of RSS or whatever is itself outdated/unused to
most people

~~~
treve
That might be true for the classic case of following blogposts, but it's used
under the hood all over the place. I'd call it one of the few absolute wins in
standards on the web. It's ubiquitous for its use-case.

~~~
dyates
Even for following blogposts, what better alternatives exist? Genuinely
curious here -- I read about how RSS/Atom is obsolete all the time but I still
use them with feedly to follow blogs and news sites and don't see a better
alternative.

Twitter and Facebook tend to produce too much noise in my experience to work
as an alternative. I have an aversion to reading email newsletters, and they
also get lost under noise.

Sure, most people don't use feeds, but even after the demise of Google Reader
I reckon they still work just as well as they ever have and are the best way
to keep up to date with blogs and provide yourself with a constant source of
interesting reading.

------
logn
With the following Atom community packages, I basically have a Rust IDE:
linter, linter-rust, build, language-rust, racer

------
amoney
So where do I get that nifty terminal they were using in the video?

~~~
jssjr
It's here at CodeConf!

[https://gist.github.com/jssjr/018717ddcb81b76e1829#file-
img_...](https://gist.github.com/jssjr/018717ddcb81b76e1829#file-img_4044-jpg)

------
snarfy
The site is severely hammered right now. I'd like to try it again to see if
the performance issues have improved.

~~~
tauchunfall
Downloads are also available from
[https://github.com/atom/atom/releases/tag/v1.0.0](https://github.com/atom/atom/releases/tag/v1.0.0).

------
sagarjauhari
Huge milestone! Congrats.

And in case you're wondering about the video, well, its this 50 year old
documentary "The Home Of The Future: Year 1999 A.D.":
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RRxqg4G-G4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RRxqg4G-G4)

------
shadowmint
woo! awesome work. I use atom for everything now.

    
    
        ...but realizing the full potential of Atom is about more
        than polish. We're considering questions such as: What 
        does super deep git integration look like? What does 
        "social coding" mean in a text editor? How do we enable 
        package authors to build IDE-level features for their
        favorite language?
    

O_o you what?

Things I'm interested in ---> A hackable, fast, extensible editor.

Things I have no interest in at all ---> 'Super Deep' github integration,
'social' coding in my text editor.

Dont get me wrong, atoms a great piece of work, and making it extensible for
building custom tooling is really great, but what _on earth_ are you talking
about?

I hope this is just 'and now we're going to make some plugins' talking...

------
wodenokoto
A lot of people complain about the slowness of the Dom/JavaScript backend, but
I see a lot of potential for some really cool things, like integrated juPyter
notebooks, semi wysiwyg rendering of latex and markdown and maybe drawing
rendering trees or other creative things.

~~~
cnp
Honestly, its not slow anymore between their React integration and this:
[http://blog.atom.io/2015/06/16/optimizing-an-important-
atom-...](http://blog.atom.io/2015/06/16/optimizing-an-important-atom-
primitive.html). Feels ~95% native.

~~~
spleeder
They dropped React a while ago.

------
dbbolton
It's nice that they provide a .deb, but a signed repository/PPA would be
really great.

------
tomc1985
I always liked the Winamp approach: ship a core system with a base set of
plugins, and implement new functionality via new plugins. The base system
almost never changes, and version updates are simply a new payload of plugins.

Why do the best plugins need to be added back to base? Why not just keep them
separate. Believe it or not Firefox was originally written in this fashion,
but right around the time they added built-in spellcheck, new functionality
started appearing as additions to the base system as opposed to browser
extensions. Why?

------
d0m
Is it possible to use atom right in the browser, rather than in a separate
app? I know facebook engineers have an in-browser editor.. is this atom or
something else?

~~~
nulltype
Are you talking about [http://nuclide.io/](http://nuclide.io/) or some other
editor?

------
Dingler
Pretty cool intro vid. A breath of fresh air from the typical startup/product
videos I encounter everywhere. I'm excited to see how this progresses. The
development appears to be extremely active, with frequent + quality updates.
Spotted the new-ish Office Code Pro[1] font in use too...

[1][https://github.com/nathco/Office-Code-
Pro](https://github.com/nathco/Office-Code-Pro)

------
sytse
I'm surprised that in their vision for Atom GitHub doesn't mention integrating
Atom as the webeditor for GitHub.com. I always assumed it used web technology
so it could form the foundation of a online IDE integrated closely with
GitHub.com It will be interesting to see if this happens and what Koding,
Nitrous.io, Cloud9, CodeAnywhere, Codio and CodeEnvy will do. At GitLab we
currently have no plans in this direction.

------
gaoshan
Downloaded it and added Facebook's Nuclide plugin suite but many things seem
to not work. the mercurial plugin doesn't appear to function at all and
frequently the config section where you list installed plugins just seems to
hang, without loading anything. I'll stick with Webstorm (favorite) and
Brackets (favorite "Atom like" editor) and vim (favorite command line). Atom
seems too buggy to me.

------
Betelgeuse90
Can anyone explain to me why startup speed is such an important factor for
them?

I really can't get my head around it. It's such a non-issue for me.

I care so much more about general performance post-startup. I wouldn't even
bring startup speed up as an issue as long as it's in the few-seconds range,
which it always was for me using Atom.

------
gabeio
I have to say amazing job to the team. My reason: last time I looked/was
regularly using Atom the generic memory size was around 100mB if I remember
correctly. I just checked with 1.0 and the memory size has now dropped below
Sublime Text 3.0 (~70mB) to ~60mB. (OS X.10)

~~~
tehbeard
Seems to still be north of 100mb on Windows machines perhaps?

Same project and files open in ST3, 30mb.

I may be reading it wrong though; task manager is reporting ~30mb for atom ,
but there's ~100mb of background processes for atom shown as well.

~~~
gabeio
Interesting, maybe they made the tabs more chrome like breaking each into
separate processes.

------
z3t4
Cool video and great copy-writing.

The editor still seems crude though. The new install used some old packages
from a previews install that I though was uninstalled!? It also called home to
report a bug without asking for permission. Then it froze after I had
uninstalled the old package.

------
naryad
Go To Matching Bracket taking almost 2 seconds in atom, happens
instantaneously on vim/sublime.

------
tehbeard
Ok I gotta ask.

Is there no recent files menu? Or am I just missing where they placed it?

I do like the find/replace UI compared to ST3, but the lack of a recents menu
and it choking if I accidentally click a large file just aren't making me feel
the need to swap to this.

------
lpgauth
alias mate="atom" \- old habits die hard.

~~~
rkuykendall-com
I still keep TextMate 2 around for simple text processing.

Atom treats everything like a project, which is great for projects, I don't
mind my project taking 5 seconds to open, since I rarely close it. But for a
little note, a copy-paste bin, or a quick regex? Textmate 2 is instant, better
at larger files, and has the best find-replace window of all my editors.

------
Globz
I am really tempted to give it a try but I am already all setup with Brackets
and I am having a hard time understanding what are the benefits if I make the
switch over Atom. I will surely give it a try a some point!

------
dothething
Have they resolved the long-standing performance issues present for the last
six months? I've tried using Atom numerous times, but the longer it runs, the
less stable it gets.

~~~
freshyill
I'm brave/a masochist. I've been using it since the very start. It has come
very, very far—performance especially.

------
roelvanhintum
Nice, this is the first thing i start in the morning, use all day and close at
the end of the day. I'm using Atom with monokai and linter and love it.

That mid century video is hilarious.

------
merrua
I think Atom could still have better performance. It wouldn't hurt to have
performance tips for package developers too (maybe it has, and I missed them).

------
norman784
I like Atom, was using for few days and I'm quite happy, also seems much like
Sublime Text experience when first launch after Textmate "dies"

------
ajryan
Is there anyone with a BGR subpixel-order monitor who has been able to
configure Atom (or VS code for that matter) to do the right kind of
antialiasing?

------
a1b2c3
What is this? I can't even tell. A text editor?

~~~
TranquilMarmot
Uhh... go to the main page ([https://atom.io/](https://atom.io/)) and it says
right there "A hackable text editor"

It's github's text editor. It runs on "electron" which is a framework for
making desktop apps. It uses node.js and Chromium.

------
anantzoid
[https://atom.io/](https://atom.io/) is down, btw.

------
yummybear
Just tried to install Nuclide and Atom complained about atom.io being
unavailable. Guess I know why now.

------
misiti3780
Off topic Does anyone here use Light Table? If so - what do you think of it
compared to atom?

------
therealmarv
I still cannot search for whole word expressions in directories without using
RegEx, bummer.

------
isuraed
Broke the default font, ugh! Anyone know how to get the old font back?

~~~
wisew
Just add Inconsolata to your Font Family in Settings. If you want the old font
size and line height too, set those to 16px and 1.3, respectively.

~~~
isuraed
thank you!

------
therealmarv
They should do a LOST remake of that Atom Youtube Video ;)

------
thomasrossi
Congrats to the Atom team:) what happened to rAtom?

------
JoshMnem
I'd rather write vimscript than coffeescript.

------
intrasight
I had assumed this was browser-based, but upon visiting the site I see there
is an installer. Can this editor run in a browser? If not, what's the point?

~~~
xbryanx
It does run in a browser of sorts
([http://electron.atom.io/](http://electron.atom.io/)), just not the browser,
you're using to read this.

------
sagarun
How do anyone run tox from atom editor?

------
lucaspottersky
can it handle files larger than 2MB yet? :P

 _Incredible_ promo video though!!!

------
bitmapbrother
The absolute disregard for any thanks for the Chromium team in the
announcement is disgusting and a slap in the face to the foundation this
editor is based on.

------
facepalm
What is it?

~~~
rev_bird
-_- a text editor.

------
tomkin
I'm sure there's a few problems with this software, just like others. After
reading some of these FWP, and the whining...I dunno, man. There are people
throwing acid in the face of girls on the other side of the world, and you're
all complaining about having to go into the registry and manually remove
context menus.

I don't know anything about Atom, but I'm willing to bet there's really
nothing this software is doing that prevents you from sleeping at night.

