
Atom's autocomplete just got better - wisew
http://blog.atom.io/2015/05/15/new-autocomplete.html
======
mildbow
I gave atom a shot ~6months back (ooh pretty), but gave up due to just how
slow it was. I just downloaded it and it's still much slower than sublime
text3.

SublimeText3 works great, so why are people willing to jump that ship onto
this? Surely paying ~$70 is ok, laudable even, for a daily tool
(notwithstanding the fact that it's supporting a indie dev).

Do people use this for day-to-day coding or is this like installing linux back
in the day?

Maybe my coding style (bunch of microservices projects open in multiple
windows at the same time with multiple tabs) just doesn't work with atom yet?

~~~
mkawia
Not a big fan of proprietary software especially software development tools
.Imagine if Apache was proprietary, the internet wouldn't be the same.

~~~
gkoberger
Apache (a server, huge lock in) and a text editor (no lock in) are not
comparable.

Open Source is driven by paid competition, and vice versa. Linux wouldn't
exist without Windows, and Firefox wouldn't exist without Internet Explorer.
And Linux and Firefox both in turn pushed their close-source competitors
forward, too.

I love open source (I used to work at Mozilla), but some of my favorite tools
only exist because someone is getting paid to work on them full time.

~~~
tosh
There are people who are paid to work on open source full time or part time.

I don't see how server software has inherently more vendor-lock-in than a text
editor.

~~~
kentt
Switching costs is a lot lower for a text editor.

~~~
tosh
I switched from lighttpd to nginx without any problems but going from textmate
to vim took a while :)

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joefitzgerald
A huge thanks to the Atom team
([https://github.com/benogle](https://github.com/benogle) in particular) for
embracing a community package and bringing it back into the core of Atom.

This is the killer feature of Atom in my mind: the community around it, and
the rate with which contributions can be made and then absorbed into the core.

~~~
hamburglar
This feature looks great, but the blog post has one very confusing thing about
the main example: why is "spy" the first suggestion for "sy", and what does
the text "Create Jasmine" next to it signify?

~~~
rkwz
They're doing fuzzy search and I think it is probably "Create Jasmine Spy"

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CSDude
I play GTA V at 1080p/high where Atom struggles to syntax highlight and scroll
through a 4KB file. Does not matter Linux/Windows.

~~~
hamburglar
By "struggles" do you simply mean there's perceptible lag? I see cracks in the
window blits while scrolling fast, that's all. I can understand being that
picky about your video games, but it just doesn't rise to the level of
actually affecting usability in a text editor for me. Would I like it to be as
silky smooth as Sublime? Sure, but it's far from a showstopper.

I keep wondering if people making comments like yours are having much more
severe perf issues than I am, or if you're just extremely picky.

~~~
Dewie3
> I keep wondering if people making comments like yours are having much more
> severe perf issues than I am, or if you're just extremely picky.

Programmers have high standards for text editors. :) And why not? AAA games
are getting bigger and more visually pleasing, so sometimes your machine can't
keep up unless it's a newer build. But editing simple text should be an
absolute breeze in this day and age on our computers. Even for those of us who
are more easily bothered.

~~~
hamburglar
I have extremely high standards for my text editor: its features should make
me very productive. I am more productive in vim than I am in sublime, but I've
never once fretted about the fact that my vim screen updates are gated to the
speed that my terminal window can draw, and that's certainly nowhere near as
fluid as sublime.

------
freshyill
I really like Atom, and Autocomplete Plus has been rapidly improving, but I
still have no idea how the hell it works.

[http://i.imgur.com/x4Fm470.gif](http://i.imgur.com/x4Fm470.gif)

For what it's worth, fuzzy matching is turned off here.

~~~
joefitzgerald
freshyill: please see [https://github.com/atom/autocomplete-
plus/issues/460](https://github.com/atom/autocomplete-plus/issues/460) for
further information.

------
kendallpark
After reading this, I'm one step closer to using Atom. My biggest issue is
performance. That's the main reason I haven't switched over from Sublime.

~~~
OSButler
If you're not 100% set on your current editor or would just like to see what
else is available out there, then I'd recommend giving Atom a try.

I'm using it as my main editor on an older 2010 Macbook Pro and the only
issues I've been experiencing with it are the slow startup time and auto-
complete in php files causing a noticeable delay. The git integration,
community packages, and extensive customization options more than make up for
those minor annoyances.

~~~
tracker1
I may give it another try... last time I looked at Brackets and Atom, they
were just slow... which surprised me when VS-Code wasn't too bad.. may check
atom again.. but still using sublime most of the time.

~~~
kendallpark
Same here. I tried it early on with high hopes, then found it was too sluggish
for my tastes. Lag while typing--even the smallest amount--annoys me.

I'll probably give it another whirl, hopefully the React stuff will have sped
it up a bit.

~~~
OSButler
Try switching from autocomplete while typing to autocomplete via keyboard
shortcut and it may already make a big difference - this helped in my case
with the php autocomplete slowdown.

------
aceperry
Excellent, I was hoping for a better auto-complete. Atom is fast becoming one
of my favorite editors. Great work everyone, keep it up!

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Megs
Looks like Atom is using the new Office Code Pro font. For those curious:
[https://github.com/nathco/Office-Code-Pro](https://github.com/nathco/Office-
Code-Pro)

~~~
tracker1
Will need to take a look... I've been using Inconsolata for a while, mainly
because I liked Consolas so much in Windows.

~~~
Megs
I used Consolas for a while, but would highly recommend Office Code Pro. It's
extremely readable and feels more contemporary, in my opinion.

------
roflchoppa
damn son, all these mentions of text editors, and no one throws in Emacs.
Sublime/atom have been sitting on the back burner for me in the last 6 months.
The majority of my work has been moved over to emacs, from using IDE's (xCode,
CodeBlocks, VS) i guess it was true, the only way to get better at emacs, is
to be forced to use it for everything. 9/10 would use again, plus it already
has support for YASnippit / Auto Complete.

~~~
killface
that's because we already know about emacs and vim -- some of us don't like
modal editors, or editors that try to be the universe. When you're checking
your email in your text editor something is wrong.

~~~
melling
That's simply a testament to an editor's extensibility. If you don't want to
use it for email or as a browser then don't.

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konsptheorist
I'm using Adobe Brackets, does this make me a loser or noob here?

~~~
sahaskatta
Some may ignore it since it's now under Adobe's umbrella, however: it's open
source, updated very regularly, and works quite well. I think the live preview
editor for web design is quite impressive and I haven't seen an equivalent
from other text editors.

I'm actually giving Microsoft's Visual Studio Code a shot and it's quite good
too.

------
badloginagain
I dont know much about Atom. How does it compare to Sublime Text/Notepad++?
I've recently switched to Sublime Text, but currently not beholden to
anything.

How does it compare to an IDE, like Eclipse or Visual Studio (being the two
I've used)? Is Atom an orange and an IDE an apple?

~~~
ssmoot
It's a Sublime competitor. Not an IDE. I'll just speak for myself doing Scala
development:

It in no way replaces IntelliJ. Atom doesn't host SBT. It won't compile in the
background, it doesn't parse your code and build an AST. It doesn't execute
tests, etc etc.

With that out of the way, it seems like a really nice text editor with the
really bad UX of shoving most commands into a "command palette" (which seems
somewhat popular these days, for reasons I don't understand) instead of just
giving you shortcuts to the common ones.

In practice this means I'm typing CMD+SHIFT+P to open the palette, type
"grammar" to open the language switcher, and type "scala" and enter to select
the language. Every time I create a new file. It's passionately lame. Also,
"grammar"? As opposed to using the muscle memory everyone whose used a text
editor any time in the past two decades has developed for "syntax"? What jerk
thought that up?

But maybe I'm just missing something.

Also, because it's a cross platform node.js thing, nothing is native and all
configuration is done in JSON ala Sublime. If this was a Windows application
they'd be making you set all your preferences, even changing font size,
through an .INI file.

Of course there aren't a lot of native apps that do a whole lot better IME.
Textastic is great, but it's syntax parsing is lacking. ChocolatApp never
bothered to get visual selection right. Sublime suffers some of the same
faults as Atom and does the `subl .` work to open a given folder on the first
try without Sublime already being open yet? Textmate is dated. Visual Studio
Code is actually probably my favorite, but it's just Atom with a different
skin and command palette and it doesn't support Scala yet.

I dunno. I flop between different editors weekly it seems. Maybe I'll give
UltraEdit a shot. I liked that on Windows back in the day and it seems like
there's a Mac version.

My 2c.

EDIT: Nope. UltraEdit is the worst of the lot. Feels like it's running under
Wine. No Theme support (you have to choose background colors, highlight
colors, etc manually), no Scala support that I can tell. You'd have to be a
forever-time UltraEdit user on Windows to want to subject yourself to it on a
Mac.

~~~
jongalloway2
One semi-pedantic correction: Visual Studio Code is not just Atom with a
different skin. It uses Atom Shell (now called Electron), but that's just the
app host. The editor component is completely different - it's 200K lines of
TypeScript code. So you should think of Atom and VS Code as two different
websites viewed in the same browser rather than the same app with a different
skin.

~~~
lojack
> Visual Studio Code is not just Atom with a different skin.

And debugging tools that actually work. A strong debugger has always been the
reason Visual Studio has excelled, and they've brought that to an open source
editor.

------
lechevalierd3on
This was one of the reasons for me to stay on Sublime. Though over SSHFS (I
have to :() Sublime is still better (but far from good).

Get a rocking solution for SSHFS support and you'll have it all :)

------
wluu
It's certainly come a long way since it started. Kudos to those involved on
both the autocomplete-plus contributors and the Atom team.

The Atom third party packages and the active community around it is part of
why I use it.

While it hasn't replaced Visual Studio for my work, but with the OmniSharp
package (realtime c# intellisense, which piggybacks on this autocomplete-plus
package) means for the times when I need to make edits without opening (and
waiting) VS, I can do so and still get my c# intellisense.

------
tosh
Having decent autocomplete ui out of the box and a way to add providers that
drive it is one of the key steps towards an IDE.

This is especially exciting when you look at Dart and TypeScript as both
provide analysis servers that can easily be consumed without having to build
this yourself.

It seems like going forward we will see popular platforms to provide their own
analyzer and debugging tools which should level the playing field for text
editors, IDEs and other tools to compete on UX.

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thousande
Excited about Visual Studio Code. Wish it was open source though.

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milkworsethan
The autocomplete just got better, the performance is still on its knees...

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binaryanomaly
Atom is big...

