
Atom 1.12 released - seanwilson
http://blog.atom.io/2016/11/09/atom-1-12.html
======
Klathmon
As is usual with these releases, i'm always more interested in the new Beta's.

1.13 is going to have some pretty big changes. They are removing shadow-dom
which is kind of a big deal and i'm really curious for the in-depth post about
what didn't work with it later (until then, [0] is the PR that talks a bit
about why).

And 1.13 will also include a change [1] that will allow it to better handle
large files, which I know is a huge plus for a lot of people (it hasn't been a
problem on my machine for a while now, but clearly people are still having
issues with it).

It looks like it's going to be a good update.

[0]
[https://github.com/atom/atom/pull/12903](https://github.com/atom/atom/pull/12903)

[1]
[https://github.com/atom/atom/pull/12898](https://github.com/atom/atom/pull/12898)

~~~
sotojuan
As much hate as Atom gets in these threads, I'm impressed by the team's (and
contributor's) continuous work into making Atom as good as possible.

Though it might just be a small, loud minority: Most devs I meet in real life
use Atom with no problem or just have no opinion on it.

~~~
Klathmon
I've stopped caring what "HN" says about things.

I'm mainly a javascript/php developer that uses Windows and Atom... I'm used
to being told I'm wrong. But at the end of the day, these are the languages,
platforms, and operating systems I get the most done with, and I just don't
seem to hit the issues everyone keeps saying I will.

~~~
Pigo
I also use Atom, and just can't seem to garner an affinity for VS Code. I came
from a .NET background, so I've struggled with Visual Studio and Nuget for
years, and it left a bad taste in my mouth. I'm also probably just used to
using Atom for my Node development. But aside from finding out very quickly on
here that I'm wrong for using it, I don't find anything difficult. I've built
many successful projects with it.

Also, Nintendo kicks Sega's ass.

~~~
Klathmon
I love VSCode from a technical standpoint. They have clearly picked a better
architecture when it comes to performance, and they have done a pretty damn
good job at showing that a web-based application doesn't need to be a "slow
resource hog", but on the other hand I MUCH more prefer Atom's policy of
"plugins are everything" over VSCode's "Core should do everything, and plugins
are second class".

But at the end of the day, it's a choice, and i'm glad we have competition to
keep everyone on their toes!

~~~
Pigo
I totally agree, I wish there was 50 viable choices. Competition is good, look
at our ISP situation.

------
valarauca1
I liked Atom. But the more I use it the less I like it. Paying 300MB of RAM to
edit a 5KB file seems idiotic. And the fact it can't open a file larger then
100K-256k means I can use it to manually inspect logs.

It was a nice distraction, but back to VIM.

~~~
shmerl
I switched to neovim, because it supports 24-bit color themes. Stock vim is
just too limited for me with 256 colors max. With neovim I can have themes
that are easier on the eyes.

------
maaarghk
I switched to VS Code last week after using Atom almost since it was released
(probably 0.70.0 or so) and I immediately decided I wasn't going to switch
back. It's just so much smoother, and the debugger (+ requisite extension for
PHP) is really nice. Based on some of the comments here I might try Atom again
at 1.13 (I tried VS Code back when it was new as well), but for now I reckon
VS Code is miles ahead.

~~~
piotrkubisa
You made me curious, how did you configured VS Code with PHP. I have bad
experience especially with that language in VSC. In Atom and Sublime there are
many various extensions which helps you get better _IDE experience_
(autocomplete. formatters, linters).

Personally, I found Crane for VSC [1] as a very limited tool for
autocompletion. It works really bad with frameworks like Laravel or Symfony
where developers use various design patterns which implements a lot of
abstraction difficult to index (facades, factory, repositories, service
providers, @inheritdoc). Using Sublime you may probably use SublimeCodeIntel
[2] with PHPIntel [3], as their best feature is I would mention that they work
very fast for large codebase and also gives great suggestions for code i.e.
suggests paramters or next objects in namespaces (when you are typing
backslashes (\\) code intel will start guessing what objects are under
specified path and it works flawlessly just like in vim or bash when you are
pressing tab after `cd`). Atom is not bad either, the atom-autocomplete-php
[4] package is really great to improve autocompletion for PHP Code. When I
have been using it recently I was really enjoying how many decent features
PHPStorm has been implemented in open-source Atom, e.g. if you add a class
from not imported namespace it will be automatically added. Such a simple
operation, but it is interesting how many editors does not support that.

Hopefully, php devs have some awesome tools to annoy them a whole 9-to-5 which
are: `phpcs` (obviously), `php -l` (popular), phpmd (rarely used) and phpcpd
(well, most php devs haven't heard about that tool). Since, aforementioned
linters are binaries their implementation in editors like VSC, Sublime or Atom
is not a problem. There are few differences between editor and their linters -
they are mostly the same but each editor have another way to display problems
in your code. It is rather matter of taste I would say. Well, I really miss
"unused use-namespaces" in phpmd.

Personally, I dislike XDebug. VSC gives a nice user experience when debugging
code with it. But all three editors supports XDebug somehow. Maybe Sublime
puts a whole stacktrace, breakpoints, local variable into editor viewport as
"plain text" but you may got used to like in Atom, where there are additional
panes to see Xdebug output. Personally, I would go with Backfire if we speak
about profiling, which is very painful in XDebug.

[1]:
[https://github.com/HvyIndustries/crane](https://github.com/HvyIndustries/crane)

[2]:
[https://packagecontrol.io/packages/SublimeCodeIntel](https://packagecontrol.io/packages/SublimeCodeIntel)

[3]:
[https://packagecontrol.io/packages/PHPIntel](https://packagecontrol.io/packages/PHPIntel)

[4]: [https://atom.io/packages/atom-autocomplete-
php](https://atom.io/packages/atom-autocomplete-php)

~~~
octref
Give this a try:
[https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=felixfbe...](https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=felixfbecker.php-
pack)

------
scottmf
Are they improving the performance issues?

I love Atom but I've had to switch to Sublime 3 because I can't handle waiting
a couple of seconds every time I switch between files (or the several second
start up time).

It's small but it completely kills my workflow.

I spent the whole weekend setting it up to look similar to my Atom setup,
including implementing the same syntax highlighting. It's not perfect[1] and
feels like it could fall apart at any moment (eg I had to do an awkward hack
to center text in tabs), but it's worth it for lightning-fast switching
between files.

[1] [http://i.imgur.com/t1ULTfy.png](http://i.imgur.com/t1ULTfy.png)

------
Hapa
Any more details what does Chromium 52 and Electron 1.3.x bring to table?

------
chucksmash
Is anybody using Atom on Linux? The last time I tried, there was an issue
where each time the cursor was moved horizontally, its displayed position and
actual position would diverge a bit so that after a minute or two of editing a
file you couldn't tell where you were typing. I believe it was a known
(upstream?) issue at the time but that was obviously a deal breaker.

~~~
burger_moon
I can echo bbrks comment. I've used it on Ubuntu for a year and OS X for 2. I
haven't had any problems with it other than slightly different key bindings
between the two which can cause some confusion.

------
fivesigma
I hope this isn't just placebo, but I can see a noticeable increase in
performance compared to 1.11. Less typing/autocomplete lag in general.

PS: how about some hashes or GPG signatures on the download page, Github
people?

------
X86BSD
Any FreeBSD port yet?

~~~
hs86
Building from source seems to be trivial:
[https://github.com/atom/atom/blob/master/docs/build-
instruct...](https://github.com/atom/atom/blob/master/docs/build-
instructions/freebsd.md)

------
edoceo
I moved to Atom from jEdit (on Linux). I build it from source and it runs
well. And SFTP plugin is working well. I've been coding 20+ years and find
Atom easy to use and customise.

I'm teaching code too, Atom is pretty easy for beginners as well.

------
SnowingXIV
Until Atom or VS handles autoclose tags the way Sublime does out of the box,
I'll have a hard time moving over. Sublime beauty packages also work great
with a simple command to keep all my code nice and tidy.

------
bronson
Impressive to see so many contributions from the unpaid rabble. vjeux's PRs
are mentioned twice in that blog post.

Even if GitHub gets bored, hopefully Atom has the momentum to keep going.

------
erikbye
Adding a project folder with approx. 50 000 files took 2-3 seconds, but the
search-in-project functionality broke down, even UI response (when entering
the search string). Takes several seconds per character to appear, as I try to
input a search string.

------
Kluny
Ctrl-f macro support, no results. Sigh.

~~~
bronson
Until it's in core, are you using one of the macro plugins?

~~~
Kluny
I'm not. What do you recommend?

------
ungerik
The only "innovation" I am waiting for in every release is humane performance.
Didn't happen so far :-(

------
deavmi
Great editor. One of the best.

------
bionsuba
"International Keyboard Support"

And it only took them two and a half years!

~~~
matthuggins
If you have an issue with it, maybe you should have contributed sooner.

~~~
toxican
I'm incredibly sick of seeing this argument. Just because someone uses a piece
of open source software does not mean that they A) Are obligated to contribute
to it B) Are disallowed to want features or complain about the lack thereof
for not doing A and C) Are even capable of contributing to it.

e- analogy was weak and unneeded.

~~~
tomtheelder
Complaining about the lack of a feature in a FOSS project that you haven't
contributed to is kind of a dick move, though, and it's extremely discouraging
to developers. If they violate community standards or put users at risk
(breaking semver, insecure elements, malware, etc.) then you have the right to
complain, but otherwise you really ought to remain civil and positive.

Politely requesting features is fine, but complaining about a lack of features
in software that you don't contribute to with effort or money is extremely
rude and pretty much a slap to the face for the developers who work on the
project.

~~~
JetSetWilly
Atom is developed by paid professionals at github, it isn't really a community
led project like emacs.

Not that that matters, because nothing is immune from criticism, free or
otherwise. It is a useful service to provide criticism, in fact, it can be
useful to the developers and also useful to potential users - although it
doesn't have to be.

~~~
FooBarWidget
There is a difference between providing useful, constructive criticism and
rude complaining.

~~~
JetSetWilly
Pointing out that the technology platform chosen makes features simple
elsewhere into multi-year odysseys seems fine to me. I think maybe atom users
are too close to it, so have heard such things before and react very
negatively to it. For me it was interesting to learn it took significant work
to provide this support.

