
Atom 1.28 - maxbrunsfeld
http://blog.atom.io/2018/06/21/atom-1-28.html
======
sebringj
I used atom for so long and at work we were kind of forced in a way to use
vscode which opened my eyes that vscode really is better in terms of speed and
auto formating etc, meaning you have plugins but it doesn't seem to add weight
to it where atom just chugged. I have a 3 year old macbook pro, a spanking new
macbook pro and a 2 year old mac pro. It was severely noticeable on the 3 year
old one for sure and always noticeable although considerably less on the
spanking new one.

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kup0
I've been enjoying VS Code for a while after really trying to find a text-
editor on Mac that fits my personal preferences (tab navigation, open new
files in tabs in existing window, fast launch time, css syntax highlighting
_inside_ of an HTML file).

I've tried so many and like very few of them. MS seems to have done some good
work on performance. It's still faster than this new version of Atom for
startup, especially cold starts (with it not open at all, going into FTP
client > open file).

Though, I revisited Sublime Text today, and I have to say, I know it's just a
few seconds saved here and there, but the difference between Sublime and ANY
other editor as far as launch/file ready time is a huge gap. While the
measured time doesn't seem significant- the "feel" of using it does. It's hard
to put into words how much better it feels to use, like the difference between
using applications on a HDD vs an SSD.

I'm still debating (as a hobbyist that doesn't make much money on what I use
text editors for) whether the license is worth it for Sublime or if I should
just stick to VS Code. $80 is reasonable for most use cases (developers, etc)
but it's a bit steep for mine. It really feels like it might be worth it, even
just for the speed difference.

~~~
bdcravens
Sublime has always been king of the hill for opening giant files (like CSVs if
you need to troubleshoot data imports) but unix tools and software like head
and vim can take you pretty far if budget is a concern.

~~~
jakear
Is subl really that much faster at big CSV's for you? I made a quick 10
million line, ~1GB CSV in Python, opened it in both sublime text and code.
code opened in 20seconds, subl took over a minute.

~~~
bdcravens
(copying comment to your other reply for benefits of thread)

Honestly, it's been a while since I tried. Perhaps I'll take another stab at
it and see how VS Code has improved. Out of curiosity, how wide is the file?
Some of the files I open are 250+ field invoices, so each line is easily 1k
characters each.

~~~
jakear
Ah didn't realize it was the same account. I tried with two 1GB files, one
with many lines but each short, another with long lines but not as many:

1.1GB, 10M lines.

Code: ~10s, smooth scrolling, instant jumping.

Sublime: ~50s, smooth scrolling, instant jumping.

Atom: ~10s, smooth scrolling, very choppy jumping: ~5s loads per jump (also
got some error messages about text too large for buffer)

1.0GB, 40k lines.

Code: ~15s, scrolling somewhat choppy, quick jumping

Sublime: Application not responding after ~60s, waitied another 60s, no
change. Same behavior each of the two times I attempted.

Atom: ~8s, smooth scroll, ~30s per jump, occasional "Editor is taking too long
to load" messages.

Note: Atom enforces a maximum line length of ~500 chars before it wraps
regardless of word wrap setting. This means the 8s load was only showing a
couple lines worth of content. I find this restriction not acceptible for the
long-line test case, but including anyways for completeness)

Full "report": [https://pastebin.com/wUv8PSgp](https://pastebin.com/wUv8PSgp)

~~~
nojvek
Vscode invested in a lot of lazy loading both for modules at startup time and
opening large files.

Their text buffers and internal datastructures are optimized for perf and save
space on RAM.

It amazes me sometimes that all this is built on standard web technology and
it’s mostly blink (chromium) and v8 under the hood.

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nikolay
I was a loyal Atom user until I tried and fell in love with VS Code. Although
there's a richer set of add-ons for Atom, some of the VS Code are of a much
higher quality - especially the ones backed by Microsoft. Anyway, GitLens [0]
is one of the non-Microsoft ones.

[0]: [https://gitlens.amod.io/](https://gitlens.amod.io/)

------
stuxnet79
Between Sublime and VS Code I just don't see Atom's value proposition. I'd
like to be proven wrong though.

~~~
exelius
Pretty sure Atom will just go away soon. VS Code is better at the same thing
and now that they’re under the same roof it makes no sense to keep Atom
around.

~~~
nijaru
I haven’t looked into it in about a month, but there are people on the atom
team working on an experimental text editor engine written in rust rather than
electron.

~~~
BalinKing
Maybe it's Xray? [https://github.com/atom/xray](https://github.com/atom/xray)
(I'm personally super-excited to see how Xray turns out!)

~~~
nijaru
That’s it! I’m on mobile, so I didn’t take the time to post a link. I’m
excited to see how it turns out as well

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plg
What’s the main argument for using Atom over say Sublime Text? (argument other
than price—-I’m willing to pay $ for good software)

~~~
628C6l0
For me the biggest argument in favor of atom is that because it's based on
chromium it displays emojis properly, in colors. As someone who makes use of
emojis extensively as variable and function names, this is very important.

~~~
giancarlostoro
I think you're being sarcastic but others seem to think you're serious. Care
to clarify? I'm leaning towards you're being sarcastic. I'd flip a table if I
opened up code full of emojis.

~~~
628C6l0
Emojis make your code a little more like math formulas. In math formulas you
use single letters. This makes the syntax easy to parse, but has the drawback
that the letters are mostly meaningless and so not very suggestive. Names in
programming language tend to be words. This makes it easier to remember what
they are supposed to stand for but also make the syntax hard to parse and
other occurrences hard to spot

Emojis combine the best of both worlds. Like the letters used in math they are
easy to parse and it's really easy to find other occurrences of the same var
when the name is an apple . But like the more verbose names in programming
languages they can carry meaning. Eg I use the dango emoji for arrays and the
monitor emoji for window instances.

~~~
EpicEng
So... just to be clear... you're serious...? I smell a clever troll.

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jimwalsh
I love Atom and use it as my default text editor. There are all these people
talking about IDE wars in the comments. I feel like Atom is an enhanced text
editor at best. But the comparisons to VSCode and then eventually
IntelliJ...not even the same ballpark.

~~~
bdcravens
> But the comparisons to VSCode and then eventually IntelliJ...not even the
> same ballpark.

VSCode is pretty close to Atom in many ways (though some of its plugins and
things like the integrated terminal get it closer to IDE territory)

Are you sure you're not thinking of Visual Studio rather than Visual Studio
Code? (2 entirely different projects; Code isn't a subset or a "lite" version)

~~~
jimwalsh
I am talking about VSCode, but you make a good callout about the two products
because many people may not realize the differences. I agree that VSCode and
Atom are similar, but you are right, and I feel like many people, end up using
plugins to the point that push VSCode to IDE levels.

~~~
collyw
I must admit that I assumed it was a web version of Visual Studio until
reading this thread.

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ddon
Tried VS Code several times, and failed to set it up correctly, so that I
would be able to edit files over SSH and see a tree of files (without syncing,
downloading entire projects, etc...). I just want to connect, browse to the
needed file, double click on it, edit, save and close it. May be someone who
has similar needs can point me to the right plugin/tutorial, I would try VS
Code again?

But for now, using Atom as my primary editor, and was able to set it up the
way I described above. Plugin which I use to edit files over SSH is Remote FTP
([https://github.com/icetee/remote-ftp](https://github.com/icetee/remote-
ftp)), if someone is interested.

~~~
eat_veggies
Would something like sshfs work for you?

[https://github.com/libfuse/sshfs](https://github.com/libfuse/sshfs)

------
vorpalhex
I like Atom because I can keep it a relatively dumb editor. I hate
autocomplete, I hate automated code formatting usually (I do occasionally use
Prettier to get legacy code cleaner) and I don't want to see my linter until I
go to make a commit.

I do wish Atom was faster, especially on Windows. I do appreciate the support
for ligatures in font though, and how easy it is to change editor behavior as
I go.

~~~
megaman22
Why not use gedit or notepad++ or geany then? Those are all more performant.

~~~
dontJudge
Many versions of notepad++ phone home, so be careful what you type.

~~~
beart
I've never heard of this - can you provide more information?

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ojuara
I was a Atom user until I found BBedit. I like the hackable proposal around
Atom, but being fast is the most important feature for me.

~~~
chipotle_coyote
It's nice to see some love for BBEdit. I confess that I use VS Code for
programming more often, but I'm a technical writer, and I almost always use
BBEdit for my work. The other day I had to do a task that boiled down to
"recursively search for all files in this directory that do NOT contain the
following text, then in the result set, run the following regex-based search
and replace." In BBEdit, this is essentially a two-step operation (the first
search, then a "text factory" with the regex search-and-replace that used the
search result window as the input). I'm sure there are other editors that
could do that same operation, but I have doubts how many could do it as
easily.

Really, if I could bring a couple of the more "IDE-esque" bits over from Code
(most notably language-sensitive smart indent, something I'm boggled Bare
Bones hasn't broken down and added yet), I'd probably just stick with BBEdit
full time still.

------
__alias
Sounds like everyone has had similar experiences with trying VS code then
falling in love with it

------
gjmveloso
There is no reason for Microsoft keeping two Electron-based code editor.

Would be nice to see how both communities from VSCode and Atom can work
together and drive an even better coding experience with an unlimited
extensions ecosystem.

Both Atom and VSCode are great!

~~~
sergiotapia
Expect Atom to be killed, or just have security updates very soon. Microsoft
has teams right now looking at what they can bring in from Atom before
shelving it. No sense in having two "electron" based editors.

~~~
rhencke
That is a substantial claim which runs counter to all public communication
from Microsoft and GitHub on the matter so far.

Can you provide anything to substantiate your claim?

~~~
jakear
I am quite sure that if they had the information to substantiate that claim,
they would not be publicly making the claim in the first place.

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breatheoften
I hope vscode copies the text search interface from atom - after using atom
for awhile I switched to and love vscode but the more functional/information
rich search result navigator is the buggest thing I miss from atom ...

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haolez
Long time Emacs user here. I’m enjoying Atom more and more on each new
release. It’s not slow anymore and the UI is really minimalistic and clean.
Highly recommend it.

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sidorares
I'm surprised that no one asking this - but what's the future for Atom in
VSCode in light that they are pretty much direct competitors AND developed by
same company now. Any plans to merge teams / unify development? ( Or opposite,
close one of the projects ? ) Competition was definitely beneficial to both of
them, but is it common to have healthy "intra-company" competing products?

~~~
benatkin
Nat Friedman, who will be the new CEO of GitHub, answered this. He said that
both would be maintained as long as there were dedicated users, and that he
expected it to be for a very long time.

I expect it could be used to promote Microsoft.

Surprisingly, Atom doesn't even say GitHub above the fold on
[https://atom.io/](https://atom.io/) There's an octocat above the fold, but it
doesn't mention GitHub until further down the page.

~~~
jakear
Does it not have "GitHub Integration" link in the main set of buttons for you?

~~~
benatkin
Below the fold. On a 13" laptop and a phone though. Might show up higher on
the page on a bigger screen.

~~~
jakear
Ah. My 15" puts it all above

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partiallypro
Since Microsoft has taken over, perhaps my take might hurt people's confidence
in Github in light of that news...but they really should just kill off Atom
and focus on VS Code. I'd rather they focus energy on building other tools.

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jakear
How is Atom with a11y? I tried using VoiceOver with Atom but I couldn't quite
get it to work. Is accessibility something the Atom team is committed to?

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petre
Cool, 1.28 now fails to strat on OSX 10.10.5 Yosemite. Maybe this is a warning
sign that I need to go back to Sublime?

