
Atom 1.18 released - aditya42
http://blog.atom.io/2017/06/13/atom-1-18.html
======
ainar-g
Please, don't consider this a troll question (I personally am a vim kind of
guy), but is there any reason to use Atom over VSCode these days?

The sole reason to me seems that VSCode is developed by the "evil" Microsoft.
Other than that, most people I know who tried Atom switched to VSCode or (back
to) Sublime in the end.

~~~
Hamuko
What's the actual difference? As far as I can see, they're both poor text
editors with bad interfaces, built on top of the horrible mess that is
Electron. They're also both massive. VS Code takes up 235 MB and Atom takes a
whopping 530 MB. Sublime Text is like 30 MB.

~~~
SippinLean
>with bad interfaces

VS Code's interface is nearly identical to Sublime's, with some nice sugar in
places that are helpful (optional GUI for keybindings and extensions).

For debugging and version control VS Code's interface OOTB is leaps and bounds
above Sublime's.

>VS Code takes up 235 MB

Meh I have 16GB of RAM on my _old_ computer. Or do you actually just mean HDD
space? Who cares about 200MB in that regard?

~~~
Hamuko
VS Code's interface is a garbage Metro (or whatever Microsoft is calling it
today) implementation with sidebar hell from Office.

>Who cares about 200MB in that regard? Who cares about anything? Just use
everything you have. CPU, RAM, battery life and so on. These things are free
for the developer.

Is VS Code actually seven times better and/or complex compared to Sublime Text
that it actually needs to use the additional disk space.

Electron is garbage and just an exercise in providing a bad user experience to
people for the sake of making front-end developers happy since they're the
ones making them. The end result is bloated applications that are slow and use
way too much system resources. VS Code used to use a significant portion
(>10%) of the CPU just to draw a blinking cursor.

~~~
LiquidFlux
Electron is the reason you're getting these kind of desktop applications built
in the first place, it's opened up an entire portal of developers to catering
to your needs.

It may not be the ultimate solution to the problem with regards to things such
as performance, but these are irrelevant if the application were to never be
built in the alternative.

~~~
swozey
Cheers to that. Maybe now with Electron the developers at 1Password will give
us a Linux port........

------
ssijak
I really wanted Atom to work. But in the end, it is just to damn slow, takes
too much memory, and hogs on large files. Now, I find vscode to be very much
what I need for javascript/typescript/html/css work.

~~~
v1n337
Isn't VSCode Electron based too? After reading this article[1], I've shunned
desktop apps using Electron, because it just seems wasteful in terms of
memory. I've switched back to Sublime.

[1] [https://josephg.com/blog/electron-is-flash-for-the-
desktop/](https://josephg.com/blog/electron-is-flash-for-the-desktop/)

~~~
veidr
Yes, but while Sublime is still _way_ faster, there's not much human-time-
perceptible difference between Sublime and VS Code, and there's still (even in
this new 1.18) a _huge_ difference between Atom and the other two.

Sublime (or really any competently-designed native editor) does indeed use way
less _memory_ for any text-editing task than any Electron-based app. But
memory is fast. VS Code shows that an Electron-based app can exhibit
performance basically equivalent to a native app at most tasks (other than
opening that initial window, where it's still an order of magnitude slower).

So I think the performance problem with Atom is more Atom than Electron.

(Still, though, if you only have 16GB RAM, you probably don't want to use more
than 4 Electron-based apps.)

~~~
santaclaus
> there's not much human-time-perceptible difference between Sublime and VS
> Code

VS Code chokes pretty horribly on 'large' files and is really slow to load. It
also has noticeable typing latency vis a vis Sublime.

~~~
veidr
Hmm, I have never seen any typing latency with VS Code, but I use fast
computers and few plugins. It is indeed slow during initial loading, and
unusable with large files.

My comment wasn't intended to advocate for inefficient software based on web
browser cores; I was just trying to note that most of Atom's abysmal
performance issues seem to be more Atom's fault than Electron's, since VSCode
is so much better.

Sublime, and any competently-designed native text editor, will always be
faster than one based on Electron. Still, I leave both editors (and a few
others) open throughout my workday.

------
ericfrederich
Wonder if it changes anything significanly. It would really have to to change
my opinion. It always felt very slow to me even on killer hardware.

This page quantifies it. [https://github.com/jhallen/joes-
sandbox/tree/master/editor-p...](https://github.com/jhallen/joes-
sandbox/tree/master/editor-perf)

I don't so much care about memory consumption. It can be 5 to 10 times as much
as Sublime... I am RAM to spare. What I do care about is that a lot of these
tests are 20 times SLOWER than Sublime (which can already be considered a
heavy-weight editor)

------
kalendos
Also, Atom 1.19 Beta has native text buffer. This should reduce memory usage
for large files. Will try it out!

------
atiredturte
I used to love Atom, the plugins were perfect and I could customise it to do
exactly what I wanted. However, even on a fully specced macbook air, it just
became too slow. I moved to VS Code because it had the speed I needed with the
customisability that I wanted. Hopefully this Atom update increases
performance though, I really liked that editor :)

~~~
RobAley
I've had no particular performance problems (well, nothing I couldn't live
with), and recent versions have improved things in various areas. It doesn't
look like this version has much in the way of performance enhancements, but
the next version, 1.19 (currently in beta) has a raft of stuff that should
perk thinks up a bit.

------
baby
This is the 5th time I try Atom (after switching back to sublime) but I might
start using this a lot more now that I've discovered go-plus. Atom might
really be the best text editor for golang.

~~~
ggordan
I was in the same boat until I tried VScode. It's a really great editor,
configurable, and performant enough that I don't miss Sublime. Also the Go
support is pretty great.

[https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode-go](https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode-
go)

~~~
baby
What's the big difference between VScode and Atom? Why would I move to a fork?

~~~
gustavoluz
VScode is not an Atom fork. It's only built on the same tech (Electron)

~~~
baby
Really? For some reason I really thought it was a fork of Atom. How does it
compare then?

------
gri3v3r
I prefer Notepad++. On Linux, Geany is a viable alternative.... If I need an
IDE, I will get an IDE. I want my text editor to be as lightweight as
possible. This was not the case with Atom.

~~~
yoodenvranx
I use Sublime because I absolutely can't live without multicursors.

~~~
soapdog
VSCode[1] has multicursors and I believe that atom[2] does too... not
advocating for your switch, you should be happy with whatever editor you
choose, but, that feature is more wide-spread than people realize.

[1]: [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/29953479/multiple-
cursor...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/29953479/multiple-cursors-in-
visual-studio-code) [2]: [https://atom.io/packages/multi-
cursor](https://atom.io/packages/multi-cursor)

~~~
jhasse
I think he just wanted to explain why Notepad++ and Geany are not an option
for him.

~~~
8draco8
Notepad++ have multicursors [https://notepad-plus-plus.org/features/multi-
editing.html](https://notepad-plus-plus.org/features/multi-editing.html) and
block editing [https://notepad-plus-plus.org/features/column-mode-
editing.h...](https://notepad-plus-plus.org/features/column-mode-editing.html)
. Don't know about Geany.

~~~
yoodenvranx
That's good to know, thx. The last time I checker Notepad++ did not have them
and I decided to stay with Sublime.

~~~
8draco8
Last time I've used Notepad++ was around 5 years ago and this feature was
there already so it's there for a while. I'm glad that I could help.

------
nickrio
I don't know. Since it's basically build upon ECMAScript, HTML and Webkit
already, why not also wasm?

~~~
merkaloid
so that it can run 50% slower than it already does?

------
astrod
I recently switched from vs code to atom, before that I was on webstorm.

Loving the hydrogen plugin to evaluate lines or js expressions inside the
editor. [https://atom.io/packages/hydrogen](https://atom.io/packages/hydrogen)

~~~
StreakyCobra
> This package lets you run your code directly in Atom using any Jupyter
> kernels you have installed.

FYI you can do the same with the jupyter VSCode extension [1]

[1]
[https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=donjayam...](https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=donjayamanne.jupyter)

PS: There are a few differences in the way they work, but I posted this to
give pointers for people who may want such extensions in VSCode.

~~~
astrod
Thanks for bringing it to my attention.

------
unsignedint
Byte-order-mark is not implemented yet :-(

[https://github.com/atom/encoding-
selector/issues/18](https://github.com/atom/encoding-selector/issues/18)

I've bitten by this before when doing Unity coding. I no longer do much of
Unity dev, but I deal things where this makes big difference and I haven't
given serious try on Atom because of this. (I use VSCode which handles this
correctly.)

------
jokoon
Insert another rant about how atom is bloated compared to editors like sublime
text, notepad++, and VScode (which I discovered recently and seems to be a
clone of sublime text).

