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Comment by sirsuki | Hacker News Reader

I'm always fascinated how the editors we use tend to bloat. It seems like they get more and more features till they are a full blown IDE. I come from a Unix/Vim background and I thought "can Vim have a pair program… uh… wait! WAT?!" It does and it is call TMUX/GNU Screen. See in the Unix world programs do one thing and they do it well. You compose them or layer them to accomplish a bigger picture. So running Vim edits text while running TMUX/Screen lets you pair with multiple tabs and/or interact with the same Vim instance. So again I must ask "Why do text editors need to feature creep?"

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In the case of Atom (as Emacs), it is fine because it's modular. So if you don't need said feature, just don't install it.

It's incredibly convenient to just install an extension, as opposed to an external program, configure paths and the like.

vim is 2.7 MB. How big is Atom?

Edit:

Jesus guys, enough with the white knighting for Atom. I think you should use whatever editor you want, I'm just countering the point that it's not bloated because it's modular.

Frickin' enormous, but at the end of the day if someone is productive in vim, use vim. If they're productive with Atom, use Atom.

You can spend your life proving that your editor is the truth, or you can get on with it and build something awesome.

I don't think anyone is against the idea that you should use what you're comfortable with. I'm just backing up the idea that Atom is bloated, and even with all of the modules removed it's still going to be huge.

I have a machine with 6 1TB HDDs and a 512GB SSD, why do I care?

As long as it's not so big it becomes inconvenient to download it (IMO in the 10+GB range) I simply don't care about it's size, it doesn't effect me at all.

Use what you want to use, this field has too many holy wars already.

If program size effected programming productivity no one would use visual studio.

Many people don't explicitly for this reason. I know I can't, its just too much stuff stuck together. I'd expect something like VS and Atom to be made well polished and optimized. The projects are rather large and both have well staffed teams behind them. I'll take sublime, eclipse, or even JetBrains products over VS/Atom because those editors/IDEs are polished and simple to use. I don't need to RTFM just to add three lines to a text file.

Right click -> Add -> Text file, then type the 3 lines. Definitely needed to RTFM for that!

Hyperbole: exaggerated statements or claims not meant to be taken literally.

You do realize I all I was implying was that visual studio is very large and that people use it?

Gigantic, in comparison.

But does it really matter? We are not developing using potatoes. Even a 5 year old computer bought at a department store should have no issues running Atom.

The more useful metric would be, what's the actual performance like? I couldn't care less if it used gigabytes of otherwise unclaimed memory for caching. Unused memory is wasted memory.

Atom has more potential, as it embeds a full web browser. That potential is mostly untapped right now, but it is there.

As someone who uses Tmux for this purpose every day, pair programming with a content aware pair programming editor is a very different experience.

Typing at once in different parts of the code would be a huge boon to pair programming (that isn't even possible with in-person pairing, yet). Imagine being able to jump in and fix a typo while your pair keeps writing the next line.

There's no product that does this well enough for reliable daily use across a range of project types, but I can dream.

Have you tried https://www.nitrous.io/ - It may not meet the wide range of projects criteria, but it's pretty nice.

(I'm not affiliated, just have used it for pair programming before with success)

While not for code, Google Docs does this well enough that I've written things while a friend literally fixes typos, starts on the next paragraph, and sometimes edits the same line i'm on.

At least it's possible...

I think a better question would be, why are we still trying to write software with text editors instead of program editors.

0_o

Because source code is text. Text is edited using a text editor or an IDE.

Those of us coding in GNU Radio, LabView, MaxMSP, PureData, Simulink, VEE, vvvv, etc., would object to such an overly general statement.

(Hint: those are all visual or hybrid textual/visual programming languages.)

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