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Comment by cageface | Hacker News Reader

The decision to base Atom on web technologies remains controversial and it's still not as snappy as Sublime, for example, for similar tasks. But I think that decision has been vindicated by the speed of development it's made possible. Since the bar to entry for contributors is so low the ecosystem that's developed around Atom is second to none. You can find a package for just about anything and the UI polish of a lot of these packages is much higher than I've seen for any other editor, thanks to the ability to leverage modern HTML, CSS & JS.

Atom may never be as fast as a truly native client but it's perfectly usable now and is increasingly leaving the competition in the dust when it comes to features.

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I'm not sure Atom's slowness can be attributed to being built on web technologies. Visual Studio Code is also built on Electron and is not only faster than Atom for many tasks, but also faster than Sublime. To be more specific, on my windows machine at work I can open large files (10+ MB XML) much quicker in Code than Sublime. Global text substitution in these large files are also noticeably faster in VS Code.

> Visual Studio Code is also built on Electron and is not only faster than Atom for many tasks, but also faster than Sublime.

Can you please back this up with any benchmarks? 2 months ago when I tried VSC, though the UI and some features (git workflow) were really nice, performance was again a disappointment compared to Sublime. Having played with Electron myself it's obvious why performance is an issue with both Atom and VSC.

EDIT: s/flow/workflow

Agreed it's slower than Sublime, but seems to have more in the box too... There are also some quirks that I haven't liked, but it's become my day to day editor over sublime at this point... I like the UI a lot.

I haven't used Atom yet but I'm certainly willing to try. It doesn't have to be fast as native, just fast enough.

"Leaving the competition in the dust" sounds a bit like hyperbole. Can someone provide a better comparison?

Code completion? Multiple cursors? "Ace jump" ... navigation in general. I guess "precision editing" encompasses what I'm trying to say.

https://vimeo.com/53144573

I currently use Atom as my primary editor for creating http://clara.io on all machines, switching away from Sublime. Two issues stand out in my basic usage:

- Atom fairly regularly freezes on me -- probably once every two days such that I have to force kill it.

- It also is very very slow opening large files (+1M files), probably at least 5x slower than Sublime in that regards.

> Since the bar to entry for contributors is so low

Have they switched from Coffeescript to JavaScript?

Yeah https://twitter.com/sindresorhus/status/669958889941639168

Cool. Got to resurrect my plugins :)

I think it's still a work in progress. I still see .coffee files in atom/src.

All new code is in ES6+ rather than CoffeeScript, which is significant.

This is some of the best news I have heard in a while. I really wanted to love atom, but just couldn't wrap my head around the decision to use coffeescript

I assume ES6 didn't exist at the time (or wasn't feasible to use). If you're not used to javascript it can be quite annoying to develop in.

That's a really big deal. I wanted to fix a bug or two and saw coffee last year and noped out. Glad to hear they are going back on that one.

Kind of curious why they made that decision in the first place.

Oh, they are a Ruby shop. Right.

For all the extensibility and speed of development, the Atom ecosystem is still missing features I can find in any other major editor. Off the top of my head, there's no way to automatically (hard) word-wrap text. The vim plugins only implement the basics, and they all seem to be missing the command bar entirely.

Here's a nice plugin to add the vim command bar: https://atom.io/packages/atom-vim-colon-command-on-command-p...

Sadly that only supports four simple commands.

I search for hard wrap in the plugins and the first hit seems to do the job.

Which plugin? The only ones I could find required using a keyboard shortcut to format the current line, rather than wrapping as you type. In vim the equivalent would be :set wrap.

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