Comment by ShaneWilton | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ShaneWilton | Hacker News Reader

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I've been using Atom full time for about a year and a half now. I've never noticed performance issues though, so I've always been curious about where these complaints come from.

I just ran a find over the project I've been working on full time, and the largest file, by a long shot, is 8kb, and a little under 100 lines. That's just an autogenerated enum of the HTTP status codes though, so it isn't indicative of real code.

In the vast majority of cases, all of my files are less than 4kb, and hover around 40 lines or so. Atom handles this use case just fine, and I'm hard pressed to think of a situation where I'd run into performance concerns. The entire process itself is using less than 80mb of RAM, and 0.2% of my CPU. A single tab of Chrome is worse than that.

What are people doing with their text editor that they need blazing speed?

What are people doing with their text editor that they need blazing speed?

I admit the answer that immediately comes to mind is: "uh, editing text?" But to be more serious --

My own coding projects rarely have files with more than 300-400 lines, but the coding projects I'm working on aren't always my own, and my own projects involving text files aren't always coding. If I have reason to load a 3000-line source code file, I don't expect my editor to choke. (I've done this on occasion.) If I have reason to load a 603K, 7300-paragraph Markdown file, I don't expect my editor to choke on that, either. (For somewhat obscure reasons, I'm doing that weekly, and yes, I'm making edits as I go.)

In (very!) limited testing just now with both those cases, Atom 1.4 seemed to do just fine, for the record.

Your codebase is very modular and wonderful but for other projects, large files (100kb+) are not uncommon. For those projects, "clean up your code before using my product" is not an acceptable answer.

This seems like a tragedy of the commons: those projects only exist in the state they're in because some products exist which allow you to work with them despite their flaws. Whereas, if nothing worked with 100kb+ source files, the projects would change.

Opening log files? Having a generic text editing component that can scale to showing 75k logs makes it easy to build great visual tooling on top of that.

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