Hacker News Reader

Comment by softinio | Hacker News Reader

I think its time to just move to using atom. To me its ahead of Sublime now.

Its clear that Sublime is no longer being developed as a priority like it used to.

(Disclaimer: I am a _huge_ Sublime fan. I picked up their net award in 2014 on behalf of Sublime HQ Pty, plus I've developed a fair few plugins for it.)

I've been using Atom for a couple of weeks now, mainly for a few Laravel applications. I use the git-hide package to remove the ".git", "node_modules" and "vendor" directories from the tree view which does seem to have a nice effect on speed.

That said, here are the issues I face:

- I frequently find that I type too quickly for the editor to pick up the keys and I end up missing off the beginning of some lines.

- I still use Sublime text daily for quickly opening a file, rather than waiting for a new Atom instance to open.

- PHP support is awful. Auto complete for class names in any used packages is something that I sorely miss from the Sublime plugin I use.

- Start-up time still takes a few seconds which means I only use it for projects.

- Listing of installed and discovery of packages is _so_ slow. Sometimes I just don't bother installing a package anymore because it takes at least 10 seconds to show me what I have installed or search for one.

Regardless of me using Atom, I'm still loving the updates to Sublime and continue to moderate the forums, knowing that Jon will deliver :)

VSCode doesn't have some of the problems you mentioned, notably the startup time. No discernible difference between it and Notepad.

That's not to say that it doesn't have its own problems. One massive pain-point: I was assisting with a getting a complex build system working a few months back. The VSCode build integration is scenario-driven garbage. Because I deviated from the most basic of scenarios I had to resort to all manner of nasty hacks to avoid having contributors open a CLI.

> I use the git-hide package to remove the ".git", "node_modules" and "vendor" directories from the tree view which does seem to have a nice effect on speed.

I feel it'll never be a sensible choice until people no longer have to type sentences like this.

Hiding files and directories is part of the Atom core, why do you need a third-party package for it?

AFAIK they only get excluded from indexing, if you don't want them to show in the sidebar, that's something else.

I may be wrong, so please let me know :)

It's part of Atom's own tree-view package. You can either edit the options [1] or add this to your config.cson (under the "*" key):

  "tree-view":
    hideIgnoredNames: true
    hideVcsIgnoredFiles: true

[1] http://i.imgur.com/tZc3DW9.png

I hope someone's already working on the successor to Atom. A piece of software like text-editor only has a shelf-life of a few short years before you need to start from scratch and write a new one.

EDIT: Do I really need to say /s ?

I disagree. Vim and emacs are still here and powerful

/s grandparent, methinks.

I know /s, and perhaps I'm getting old and idiosyncratic, but I really don't understand why invent new text editors (Sublime, Atom, ...) at this point.

With emacs and vim around, I'd argue that text editors is a solved problem, if there ever was one. It is very hard to match emacs in terms of useful features or adaptability. Granted, the learning curve has a reputation for being steep, and elisp could need a facelift, but I think addressing these problems would provide much more value than reinventing the wheel with another shiny editor.

Intel's top scientists are hard at work developing even slower and more inefficient programming languages and display technologies. I'm confident by the time we have 10 GHz processors, we'll also have a new generation of software that makes it perform like a 66Mhz 486DX.

>A piece of software like text-editor only has a shelf-life of a few short years before you need to start from scratch and write a new one.

A piece of software like a programming editor, which until now leaves a lot to be desired, even in the most popular implementations (Vim, Emacs, ST, Atom, etc), sure needs constant reinvention and refinement until someone finally gets it right.

Atom would be close to that if it was not fucking based on web technologies. ST3 would be that if it was open source (so the APIs/internals could be improved faster). Emacs would be that if it wasn't based on a 30+ year old UI model and elisp. Vim would be that if it was more extensible and not 100% focused on the CLI experience.

No, it's much better to avoid posting sarcasm at all. It nearly never scans, and it doesn't really fit the HN culture in any case.

Also, your underlying point is practically offensive to the hacker mindset. Though there is nearly a cult-like devotion to the editing tools of yore, the devotion is not universal.

The only problem I have with Atom and siblings like VSCode is that they are way slower than native software (like Emacs or Sublime). So I'm waiting for editors like 4coder to come to life

Note that Atom and VSCode are "siblings" only in a very loose sense: they use the same app packaging technology [1]. This is enough for your point w.r.t. native software, but VSCode being a fork from Atom is a common misconception.

[1]: https://github.com/atom/electron

Then again, emacs is not really native code. Everything outside the basic editing and display layer is implemented in elisp, whose VM and GC are not exactly state of the art (single threaded, no JIT, basic mark/sweep).

It still somehow manages to feel faster than many other editors.

Well Emacs is faster to me because its just a lisp interpreter written in C, tightly close to the hardware. So yes, Emacs is like 80% Elisp, but it still runs fast, and its stable. Editors like Atom are a bit too... "abstract" maybe. If I understand, Atom is CoffeeScript/JS running on a the Electron shell which runs on NodeJS which is written in C++ IIRC. Thats at least 3 levels of abstraction in my point of view, and knowing that Electron is Chrome based, it can't improve its speed. Simpler is faster

Yes I knew that, I meant native in the sense of "not close to the metal"

4coder for those curious: http://www.4coder.net/info/

I tried to move to Atom. But on large projects it is very slow. Even when I'm typing characters I see lag :-(

Yeah I tried it again recently, still seemed very 'javascripty' - try opening some large SQL etc... in it and it really doesn't compare to ST.

Try opening really really large files in Atom, it can't do it.

VS code, interestingly, is faster with large files than even nano.

What happened to Lime? [1] It looked promising (especially since it was from the author of SublimeClang [2] which worked like a charm, but now it's dead too and doesn't work with SublimeText 3), but there hasn't been any activity for half a year.

Is there any plugin/editor combination that still does C completion like SublimeClang used to do?

[1] http://limetext.org [2] https://github.com/quarnster/SublimeClang

Lime looked so promising, and it seems they are still working on it (at least a couple of months ago, when I was lurking in their IRC chan).

How is the performance on Atom these day? When I tried it a few months back it took a while to start up, and to load large files.

Same for me, dropped it on spot because of those issues. It was very very slow, 6 months ago.

When atom first came out and i tried I said no thank you as it genuinely was painfully slow.

I have been using atom now full time for 3 weeks and gave it another chance as I love a lot of the plugins it has and the community and I am very impressed.

Regarding its slowness it has improved a lot. The only complaint I have with its speed compared to a native app like sublime is that it is slow in starting. This doesn't affect me much as when I am working on a project I leave it open all the time anyway :-)

Give it a try and get some of the useful plugins and you will never look back.

Visual Code is much faster than Atom but Sublime is still way faster. I have not seen great speed improvement last year in Atom :-(

Start-up and creating a new window can still take a good 3 seconds on my machine. Visual Studio (the huge IDE, not VS Code) is actually faster to start most of the time.

https://github.com/atom/atom/issues/10086

Atom is fine for many people's usage of it, and it does some interesting things. It is not without merit. But until issues like this go away, I can't consider it. I regularly need to work with text files several hundred megabytes large. Atom cannot handle this usage. And before you say "Well, you're deliberately being difficult"... I am either taking a quick look at big csv files or automatically generated XML files that store configuration information for some of the systems I work on. A 120 MB XML config file isn't unusual.

What kind of systems are you working on that require 120MB config files? I'm genuinely curious, not asserting anything.

openstreet map data file for places can exceed GB even for cities. Sometimes it needs to be looked into. I was able to do it only using sublime.

Pretty much what it says in my profile. Instrumentation systems. The system topology and configuration for each card, parameter, etc. are all defined in an XML document. With thousands of parameters these files become quite large.

I use Sublime to look and search very big files as well, it seems like basic functionality. Examples would include experimental pressure / temperature measurements, numerical simulation results, large geoJSON datasets...

And does not being actively developed anymore suddenly makes it unusable? I don't think I ran into a bug in years, it's fast and supports everything I need. Moving to Atom sounds like a downgrade to me.

Yeah, I'm baffled by the idea of trading lots of useful features and much better performance just to use a piece of software which is under more active development.

ST3 is a great editor. My biggest problem with the recent pause in development is that I have to install a plugin to get Rust syntax highlighting.

I certainly wouldn't buy a license considering both Atom and Visual Studio Code are freely available on major platforms.

I just wish Node-based editors were as nimble as ST.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com