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Comment by hacker_9 | Hacker News Reader

I see this comment every time an Atom post gets on HN. Are you sure it's not just your computer specs? If Atom continually makes the HN front page then many people must be using it just fine and like it? Personally I'm not sure why we need another text editor of all things, but hey its made in javascript which is hip at the moment.

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A quad core, 16GB RAM rMBP with SSD should really be able to run a text editor for a 500 line Python file without caret lagging behind typing :/

Sublime can do it easily, Atom still can't. Am I holding it wrong?

No, Atom is just slower.

16GB, 4790k with SSD.

I don't have any lag. Do you have lag with a plain text file? Does this happen with default install no added plugins? I recently was editing a 10M log file with no lag.

I've had problems sometimes with all these editors with occasional bad performing plugins.

My Atom on a 8Gb rMBP with an SSD handles it perfectly fine...

It is certainly slower than Sublime, and is so on well-speced machines. I have machines with i7s, 16gb of ram, and an SSD, and atom still chokes when dealing with large amounts of data. Try multiple selections on large text files and watch it grind to a halt.

Certainly people are falling in love with Atom. It is open source ("hackable editor", as they say at Github), and of course this leads to a much quicker development cycle. Sublime has been criticized because features and updates are few and far between, and there appears to be a reluctance to open-source it.

And Sublime is sometimes slower than VS2015 or even Notepad++ on a similar kind of machine.

Can we convince companies to work on making things run faster instead of just making the hardware faster instead?

The reason it comes up so often is because it's very noticeable even on late-model systems with SSDs. Just as with Java-based IDEs, the previous target of these complaints, many people tolerate it anyway because they find the features balance out raw speed.

It's not his specs. Sublime is just that much faster. It also doesn't slowly creep up in RAM usage unlike Atom.

Like others, I have beefy machines and it's still somewhat sluggish. It doesn't bother me as much as others, but I still finding myself typing vscode "blah" instead of atom "blah" for simple file edits that will be opened, saved or looked at, and then closed.

" If Atom continually makes the HN front page then many people must be using it just fine and like it?"

This is terrible reasoning. Also if you need a new computer to edit text then something is terribly wrong even more so the more applications adopt such a casual attitude towards sane levels of optimization.

What happens when you want to run 10 applications without having to start and stop them and all require for no particular reason 1GB of ram. Should we just all go buy 32GB of ram and screw anyone with an older machine?

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