Comment by pugio | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pugio | Hacker News Reader

I love the concept of Atom and have a lot invested in its success. That being said, I switched back to Sublime because of the responsiveness, and here's why:

Programming (for me) is a craft. When I'm in the flow of coding, there's a conversation between me and my program, mediated through the editor (and my REPL). Even a subtle typing lag is enough to subtly disrupt that flow state – the speed of thought and text no longer coincide, and that slight, almost subliminal perception of delay build into a sense of frustration and just being out of sync with my program.

It's a problem that's most noticeable in its absence. Like when you go to the gym for the first time in a while and realize "oh, yeah, this feeling is what I've been missing", switching from Atom back to Sublime feels... right, refreshing.

For a great analysis of typing latency, and why it's important, see: https://pavelfatin.com/typing-with-pleasure/

(I am happy Atom is still moving forwards, though, and eagerly await the day I can switch fully from Sublime. Easy modification of ones own tools is another big component of my personal programmer-as-craftsman ideal.)

I've had the same feeling about the startup speed issue, but with javascript / typescript, I've found that Visual Studio Code occupies the middle in startup performance, and I've found the "intellisense" information to take a load off the mental difficulty of work and memory.

So now I use Sublime to make quick edits, but for anything longer, I use Visual Studio Code.

Atom's startup speed was heavily improved in 1.5 for me. I keep checking back every so often to see if it improves and they're steadily working on it. I think by the time 1.7 hits it'll be about on par with VSCode.

Visual Studio Code is built on electron and both are javascript running in chromium and I still don't understand the difference in performance between VSC and Atom.

Here is a conversation about VSC better performance. It was an interesting read https://github.com/atom/atom/issues/10188

I have tried both and both are slow and sticking with Vim and RStudeo.

I second this. I am in no way a programmer, but doing some JS for analytics I find Visual Studio more and more usable.

I'm curious how much time you spent with it before switching back? When it first launches, coming over from Sublime Text or Vim or whatever definitely feels different, but in my experience after a day or so the lag became totally invisible and all of the other Atom features started to shine through, leading me to stay. (Note however, that this is post v1.0. If you haven't checked it out in a while there have been some really great perf improvements.)

Interesting line from the article quoted above:

> One does not necessarily need to perceive latency consciously to be affected by it.

Atom's speed has increased so much that I usually don't notice a lack of performance anymore. Startup time is one second flat and unless I'm opening huge DB dumps or have dozens of selections at the same time, it feels just like Sublime Text.

I find it's slow for opening large files, but not so far behind other editors. Other than that it's fine.

It's kind of funny. You mention 1 second, as if it's a good thing, while "instant" is generally at least bellow 200ms, preferably below 100ms. Now, it doesn't really make a difference in productivity, but certainly makes a difference in perception (which, I suppose can make a difference in happiness :-).

I have some programs that take (too) long to start up: Elite: Dangerous and Star Wars - the Old Republic. My web browsers also start up too slow, but opening a new tab is instant, and that's all I do, anyway.

I recently thought about the craziness of these applications based on web technologies, with a 15 MB download and sometimes sluggish performance. We had full GUI OS [the QNX demo-disk] that fit on a floppy in the 90s - surely we can fit an editor in less than 1MB today, and have it perform more things, ~1000 faster than in the 90s?

I really don't expect an advanced editor/IDE to start in less than 200ms, even with an SSD.

When I work or need to open many files, I leave the editor running and when I don't need to open many files, the occasional startup time of 1-2 seconds is more than acceptable for all the functionality it offers. If you open dozens of files and close the editor every time in between, that's really more of a PEBCAK issue.

I agree about the typing lag. It's not just a nit to pick for me. I am reminded of it at every keystroke. I'm also annoyed by it in part because I don't think this should be a problem in this day and age, just because a text editor is supposed to be extensible. We have monstrous performance from Javascript JIT engines today and Atom is perhaps built on top of the best one, yet we wait short moments for letters to appear.

Visual Studio Code works better for me in terms of lag, yet being extensible and similar in concept as well as price. Not quite as extensible as Atom though, not on the order of being able to rebuild the interface and core features as far as I have seen. But enough to offer pretty good suppport for e.g. Go development including linting and debugging, without actually offering this built-in.

Yes Sublime is more responsive, but for me it's just a minor annoyance. The benefits of a community over a one man project who has a tendency to disappear are more than evident IMO.

The author of Package Manager (wbond) is now working on sublime core, so there's at least one more person working on it. :)

That must be why there is a new forum. :)

> It's a problem that's most noticeable in its absence.

I know what you mean, when they added the option for Zero-Latency typing in intellij it subtly just felt better (and on linux the difference was noticable).

Have you tried atom with default plugins only?

I just did some benchmarking and discovered switching the Windows theme to Classic reduced the lag with 30-40ms!!!

How did you measure that?

I used the program in the article the parent post linked to. Here's the link: https://pavelfatin.com/typometer/

Start the program using:

  java -jar typometer-1.0.jar

What if you just try disabling transparency in your current theme?

Did anybody had the curiosity and the time to run Typometer on the last version of Atom?

https://pavelfatin.com/typing-with-pleasure/

Same here. I liked Atom at first, but the user experience is annoying in the long run. Atom is slow and buggy, what is absolutely not tolerable for a text editor.

Curious to know, Mac, Windows?

Agreed, and the sluggish problem can't be solved because the Atom team chose a developer stack which benefited them, and not one which benefited the actual users of the software.

There is a massive gap in the market for a native speed open-source SublimeText clone.

I don't know that the stack is the problem. Visual Studio Code seems quite fast.

And the your first statement seems to imply some kind of obligation where there is none. Open source is a public service not a public obligation.

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