Managing the Deluge of Atom Issues | Hacker News Reader

Managing the Deluge of Atom Issues

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As much as I liked the idea of Atom, giving it a genuine try for about six months, I ended up going back to trusty Sublime Text. Why? As a developer, I think it's silly to make my computer do more work than necessary, to take up more CPU and battery than needed. And, the subtle non-native sluggishness always seemed to reduce the usability, ever so slightly, not also counting the occasional "the editor has frozen" prompts.

Admittedly, Atom's background color is hands-down more eye pleasing with its slightly blue tint. Fortunately Sublime is skinnable.

I too abandoned Atom after a few month trial period. It has potential, but it just had so many issues that, upon opening Sublime Text again, I heaved a huge sigh of relief. That's not to say Atom is bad, but even now it's a bit rough around the edges.

I love the theme though. It's probably the only time I've opened an editor and didn't immediately look to change the theme. If I'm not mistaken, it's called "One Dark" but I could never find a good Sublime or Emacs clone.

I haven't directly compared them to atom recently, but I've found these emacs themes to be pretty comparable:

https://github.com/jonathanchu/atom-one-dark-theme

https://github.com/NicolasPetton/zerodark-theme

https://github.com/nashamri/spacemacs-theme (not really an atom/dark-one clone, but pretty good nonetheless)

FWIW, VS Code is built on top of Electron (like Atom) and AFAICT, doesn't have the perf issues that Atom does. Nor does the Slack client which is similarly built on Electron. I wonder what the root cause is, but I don't think it is an issue of it not being native.

I tried VS Code the other day after the big announcement but "Electron Helper" or something was routinely taking up 2-3% CPU, eating the battery. Why is there even a separate helper process? Will try again in a few months, I guess.

There's a separate helper process because Electron is based on Chromium, which has a multiprocess architecture - AFAIK "Electron Helper" is the same thing as "Google Chrome Helper". No idea about the CPU.

Yeah, it's unfortunate because I love the idea of Atom, and of course that it's free with no fuss to install wherever whenever at whatever number of times, and that the source is open. Simply a modern version of an extensible, easy to use editor and I think definitely has its place even despite what was already there in terms of editors.

However, I'm personally on Visual Studio Code now, which shares similar ideas on platform and extensibility, although it's not quite as great there as Atom. But good enough for me, and much faster. Good enough for me to not "need" Sublime Text, and to have a pretty convenient development experience in e.g. Go and scripting languages in terms of coding support features.

This is the reason why I use Atom on my desktop and Sublime on my MacBook.

One Dark is really pleasing to the eyes than Monokai. Here's a link for Sublime users who want to give it a try:

https://packagecontrol.io/packages/One%20Dark%20Material%20-... https://packagecontrol.io/packages/One%20Dark%20Color%20Sche... (unfortunately they're both abandoned now)

> As a developer, I think it's silly to make my computer do more work than necessary, to take up more CPU and battery than needed

What language were you using?

Hand rolled assembly I am sure.

I for one, absolutely love Atom. I (sincerely) thank GitHub and the surplus of VC cash that allows projects like these to happen at places like GitHub.

Except for the sub-native speed, Atom basically offers everything that high-quality commercial text editors (BBEdit, Coda, Chocolat, early Textmate ) used to offer. On top of that, it's open-source, is free with no limitations, and totally cross-platform. It comes with a minimap, for goodness sake!

I currently use a mix of both ST and Atom, depending on my mood.

Except for Chrome OS. Boy, I would drop any Macbook for a Chromebook Pixel if it could run Atom without tinkering.

Managing issues in big projects is a lot of work. I wrote a blog post about it a few years back: http://words.steveklabnik.com/how-to-be-an-open-source-garde...

Slow and steady wins the race, as well as making triage a part of your process. Leave it too long and the weeds overgrow.

Like just about everybody else it seems, I use Sublime Text. Every year or so since I first heard about Atom, I give it a couple weeks. It has really come a long way since pre-1.0 days. It is very usable and doesn't crash nearly as often. However, there is strange behavior that ends up pushing me back to ST3. Over the years I've developed a "bullshit cutoff point" after which I stop using an application. If a distro/app/site/whatever is making me spend hours on getting it working/fixed/performant/whatever, I go back to what works until some months down the road. I think Atom is very close to being a top-tier editor, but not quite yet "better" than Sublime for my purposes. I do think that it's just a matter of time, though, that an army of developers will eventually surpass one developer (as long as its not mismanaged, and Atom certainly isn't). So for me, Atom's day is still yet to come, but I do think it will come.

So for example, multiple panes and session/editor restarts should be flawless for me to give serious consideration to an editor. If there is even one bump in the road, I judge extremely harshly. And problems/bugs with panes and remembering my session is what pushed me back to Sublime this spring. I should be able to drop whatever I'm doing, restart Linux, and when it boots back up, start the editor and it will be as though nothing happened, including multiple unsaved tabs. Atom has a lot of trouble with this.

I've done a lot of foss bug triaging and I found that tags are essential to managing incoming bugs.

Have lots of tags/labels and tag every bug as soon as they are filed with at the very least a basic component (this is where machine learning could help a lot). Unlabeled bugs tend to get lost; labeled bugs can be looked at by someone who's familiar with the area (and relabeled if needs be).

If your product is very popular make sure to tag support questions and similar as soon as possible with their own label as well.

Maybe they should switch to bugzilla or phabricator or jira or something. Github issues don't scale well to complex distributed projects. Chrome just open sourced their monorail project that's designed for this kind of project too. Lots of great choices out there.

Atom is made largely by GitHub. You're right a more sophisticated issue tracker may be in order, but I don't think they'd do that.

It seems strange to me that Atom is experiencing the same sort of troubles that occur with large multi-project projects and they don't seem to be aware that their tooling should accommodate that.

One thing that is blatantly obvious would be a organization wide issue tracker. That alone would alleviate the "which project do I file this against" questions and give the project owners an easy way to see the issues for all of their projects.

I work on a few projects that are actually multi-org, so even that wouldn't be enough for me, but would be a darn good start.

This. Org wide issue tracker (and the ability to create new labels while creating a new issue) would solve 99% of my github workflow complaints.

> organization wide issue tracker

Does anything like github/bitbucket/gitlab support this?

GitLab allows you to show issues from a milestone in multiple projects (but one group). See http://doc.gitlab.com/ee/workflow/milestones.html#groups-and...

My thought too. Maybe it'll be an impetus to make their issue tracking software a bit more powerful, a bit more serious. Might be optimistic, but I'd really like to see it, especially as Github's clones copy the feature.

Best way for GitHub issue tracker to improve is to get GH engineers to use is on a complex, distributed project?

Speaking of issues, I got bored of Atom crashes (at least with the last version your work is no longer thrashed), and I came back to Sublime.

What OS? I've had no problem on both win 8 and arch, though on an admittedly powerful computer.

I have tried atom a couple of times, but ran in to some very annoying rendering issues - tearing while scrolling, dark backround flashing white when changing tabs, especially with the minimap - as well as general lag and sluggishness. Sublime is just so much smoother and easier to use.

If they made it easy or easier to work being a proxy at work, I might stick with it. Currently sucks.

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