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Comment by lpsz | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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