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Comment by tbrock | Hacker News Reader

I think the "Atom is slow" meme needs to die.

Obviously, if you are loading 100s of random extensions made by fledgling JS programmers you are gonna have a bad time. Obviously if you load a 2gb text file and try to syntax highlight it, you're gonna have a bad time.

The core editor is fast, looks great, and is stupid extensible. Yeah, it's not vim fast, and yeah it won't fly on your dads old compaq, but it's fast enough not to care at this point.

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I try it out of the box every so often and it is slow. Slow enough to keep me on Sublime, even though Atom has a much better plugin API. Everything looks great until I try to use a few hundred cursors at once or load a large file and then it grinds to a halt. There is also a general lagginess to the interface that is hard to pin down.

>a few hundred cursors

Dear god.

I love Atom, but it is noticeably slower than VS Code when editing, especially when autocomplete is involved.

Just tried loading a 6MB json log, and it froze Atom horribly. On a nice laptop, less than 6 months old. Not sold yet.

Waiting for VS Code to implement tabs then will give that a more serious look.

I vastly prefer the working files list in the VS Code sidebar over any traditional horizontal tabbed interface. The overall functionality is practically same, but having a vertical file list makes much better use of horizontal space (vertical space is generally at a much higher premium for widescreen displays) and handles use cases where a large number of files are open much better (having too many files open doesn't preclude you from seeing the whole filename). I much prefer using Firefox with Tree Style Tabs over regular horizontal tabs for mostly the same reasons. However, I agree that they should offer the option for horizontal tabs those who find it more familiar.

I've never had a problem with VS Code's performance, but VS Code itself is also not without issues though. For instance, this is the one that often leaves me no choice but to open another editor: https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/1690

I need tabs too ...

No, Atom is still slow. I opened a 150kb JavaScript file yesterday which brought it to its knees. VSCode, which is also based on Electron handles the same file seamlessly. Atom has a long way to go.

It will die when it is no longer true.

The slowness I have noticed and bothers me is on the startup time. Other than that its OK.

I tried atom a few months ago and it was slow. Loaded it up yesterday and I'm thinking of switching if only I could get decent autocomplete working.

Curious what problems you have with the autocomplete. I haven't had any serious issues with it (yet).

I wish there was a good C++ autocomplete package that's compatible with Nuclide's remote projects.

I mainly write JS. With vs code I can get some basic autocomplete with type script files (typings) and it autocompletes my own JS (including Docs). Atom will only show generic auto completion and won't even autocomplete my own files. I've given ternJS a try but can't seem to get it working.

There's You Complete Me[1], which will do: C, C++, C#, Go, JS, Obj-C, Obj-C++, Python, Rust, Typescript, and filesystem entries.

[1]: https://atom.io/packages/you-complete-me

Not to derail you, but you may want to give VS Code a try too... been my default editor for a while now... love the git integration.

using VS code now. It's great, but came back to atom to see if things changed

I love atom. However, I use VS Code, because atom is slow. I am primarily a JS developer and often have to interact with bundled js files. Atom freezes for 10+ seconds whenever ever so much as click on a bundled file, while VS Code is instant. Moreover, sometimes I like to have 2 instances of the editor open (one for each the client and server). When I do this with atom, my laptop's performance is visibly affected.

So at least in my case, the '"Atom is slow" meme' is still relevant.

I'm sick of the meme but I agree with it. I think it needs to be put away for a little while because it's just noise. We know some people feel it's too slow for them. We don't need the same comment on every thread discussing atom.

To reply directly to your comment though, sublime is much faster when first opening the application, regardless of extensions. That, and the fact I use sublime for browsing log files on the order of 10-50mb keeps me from jumping.

I think if you are using a text editor to browse 50mb logs you are probably doing it wrong. Try grep.

Except text editor can handle it. Notepad++ eats that for breakfast.

When I am browsing files that big I often don't know exactly what I'm looking for. They're multiline entries, and Not easy to parse

I wrote a post about setting up Atom for web development around a year ago:

http://www.developingandstuff.com/2015/04/setting-up-atom-fo...

after using it for around a year.

I think what's more important about Atom's speed is not the speed itself, but the rate at which it increases. Atom was slow 2 years ago, became faster 1 year ago, and today is faster than that. On the other hand, Sublime Text, on a similarly specced computer (of a colleague), today, seems much slower, for example, when doing a project-wide search.

Sublime text's search needs work, but on a huge project you often need a dedicated search tool anyway (or plugin for one).

IME the search isn't really what people complain about for atom's perf. Certainly isn't what keeps me from using it.

If only it weren't true.

On a fresh, OOTB El Capitan install, with an identical plugin load to what I use on vim, atom takes a good 5-6 seconds to appear, and a few more to become usable.

Atom is objectively slow, compared to its competition.

Atom starts up really slow, but I restart it maybe once a week. It's the same as emacs; when you spend hundreds of hours in the same editing session, who gives a shit about 8 seconds you paid 7 days ago?

I wouldn't call Atom slow in general use, post-startup, which is all I really care about anyways.

Atom still has a memory/cpu/power consumption problem that requires restarting to fix. A quick google returned a number of active issues on Github.

"fast"

Wtf world do you live in?

I wrote a blog post where I reverse engineered Sublime Text's fuzzy match. One of my test cases was a C file with single line functions. I think there were about 16000 lines. Both Sublime and my algorithm ran in under 100 milliseconds.

Atom also has a fuzzy match algorithm. It hard froze the editor for over 5 seconds while matching.

Atom also has some of the highest latency when typing. By a large margin. https://pavelfatin.com/typing-with-pleasure/

So no. Atom is still a slow piece of shit. It's not a meme. It's a verifiable fact.

Sorry.

Please don't spoil an otherwise substantive comment by calling names ('piece of shit'). The HN guidelines specifically ask not to do this.

Do you have a link to your blog post?

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