Atom 1.8 and 1.9 beta | Hacker News Reader

Atom 1.8 and 1.9 beta

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Every time Atom is discussed, it's pointed out how slow it is, and then others point out how VS Code is much faster yet is also based on Electron. Could someone explain what makes VS Code significantly faster?

Full disclosure: Every time I try Atom I decide to stick with Sublime Text, largely because Atom feels slow. I've never tried VS Code myself.

Atom and VS Code only share the Electron environment, but the actual way they've implemented the editor rendering and interaction is completely different. Basically, all that VS Code shows is that it's not the JS/Chrome environment that's the bottleneck, it's the editor implementation itself.

There's some discussion in this Atom ticket: https://github.com/atom/atom/issues/10188

Just flat-out more efficient code may have a lot to do with it (I have not deeply explored the codebase for either project). However, I suspect that the larger reason is that Atom ships with a ton of plugins enabled by default, whereas VS Code ships relatively lean.

If you look the settings in Atom, it tells you specifically how many milliseconds each plugin adds to startup time. They REALLY add up. Install even more plugins to customize your editor, and it rapidly enters IDE bloat territory.

All that being said, VS Code recently launched a plugin marketplace of its own. I've installed Vim emulation and a couple of others, and really haven't noticed any increase in startup time.

In my experience, Sublime is vastly faster than both. VS Code comes next, and then Atom.

I still wouldn't switch to VS code because by design[1] you can't open multiple folders in the same window, which destroys my workflow.

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/a/30234987/5905344

Sublime is already slow as hell for me. (I open a lot of logs)

I can't imagine going any slower...

Atom can't open files larger than 2MB IIRC, and files below 2MB are.. very rough. This was about 6 months ago, though, so hopefully it's improved since then!

EDIT: yep, things have improved: https://github.com/atom/atom/issues/307

It still struggles with large files. I can crash atom at work often. Never managed to crash vs code. But vs code still lacks plugins. As does sublime nowadays.

Oddly enough, about 2/3 of the times I come back to my work computer in the morning, VS Code is unresponsive and needs to be killed. (Yes, I should get together enough data to make a bug report out of this.)

But, yuck, sounds like I should keep using VS Code anyway. I kind of want to be able to use Atom, but 2 MB is a frighteningly low size limit.

Open a file with everything on one line in Atom, and you can bring it to its knees, even if the file is only a couple of kilobytes.

I used Atom for a while then switched to VSCode. Atom always felt a little "wrong" after Sublime. It works perfectly but there is this feeling of heaviness on all interfaces, scrolling etc.

VSCode works great, completely replaced both Atom and Sublime for me. Give it a shot sometime.

I've also found the font rendering on OS X to be better (sharper/cleaner) in Sublime than Atom on a retina display.

I know it doesn't add much, but ditto... I love VS Code as an editor... I work in Linux, OSX and Windows on pretty much a daily basis, having the same editor everywhere is a really nice thing. Freshly updated, and the plugin ecosystem keeps growing... even debugger support (that I've never actually used).

Latest update added an on-screen terminal view, which is definitely useful for a quick npm install, etc. Some of the "solution" stuff is a little clunky to get setup for a full project, but it's interesting the approach MS is taking on this compared to classic VS. Hoping it gets a bit better on integrated project tooling for the likes of getting some of the boilerplate setup. Seems that go, python, C#, JS and TS are very well supported (out of the box or via extensions).

I wonder if the major Atom users are working with nicer repos than those who lament that they can't use it. The ideal project would maybe be a max of 3 or 4 levels deep (but fewer in most part) with 5-20 folders/files in each folder, and most files less than 200 lines and all less than 1000 lines. A lot of repos are not like this though - they have too much crap in them.

Why haven't you tried VS Code? Relatively small download, fast install, free and open source. You could install it in just a little more time than it takes to post this question. https://code.visualstudio.com/

Disclaimer: I work for m-dollar. My commission rate is 0.0% and VS Code is free, so I am hoping to make it up in volume.

Kudos to the humour in your disclaimer :)

I love VS Code and have been using it as my main editor for quite a while now, but the lack of project-wide find and replace is why I still keep Atom around:

https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/1690

This glaring omission combined with the proposed performance improvements in the Atom 1.9 beta might just be enough to tempt me back to the Atom side again.

The thing that stops me from giving VS Code a real shot is its sad VIM mode.

I tried VS Code. I liked it. But I really miss project-wide find and replace. Hope it will be added soon.

Electron is the Chrome UI embedding shell. The actual editor code is totally different between the two.

Yes, I get that, but because they're both based on Electron, they're essentially both browsers and will do all their rendering through DOM manipulation. Yet VS Code is reported to be much better at it than Atom, so I was wondering what architectural differences account for this.

It seems there's some dramatic differences in how plugins are integrated, meaning some things are easier/harder to do via plugin. The VS Code UI is much more fixed than Atom as well... that said, other than getting used to the open files on the upper corner instead of tabs, it hasn't been bad at all. It's just out of the way enough.

Another one to try is Howl (http://howl.io)

It's newish but very stable and uses Lua (not Javascript) as the extension language. It is very lightweight and faster than Atom.

Disclosure: I'm one of the contributors.

This looks cool; kind of like modern Vim/Emacs hybrid. I especially like the filename search, which is lacking in Atom.

Thank you. Yes it's kind of like a modernized Emacs with a very nice API in Lua. I haven't used Vim so can't say about the similarity there but it does have a Vim mode.

Do you mean the normal file browser or the recursive search (`ctrl_s`)? I did find Atom a bit lacking for general quick file browsing as well as previewing and usability of things like replace commands.

I mean the ability to list all files recursively in a buffer and then search that buffer, something Emacs got right.

Ah yes - I find that really useful too!

Do you know how Emacs handles too many recursive listings? Howl just truncates the search after 3 seconds and I'm wondering if there's something better we can do.

This looks really nice. I'm gonna try to compile on OSX, shouldn't be too hard. It seems to be a modern vim/emacs with no bloated GUI, and I'm surprised by the relatively small number of LoC!

Thanks! See this comment for instructions on how to build on OSX (or what worked last time :)

https://github.com/howl-editor/howl/issues/68#issuecomment-1...

For one I understand that Atom just uses Regex to highlight syntax for languages. I'd be surprised if VS doesn't use a proper parser.

> Could someone explain what makes VS Code significantly faster?

I'm wondering the same every time someone writes VS Code is faster than Atom (which is true in my experience): yes, but why?

I never understood why everyone complains about atom's speed on HN. I have been using it for 3 years as my default editor with lots of plugins, never experienced performance issues.

Have you tried Sublime? I'm asking honestly, because I used Atom for a year and thought it was pretty fast until I tried Sublime.

The people with complaints about performance issues are the people coming from Sublime Text.

Everything you do in Sublime is done instantly. Try opening the command panel (ctrl+shift+p) both in sublime and atom. At least a 300ms difference. Multiple cursors, switching to different panels (I can see the whole pane getting rendered in front of my eyes -- not instant!), even things like loading the list of installable plugins or installing a plugin is far, __far__ faster in sublime, assuming package control, compared to Atom!

Sublime also has this insane feature where no matter how many plugins you have installed, Sublime will still start up in about 200-300 milliseconds, as fast as notepad on Windows and faster than gedit on linux. Atom only goes slower and slower and slower the more plugins you install.

When you're used to an editor that does everything instantly, everything that takes longer than 200ms takes too long.

Wow, that explains everything so perfectly.

I am a Sublime user. Your comment has moved me to register my copy now. (I'm serious!)

I came from Notepad2 on windows. Tried sublime, atom, vscode, brackets.

End d up with brackets for a long time but as much as I hate atom. It's where the plugins at. :(

> Try opening the command panel (ctrl+shift+p) both in sublime and atom. At least a 300ms difference.

Opens instantly in Atom for me.

For me too. I also tried few other things (open file etc.) and everything works instantly. Just startup time could be faster, but I launch it once a day at most so not a big problem for me.

Try Open 10 files in Atom then open the File Panel. Try the same in Sublime Text. There is a noticeable speed difference.

* while standing on your hands upside down and drinking a glass of water

You will notice the difference!!11

This is largely why I really like Sublime. But! It's worth remembering that it wasn't always that way. One of the huge wins for Sublime Text 2 was that it started up much faster than before; nowadays it's almost as snappy as Notepad!

So I'm fairly hopeful for Atom. It took years for Sublime to get to where it is today, and Atom looks like it's on track to be a great contender. ... Until then though, I'll still cherish Sublime as my go-to text editor: it's got a well earned head start.

I use both Sublime and Atom, and have switched over to Atom as my daily driver. While there's a small responsiveness difference, it's not enough to bother me for most use cases.

ST was great before the Electron-based editors surfaced and I think it's the reason we now have all the good editors, but nowadays it's just lacking in features compared to the rest.

For example, you still can't move the sidebar to the right side after all these years.

In sublime or atom? You can in atom but I believe it may be via a plugin.

When I'm working in Atom, it always feels like I'm an accidental click away from a hang. Open the wrong file and hang.

A wrong file could be something too big for Atom to open, or just a smallish XML file with all of its contents on one line. Either will lock Atom for a while on a high-spec MacBook Pro.

Other than that, I agree it's pretty fast for most things.

A big thank you to https://github.com/joefitzgerald for the environment handling!

I stopped using atom last week. It crashed too many times on me even though I like it's feature set. Went back to trusty old sublime, Atom is crash-prone and slow.

Maybe it is because of the extensions I installed but they were all popular. If so then Atom should track crashes and correlate with extensions or something like that.

I tried to like Atom two or three times, but it was simply too slow and too buggy. Visual Studio Code is much faster and I haven't encountered severe bugs so far.

atom has become my default GUI editor.

I share with others and recognize all the problems with atom. It's so incredibly slow on my strained workstation, especially with large files. And yet, same thing happened to me: it's become my default GUI editor.

I used VIM / Atom for a long time but after switching to Webstorm I just can't look back. I don't even use crazy IDE features but the click/symbol mapping and knowing what's in use or not is really dope. Atom didn't have anything that sophisticated when I used it. There was a click to tag thing but it wasn't as thorough as webstorm.

I really like how easy it is to customize Atom. I'm over "OCD" about syntax highlighting and I love how all I need to do is add some CSS and I'm done. I know it sound small, but it's a very friendly environment if you're a web dev. I still haven't made the full switch from Sublime but I'm using Atom more and more.

I finally gave up with atom this week, after switching between st3, atom, rubymine and vs code I deleted all of them and just started using vim with spf13. I liked atom and its vim-mode _alot_ but its handling of tags even with atom-ctags never worked for me.

Wow, the tab snapping in 1.9 is excellent. Looking forward to seeing that in the release version.

Atom is my main editor. It used to be little slower at ubuntu 14.04 but now on 16.04 Ubuntu, it works just fine.

But is it faster?

"Atom 1.9.0-beta0

This beta version of Atom introduces several important changes that will bring performance and reliability improvements to the editor, as well as some new features we are really excited about. We recommend you check it out! :sparkles:"

They do mention "rendering and performance improvements", and the linked pull request [1] mentions "much faster cold startup time and general increase in responsiveness".

I don't know if that means it's fast enough to replace other editors now, but it's promising.

[1] https://github.com/atom/atom/pull/11474

No. Just like Firefox. It's the same mantra over and over again.

The only excuse you can is 'but it's Foss'.

I think it's a bit disapointing to see no focus at all on performance.

Have you tried clicking the link at the top of this page that takes you to the release notes?

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