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Comment by rattray | Hacker News Reader

Many people use full IDE's to do their work - JetBrains, VS, etc - which are dramatically more resource intensive than Atom.

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Yes but they are IDEs, while Atom/Vim/Emacs are plain text editors.

... and Emacs really is an IDE; the distinction between it and GUI IDEs has more to do with user interface than any limitation of Emacs.

e.g. live libclang-based code completion for Emacs: https://github.com/Sarcasm/irony-mode

Atom is essentially the same class of editor as emacs. Both have designs that can accomodate IDE features (so does vim, but it's more of an afterthought in that case), but normal usage is not IDE-like. Atom is essentially emacs built atop javascript+web rather than lisp+unix.

This is more holy war material than anything really. Emacs is just an editor.

> plain text editors

I don't think that's a fair assessment given the what is now minimum expectations around syntax highlighting, syntax/grammar validation, autocomplete, etc. We're no longer dealing with "plain text".

So that's even less of an excuse for Atom's resource hogging. Vim and neovim use so little memory and are probably the most responsive editors I've ever used.

>> Many people use full IDE's to do their work - JetBrains, VS, etc - which are dramatically more resource intensive than Atom. reply

My Visual Studio doesn't need 16 GB of ram... I have enough with 4 on Windows ;)

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