For once, on an atom release thread, can we have a discussion about atom and this release rather than endless threads about folks preferring vscode or sublime?
It is fast, even with Photoshop, Indesign, and multiple Chrome tabs opened.
Pros: its handy and has so many addons. Not crippled with useless toolbars like Eclips-y editors.
Cons: Sadly, it's still missing a "go-to-method-declaration" feature (did I miss something? ), and is awfuly buggy when editing over FTP.
I've been a long time sublime user and found it very very difficult to switch to anything else, mainly for performance reasons. But I decided to give atom and vscode a real try for a couple of weeks each. These are my findings and results.
I started with VScode when dotnet-core was officially released for OSX. The debugging features, performance, and usability were awesome. I was going to stop right here and jump to vscode except for these reasons.
- Tabs. I know they're coming, but every time I had to go looking for the correct file I was ripped out of my train of thought.
- Shortcuts. They're completely different to sublime/atom and I didn't feel like learning a bunch of F-key shortcuts.
So I decided to give atom another go. Right off the bat I had a very nice looking editor. I appreciate the settings UI that isn't just a text file. The project view on the left is way better than sublime's. A major pain point of mine with sublime was opening a file with CMD + T, but then being unable to find it in the project view on the left. Atom has a reveal in project feature that expands the tree and focuses the file. The git status indicators on each file are nice too. The shortcuts are similar enough to sublime that there's no learning curve.
Atom has a lot of really nice quality of life improvements over sublime text. Startup is really slow. Incremental search is really slow. When I'm viewing large text files I still load them up in sublime text. But for the majority of my coding now, I'll be using atom.
I do quite a bit of C# development in a windows VM, so I might fire up vscode for that use case if dotnet core becomes an option for the app I'm working on.
Indeed I liked the good looking atom without configuration. Lately I switched back and use sublime with the material theme which is great, but atom is much easier to style, or doesn't event need it.
In the end it was startup performance that killed atom for me. I use it to view all sorts of single files as well and each time it took ages to open a file which I wanted to look at for 20 seconds.
Not on HackerNews in this reality, a while back someone did analysis of most voted comments, the top-comment is usually contrary to the post and its first reply is counter-contrary (pro-OP). Post about Golang -> get pro-Haskell comments, Android <-> iOS, iPad <-> Surface, Linux <-> *BSD. Its what we are.
Sure, let's focus on Atom's speed issues.
"Oh, I don't have a problem with my laptop's CPU fan spinning like a lawnmower. Surely deep architectural nonsense will be solved in the next minor update."