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Comment by todd8 | Hacker News Reader

Atom does look very cool. Systems will get faster and any performance problems with Atom should diminish.

But Atom makes me sad. I've got years and years invested in understanding how Emacs works and being able to tweet the capabilities of Emacs and write my own commands and packages in Emacs Lisp. I feel kind of stuck with it now.

Don't get me wrong its a great place to be stuck--Emacs is the world's most powerful editor. Yet, a weakness that has always bothered about Emacs is it's reliance on an unpopular language, its own version of Lisp. There are so many Javascript programmers that, eventually, a Javascript based editor will exceed the capabilities Emacs which is written in Lisp and C. (I don't rule out success for NeoVim either, the foundation of vim with a clean way to write packages in Python, totally cool!)

I wish there was a Neomacs project or a true org-mode and magit for Atom.

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So it's now the hardware's job to adapt to poorly written software by "it should get faster"?

Sorry if this sounds salty, but I don't think it's justified to say performance issues can be swept under the carpet since the future hardware will be faster. Atom definitely needs to get faster, Visual Studio Code for example is built with the same underlying web techniques and performs way better.

There is a little community that is trying to develop software with the opposite view: http://handmade.network/

I hope their efforts result in fast software we love to use..

I manage Atom at GitHub and I wanted to chime in here saying I agree! We're not waiting for hardware to fix this. My first PC was 386 running at 20 MHz. Modern hardware is insanely fast! Improving Atom's performance is positively a team priority. The overhaul of the display layer that shipped in Atom 1.9 represents a significant step down that path.

Being sad about that is like being sad about being emotionally invested in your collection of Beatles music when all the kids these days love Justin Bieber.

The analogy breaks with the fact that if few people use emacs, you don't get to benefit for all their effort in making it better - whereas with the Beatles, having more or less fans doesn't actually make new Beatles albums.

I just wanted to plug an up-and-coming editor called Howl (http://howl.io). Written in and extended using Lua (actually Moonscript), not Javascript, and definitely very easy to extend. As an ex-emacs users I do find it similar in some respects.

I'm biased of course since I use and develop for Howl :)

Just downloaded it. It is really really zippy for at least small files! Will explore it more extensively over this week!

Excellent! It should be zippy for largish files too :D

Here's a link to video segment showing opening a large number of files: https://youtu.be/FmxKXWXj90c?t=24m50s

I'd be down for a new 'big bad editor' in the style of emacs' kitchen-sink philosophy (and hopefully completely modal by design, like spacemacs/vim). But basing the ENTIRE thing on Electron/JS/"web tech"...man, I hope not.

Systems will not get faster since Moore's (not murphys) law is reaching its end. Though Atom could certainly get faster in a variety of ways. I think my biggest problem with atom currently is that its only useful on a personal computer in long sessions. I would never (could never) install it on a server and certainly cant use it to create a little script or project.

Did you mean Moore's Law?

Is it reaching it's end though? I could foresee us simply scaling horizontally rather than vertically. Even if it ends up drawing more power, more total CPU could still mean an increase in raw performance, no?

(assuming systems were setup with better parallel processing. I'm aware that NodeJS is pretty terrible on this front)

The end of Moore's Law does not mean that processing power will stop improving. It just means that there will likely be a slower rate at which the number of transistors gets doubled. Say, 3 years instead of 2. I think there is a physical boundary to that, but Moore's Law doesn't really address that.

God a real successor to org-mode and org-babel in a modern editor would be a massive undertaking, but I'd jump ship so fast.

Yeah, I'd like to know when one of these new text editors will support plain text spreadsheets like Emacs and Org-mode do. Much of my notes include small sets of tabular data on which I perform basic calculations, and I love being able to include the data directly in my notes rather than refer to Excel or LibreOffice spreadsheets elsewhere.

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