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Comment by Klathmon | Hacker News Reader

As is usual with these releases, i'm always more interested in the new Beta's.

1.13 is going to have some pretty big changes. They are removing shadow-dom which is kind of a big deal and i'm really curious for the in-depth post about what didn't work with it later (until then, [0] is the PR that talks a bit about why).

And 1.13 will also include a change [1] that will allow it to better handle large files, which I know is a huge plus for a lot of people (it hasn't been a problem on my machine for a while now, but clearly people are still having issues with it).

It looks like it's going to be a good update.

[0] https://github.com/atom/atom/pull/12903

[1] https://github.com/atom/atom/pull/12898

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As much hate as Atom gets in these threads, I'm impressed by the team's (and contributor's) continuous work into making Atom as good as possible.

Though it might just be a small, loud minority: Most devs I meet in real life use Atom with no problem or just have no opinion on it.

I've stopped caring what "HN" says about things.

I'm mainly a javascript/php developer that uses Windows and Atom... I'm used to being told I'm wrong. But at the end of the day, these are the languages, platforms, and operating systems I get the most done with, and I just don't seem to hit the issues everyone keeps saying I will.

Your not "hitting the issues" because a lot of them are philosophical, so if you don't care, you just don't care. I also did not care for a long time, now I do care and I get to hold that over your head. The more you know, the bigger jerk you are allowed to be :)

Damn, I gotta learn haskell!

I also use Atom, and just can't seem to garner an affinity for VS Code. I came from a .NET background, so I've struggled with Visual Studio and Nuget for years, and it left a bad taste in my mouth. I'm also probably just used to using Atom for my Node development. But aside from finding out very quickly on here that I'm wrong for using it, I don't find anything difficult. I've built many successful projects with it.

Also, Nintendo kicks Sega's ass.

I love VSCode from a technical standpoint. They have clearly picked a better architecture when it comes to performance, and they have done a pretty damn good job at showing that a web-based application doesn't need to be a "slow resource hog", but on the other hand I MUCH more prefer Atom's policy of "plugins are everything" over VSCode's "Core should do everything, and plugins are second class".

But at the end of the day, it's a choice, and i'm glad we have competition to keep everyone on their toes!

I totally agree, I wish there was 50 viable choices. Competition is good, look at our ISP situation.

Same here. I get funny looks for using Emacs at work. I tell people that I've done all of my best work with Emacs for 20 years, and the only way to get me to change is for management to implement a standard, required tool suite.

When I was on Mac and in the earliest versions of atom, I suffered through the slow startup time and keystroke lag for the ease of customization (JS/coffee, JSON/CSON; vs custom DSL, C, Python or whatever). Altogether, I'm not very opinionated about text editors, so the pros and cons were pretty negligible. Upon switching to Linux, the performance were gone. I don't know if it was because I'd been using too old of a version on Mac or if OS X just has a latency penalty for using web views.

I personally don't have any perf issues on Linux or Mac, of which I use both regularly.

I've been using Atom since a fairly early version, upgrading with each release, and it has improved a lot. My guess is that SSD makes the biggest difference, though: startup is near instant on my current MacBook, but can visibly struggle on my older work iMac if there are Windows VMs hitting the (spinning rust) HDD.

Hate? Does it? I use Atom for Rust development, and so far it's the best I use there. From that I started using it for some JavaScript, and now for other languages which have less IDE support out there.

It's an excellent editor IMO and easier to configure than emacs, gets support for new languages etc faster than the IntelliJ derivatives.

At this point the only thing I really miss (I haven't set it up yet) is a steppable code debugger, and smart code refactoring, like IntelliJ's excellent method renames or variable reordering operations.

> I use Atom for Rust development.

I think that sentence is funny. It also explains the hate. Ideally highly optimized tools would be used to use/create/run more user-facing, less optimized tools.

People are working on that in Rust, but it's taking a little while.

My one gripe is how it handles large files. It's definitely an issue because if you fuck up and "accidentally" open one, it's a bitch to get Atom to stop (you basically have to kill the process, which always feels heavy handed) and basically drop to less, which sucks because the whole point of using Atom is to get away from the terminal.

I definitely still use it, though, for python projects smaller than 1,000 loc.

I like it. I'm a Python dev, so there's this gravity pulling me towards Sublime or wanting to like Sublime more. And, while Sublime is faster, I think I just like the way Atom looks more (a bit cleaner IMO), and I've gotten use to the default keybindings.

Yeah, now if only they could make it not crash and leave me with a 0 byte file after I've done 3 hours of work on it, I'd really appreciate it.

When was the last time you used it? IIRC it auto saves every so often and I've never list more than like 5 minutes of work.

Just last week this happened. Not sure how, what or where it autosaves, but it sure didn't recover from this.

I haven't gone that long with saving something since I lost 6 hours of work in Photoshop a few years ago.

I was saving constantly, just hadn't committed it as I hadn't finished the task yet.

It wiped the file when I saved the last time before it crashed.

Wow. Pretty much the worst kind of bug you can have in an editor. Did you ever trace it back to a specific bug? I'm a tiny bit concerned now.

Shadow DOM fixes CSS scoping with the caveat that it fixes CSS scoping. If want to allow a 3rd party to style inside of a shadow root CSS variables is the only current way. While this works, it's pretty painful to pass variables for each property you need to style.

We desperately need CSS @apply [1] which gives CSS something similar to sass mixins. So to theme inside of shadow boundaries you would pass @apply rules.

[1] https://tabatkins.github.io/specs/css-apply-rule/

Also, on a minor note for us package creators and maintainers: this version includes the latest version of CoffeeScript, 1.11.1, which will make package development less of a dark ages exercise.

Now I am really tempted to install 1.13... Many of those changes are pretty big deal, and I am really curios to see will there be any (better to say how much) performance improvement.

I feel the same way with most releases, but the Atom team means it when they say it's Beta.

It's easy enough to switch between the 2 releases, but don't do it on a day where you will need to use the editor in any serious way. Bugs will happen, and with this one in particular you are almost guaranteed to hit visual issues.

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