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Comment by tornadoboy55 | Hacker News Reader

It's a symptom of a larger problem though- inefficiency. It's why everything is nearly instantaneous in Sublime but always has that tiny delay in Atom - plus it chokes on large files. Hell, the Sublime dude even wrote a custom Regex engine just for highly performant searching.

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It may be inefficient in terms of memory and CPU resources, but it was very efficient in terms of dev time and allows for easy modification by third parties. I'm not sure Atom would be where it is now if they went the native route.

When I'm doing development, I spend most of my time interacting with Atom. If I had to buy another pair of 16 GB DIMMs just for the sake of running it, I would. This is what I do professionally and I'm happy to throw a little RAM at something that makes my job more enjoyable and myself more productive.

> It may be inefficient in terms of memory and CPU resources, but it was very efficient in terms of dev time and allows for easy modification by third parties

I appreciate easy customization as much as any dev, but, in this case, I don't know if that's an advantage when as a result Atom doesn't do its primary task terribly well: stay open all day, let me type code.

Strange, I've had VS Code open for the last several weeks and it's not been an issue.

Have you ever used Sublime though? You can modify the user interface any way you want. Theming works extremely well. There's an integrated package manager too, that works superb. Sublime and Atom are pretty much the same feature-wise (they both are available to Linux too), but Sublime does it (for me) in a cleaner, more efficient and native way.

I have used (and still use) Sublime, yes. I switched over from TextMate as soon as I could.

I'm not suggesting Atom is better than Sublime, and there are definitely many cases where Sublime is better than Atom, particularly in terms of performance. I just think Atom gets more abuse than it should given how useful it is in general. Many of the complaints I see are more rooted in what they feel an app should do in the abstract (e.g. idle at under N megabytes of RAM) rather than actual issues that affect their use of the tool.

There's always a tradeoff. 95% of the time I'm not editing files more than a few hundred lines because my code is organised. I'm happy to switch tools for the "anomalous work". Nobody is stopping you using multiple editors, each for a different purpose. I'd prefer a tool that was extremely useful for the mainstay of my work, as opposed to one that makes sacrifices in order to be able to do 100% of it.

Hell, the Sublime dude even wrote a custom Regex engine just for highly performant searching.

Presumably everything Electron based is using Irregexp under the hood, so I doubt that's a real competitive advantage.

The performance difference between Atom and Visual Studio Code is interesting, given that they're built on the same framework.

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