Hacker News Reader

Comment by heygrady | Hacker News Reader

Bundling these features by default is bad for Atom. It changes Atom from an editor to an advertisement. Maybe Github dwarfs the competition but boxing them out of the editor is unnecessary. This smells like bundling IE with Windows 98.

View on HN

On the other hand this will Github an incentive to keep on improving Atom. Maybe someone has finally figured out how to monetize an editor. I hope so, cause the current ecosystem of editors is a mess of half baked solutions.

Monetizing an editor was a solved problem 40 years ago.

but stopped working maybe 20 years ago.

Why use one of those half baked solutions when vim already exists?

Not everyone is productive using vim.

I've never actually seen anyone use vim more efficiently than the average programmer can use Sublime Text or Atom with no skill and a mouse pointer. It's just too much required engagement to do things as simple as move to a specific point on the screen or uncomment/indent a bunch of lines of code. Installing plugins is tedious, tabs/buffers/windows are clunky, and memorizing key commands for plugins (like a file tree view) is required before using it, not gradually learned using context menus as a crutch.

You are obviously entitled to your opinion and it might be that you've only seen people who are still learning to use vim, but to give little perspective from someone who has been using for little over two years.

Movement:

Moving around is a hassle at first, most people insist using arrows instead of hjkl, but even thous are slow and tedious. You get much more mileage from using w, e and b for jumping between words, but even thous get slow after a while and recently I've been using the f and t commands to Find and jump To places (characters) I want to. Obviously it requires some time to learn and I am by no means perfect, but I dare to say it is faster than scrolling and pointing with a mouse.

Plugins:

I don't really see how installing plugins is tedious, you just slap one of the managers into your ~/.vim/autoload (I use pathogen) and then rest you just clone to ~/.vim/bundle. Vim doesn't have build in plugin browser and one click install, like Atom does, but at least to me that is not a problem. Maybe it's because I don't use that many plugins, who knows.

Tabs/buffers:

These do take some time to get used to, but I wouldn't say they are any more clunky than your average editors tabs.

Memorizing commands:

At first it seems like insurmountable task since almost every key is a command and as you mentioned most plugins have their own commands, but truth is you don't need most of them to get started and as you use the tool (or at least thats how it was with me) you Google how to do something tedious faster and there is almost always a better method. As for the "file tree view", I don't know what that plugin is, but I can guess and I used something called NERDTree at start, but vim's build in :find command is pretty powerful at just finding what you need and now I use fzf which makes finding files even faster.

Over all I get why you might dislike vim even without trying it (since most vim users constantly push their shitty editor (and dont get me wrong vim is shit, but it's least shit editor I've yet found)), but I suggest you try using it on a side project and see if you like it, don't install any plugins at first just try reading the documentation and making changes to the config as you go along. I bet you'd be surprised how much you'd enjoy it.

I've tried and learned vim and I'm very capable of navigating with it (I don't use marks but I use about everything else) and it is precisely good at one thing: being an editor. If you try to make it an IDE, I believe you're just using a bad IDE. It is only effective for me as a very lightweight editor for quickly making simple edits to a file.

Why don't I like it as an IDE?

* Second hand auto complete

* Second hand project management

* No debugger

These are actually to me huge features and the third party support for each of them exists but doesn't touch the quality of implementation in a dedicated IDE. Not to mention it adds hours of extra work to getting started in an environment you don't already have configured.

And frankly, you don't have to learn vim to recognize this.

If you need IDE then go with IDE. There are many programming tasks and languages that gain no benefit from IDE-ish things.

For me auto complete works just fine and I don't know what project management means.

The critical feature of auto complete is discovery, not saving a couple of seconds of typing (its always too slow for that anyways). Even if a plugin exists (which I dont think one does) which has auto complete with in line documentation and method/property details (pretty crucial to discovery), theres not a chance in hell it succeeds in making it presentable in the terminal.

I think VSCode/atom fit in the nice space where you don't want huge, intensive projects, but you do want to do some real programming (aka you'll need this discovery and a good debugger).

>real programming

Ok :)

Language servers could solve this problem and let editors hook into a deeper source of understanding of what they're editing, without building in the functionality themselves.

[1] Intro blog post: https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2016/06/27/common-langua...

[2] http://langserver.org/ - has a table of current implementations

I used vim for 3 years until Sublime Text came out and found I get work done much faster with it. I used the jump feature (forgot what it's called, similar to AceJump on emacs), position stacks, search commands, etc. I installed and learned NERDTree (that's the name) and a buffer management plugin, but they took hours to get used to while editing and many more hours to configure my .vimrc to be somewhat sane. ST came along, and with some plugins, I was able to migrate very smoothly and was introduced to some new editing methods, like multicursors and the wonderful Ctrl-Shift-Up/Down commands for moving lines. No more sequences of characters to perform a common task!

If ST was open source, there would be no need for a competing GUI text editor IMO.

If you feel like remembering vim's commands is a chore then it is not for you. For me they are reaction, I don't even think about chaining then together to accomplish my task.

As for plugins I do not see the need for NERDTree or buffer management. At least for me searching (:find for files and :b for buffers) works perfectly fine and I dare say better/faster than file tree navigation.

Multicursor is fun, but it can be achieved with a plugin in vim also, but I'd just make a macro for it.

Moving lines up and down can be easily done with dd and p, so I don't see the issue here either.

>competing GUI text editor

There might be your problem for me using vim with tmux makes my life so much simpler than using gVim or other GUI editors.

You just made my day!

Didn't knew Ctrl-Shift-Up/Down how can I've been coding without!

None of Vim and Sublime Text has "Github integration" or "deploy to Azure" or "send feedback to Twitter" type of features. They are plain, simple, useful editors which get the job done.

Sure, I think we can all agree that bloated features like this are undesirable. But there are many options for editors that don't have these features, gladly.

Installing the bundle as a plugin would change none of that. Editors are half-backed because the proof of concept is easy and the fully realized app is hard. Atom has some good things going for it (minus performance) and this Github bundle is probably awesome. But it's not good product management to pick favorites like they did.

More like a mess of overbaked solutions.

It's a tricky question. Visual Studio Code (probably Atom's chief rival at the moment) has git support right out of the box, so there's a plausible argument that it's a must-have feature. GitHub is less clear.

I find bundling Git support with Atom is a requirement, VSCode does it.

Of course, VSCode also supports TFS, Perforce, and Mercurial via extensions:

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/search?target=VSCode&ca... Providers

There are community-provided atom packages for all/most of the providers you listed. The point isn't one editor versus another. The point is that Atom should remain plausibly neutral about Github (which is separate from Git or Mercurial or whatever).

An analogy would be if VSCode shipped with a fancy CodePlex dashboard by default (I know CodePlex is dead). There's an obvious incentive for them to pick sides but it's not in the best interest of the people using the editor nor the editor itself.

> An analogy would be if VSCode shipped with a fancy CodePlex dashboard by default

Or, for example, a "Deploy to Azure" button...

Git support is different than a Github bundle. Github is different than Git.

But atom is made by github, right? Not to justify their choice but you can see from a company perspective how it surely aligns with their goals (increase github market share).

I wonder what the market share is and if they're actively seeking it at this point.

I wouldn't say that they necessarily want to increase their market share at this point (but that may have been the original intent). Now it is probably more about retaining as many users as possible by offering more or more convenient services than their competitors.

It would be quite fine as a plugin. I'm using fossil for instance so care little about git integration. Atom is already bloated and slow as it is, but then again it's their call to bundle whatever they want because I'm not going to use it anyway.

As long as they make it easy to hook up to a competing repository solution, like Gitlab, I'm fine with it.

I've always considered Atom to be an advertisement for GitHub. The branding is unmistakable.

to me it smells more like adding a "deploy to Azure" button to Visual Studio.

(It's had that button since Azure started)

Thing is, nobody is going to download Atom, see that the GitHub support is built in and say 'oh! Now we're going to have to migrate the team to GitHub!'.

VS Code has a smiley you can use to post feedback to Twitter. It makes the status bar look like a juvenile bulletin board. It's already been reported as an issue and people want it out of the way. That alone made me deinstall it after less than five minutes.

Really? You gave up on an editor because of a smiley face icon? And you call the editor juvenile?

I seriously have no words. That is the pettiest thing I've ever seen in my life.

I couldn't agree more. Thanks for saying so.

who cares what it smells like.. if you use github, why would you prefer github to "stay pure" as you've put it?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com