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Comment by pugio | Hacker News Reader

I've maintained restrained excitement about Atom for years. A super hackable editor (what more could a tool-obsessed coder want)... but frustratingly laggy. This release finally feels snappy enough that I may switch.

Large files, slowish startup, and the like are all special case problems that I can use Sublime for, but until now, the almost subliminal typing sluggishness always drove me away.

Bravo Atom team for making it fast enough. I look forward to continued improvements in this space.

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You may also want to give VSCode a go. I haven't used a Microsoft product (willingly) for decades, but it is a really, really nice and much snappier than Atom in my experience with things like key echos.

Their integration for TypeScript and GoLang are first class as well. Overall though I held the same excitement for Atom as you did (and I used to use Emacs for everything because I wanted an open editor in my tool belt) I've really come to appreciate the approach and polish of VSCode.

Also as a result of developing VS Code they've made HUGE improvements to Visual Studio 2017. If anyone had been programming .NET Core with VS 2015 and switched to VS 2017 you know what I'm talking about. I went from waiting 12 seconds for my project to compile to blinking and Chrome is opening up. Of course you have to turn off their browser debugging integration, that thing just sucks up so much dev time if you're not using it at all.

My experience with 2017 has been the polar opposite. It runs glacially slow compared to the 2013 installation on the same machine. The startup time makes eclipse look lean and mean, it takes over a minute to start.

Have you tried disabling package restore on open?

I'm talking about just to start the IDE with no project, opening a project is time on top of that.

I don't see how it would make a difference though, running "nuget restore" only takes a second or two.

Weird... It takes less time to start up for me, and compiling .NET Core is quicker, it even told me ReSharper is slowing down startup time at one point and suggested I disable it. Also suggested I disabled another component on startup because it was taking longer to start VS as a result. I guess it may vary depending on system specs? Not sure. I run it both on my workstation at work and on a VM on my laptop and at my home desktop.

I'm not sure why it was, but I couldn't use vs code because all the vim plugins available made it lag like crazy (~1sec per cursor movement). It's also worth noting that it only lagged on my work machine, not at all sure why :/ it was fine on my personal machine but it dissuaded me from switching because of it

All the vim plugins? That's bizarre. VSCodeVim had a bug if you were using `useSolidBlockCursor` that would slow it down, but I'd be surprised if all the vim plugins had the same bug.

Typing sluggishness in editors is definitely a real / noticeable issue. See https://pavelfatin.com/typing-with-pleasure/

I suspect that Atom has improved since these benchmarks were done.

http://i.imgur.com/0G3qbpr.jpg

> what more could a tool-obsessed coder want

An editor that is not "hacked" together on idiotic technologies ("web" "dev"), but a well designed editor, written for performance, on top of the best technology for that specific job.

yeah, portability is stupid.

you do not need javascript for portability

emacs pretty much runs everywhere

And there is a webkit extension to turn emacs into a browser. I wonder how well atom will run in emacs

Portability isn't stupid. However, one could argue that embedding a full web browser to achieve portability is.

Portability that goes against essential features of a product IS silly.

> A super hackable editor (what more could a tool-obsessed coder want)

That's why emacs has existed for decades now.

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