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Comment by mzzter | Hacker News Reader

I really wanted to give Atom a chance since it gets stuff like ligatures right, but I find its slow startup speed to be a no-go. I simply find in Sublime a much stabler experience and faster startup time, which makes it feel more productive.

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So did I. And every time I downloaded it again, I'd open a medium sized file, scroll down, the scroll lags, and I delete it again.

I was very pro-Atom for a while. I've since packed up and moved to Vim and then on to Emacs with evil-mode.

I never had any performance complaints while I was actually using Atom, but a while back I made a mistake when generating a text file that turned out to be ~1.5GB. Luckily, it was just one mistake in the footer, so I could take care of it without regenerating the entire thing.

Without even thinking about it, I opened it up with Emacs, went to the bottom, made my changes, and got back out. About a minute later, I saw how large of a file it was and was suddenly even more impressed with Emacs than I had been.

Just for fun, I then tried to edit it with Atom. Nope.

I can get behind it on my *nix systems, where I find it fast enough, but I find it terrible on Windows, especially when it updates and I find myself with two versions.

ligatures in source code? It seems as soon as I use a non-fixed width font, then indenting and other code formatting becomes tricky. Bjarne Stroustrup uses a proportional spaced font in his C++ book and I hate it.

There are ligatures in fixed-width fonts[0], like VSCode with the Fira Code font! I've been using it for a week or two now and like it so far.

[0] HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14821446

There was a whole discussion about ligatures in programming fonts here [0] a few weeks ago.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14821446

Yes, specifically ligatures in fixed-width fonts like erik-g mentioned. My personal favorite is Hasklig[0], which is based on Source Code Pro.

[0]: https://github.com/i-tu/Hasklig

Okay then ... does look good ... I assume that normal ascii is used under the hood and that is what the lexical analyzer sees. I am open minded -- of course it has to work with emacs -- I am not that open minded ;)

It's just a font, the underlying text is still the same no matter what font you use to render it. In fact, you could set Fira Code (or Hasklig) as the font for your terminal and (as long as your terminal app can render ligatures) it would render in emacs or any terminal-based editor.

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