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A lot of people have similar complaints about Idea. So your complaint is only different because Atom happens to eat a bit more memory. Do you know that Emacs means "Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping"? See, it's wasn't different 30 years ago. One can easily build a workstation with 128 GB memory if he's making money with it, it's not very expensive, so 1 GB of RAM would be less than 1%. I don't see much issues, honestly.

Of course it's nice when programs are fast and not hungry. Reality is that developers happily trade performance for power of abstractions.

One can easily build a workstation with 128 GB memory if he's making money with it

That's a very narrow perception of the profession. There are developers making money all over the world, and hardware prices don't scale down according to national salary levels. Even in Western Europe, that's more than a month's salary for a medium-level developer in some countries.

How much RAM does the average developer have?

I’ve got 16GB in both my 7 year old iMac and 4 year old MacBook Pro. I’ll probably get a new computer next year with 32GB of RAM. I don’t think an editor using 1G-2G matters to me.

I don’t currently use Atom but if they innovate faster and eventually build a better editor, many devs will choose it.

The average is 8g still running windows 7.

Wow, it’s time to reread this:

https://blog.codinghorror.com/hardware-is-cheap-programmers-...

The whole point is that many programmers, even in Western Europe, are not that expensive. When one makes less than $20k/year, those "mere" $4k suddenly pay for a full trimester of work, rather than less than a month.

How about providing some facts instead of making it up as you go? Who's making less than $20k/year? Who can't afford to buy 16GB of RAM? It's $130 on Amazon.

I think I had this same conversation when someone told me that the average developer can't afford the $70 for Sublime Text.

Who's making less than $20k/year?

I did, for the past five years, working as a Python dev in my country of origin (Portugal). And I occasionally went to interviews, and the offers were not better than what I already made, nor did most of my college friends make more than that.

You can imagine how much some developer from an actual poor country makes.

Who can't afford to buy 16GB of RAM? It's $130 on Amazon.

Prices are higher here, but in any case, that's the wrong question. Those $130 are worth much more to a person making $20k/m, or to a company paying that much, especially since many costs (not just hardware) don't drop with the salary levels (and in some cases are quite higher, e.g. gas prices), and so even the share of disposable income, not just the absolute value, is much lower. So it'd be absurd to waste that meager margin on RAM just to use a fancier editor.

If it's just a fancier editor then it's not worth investing any money into upgrading for anyone.

If you save 20 hours a year then it pays for itself. Everyone's economics are different, and the amount of time saved may be different. In the United States, you only need to save a few hours of work to make the upgrade worthwhile.

Fortunately, Atom is free so we can evaluate it to determine if it's worth the hardware upgrade.

Just to add there are students too. I was an international student until last year and made less than $20k in Boston. I had 8 GB of RAM, it wasn't plenty, but it was just enough. I definitely would not have preferred to use Atom then, as the benefits over Emacs weren't worth the trouble I would have had otherwise.

We moved from 4GB to 6/8GB in the past five years.

Around here the most lucky ones have 8 GB, while some still have machines with 4GB.

You don't need to like Atom, but to claim it's a "bad editor" for everyone is silly.

You can use multiple browsers to preview, I prefer to have it in the editor which makes it easier to switch between (same argument for code tabs vs windows). I still test and work in multiple browsers to ensure compatibility, but being able to get the rough parts laid out in the editor itself and fix/develop on things that are the same in all browsers is a great productivity boon (especially when i'm working on my laptop with limited screen real estate).

And again, I could run everything in a separate console window, logging to files, etc... But having that in the browser is a boon to my productivity. Having notifications in the browser window that a test that was running in the background failed and being able to click a button and open right to the test file + source file that failed along with annotations about coverage data in the sidebar saves me quite a lot of time and effort.

If Atom is useless for you, don't use it! But don't act like it's garbage for everyone. I don't need a car that goes 200MPH but that doesn't mean every F1 car is entirely useless, just that it's designed for a different purpose.

I currently have 3 different atom windows open, each with 1-4 panes with probably 5-20 tabs open in each and it's using a whopping 1.8GB (super rough counting, didn't want to actually add it all up). That's a lot, but it's not enough to outweigh the benefits for me. I'm not "sticking hardly to one regardless the pain", i'm sticking to the one which makes me the most productive and is the "nicest" for me to use (if i'm frusturated by constantly finding windows, i'm not going to be a better developer) It might be too slow/bloated/whatever for you, and that's okay, but for me it's more than fine.

> I don't need a car that goes 200MPH but that doesn't mean every F1 car is entirely useless, just that it's designed for a different purpose.

Those cars use huge resources for extreme performance. I don't think Atom provides extreme performance even after using extreme resources.

It depends on what you consider "performance".

An F1 car is going to be the worst tow truck in existence. It's "towing performance" is basically a 0/100.

Atom's "extreme performance" for me is in my productivity. the 2GB of ram that my atom windows are currently using is a very very small price to pay for better productivity.

Even if Atom were so resource hungry that I needed to buy a new laptop every other year for $5000 (which I don't), if it makes me more than 2% more productive, it's paid for itself.

> better productivity

than what ? wtf is worse than atom. Even notepad++ is better.

Better in which way? In your daily usage scenario? Memory usage? I'm sure there will be cases where Vim or notepad++ works better for me. At present, vscode works for 90%+ of the things I need to do. For my usage scenario, notepad++ is not better than vscode. Use whatever application works for you, but don't say something is better or worse, without looking at it subjectively.

why are you talking about vscode ?

Last time I used visual studio it was great, levels of magnitude better than notepad++, but not quite as good as intellij.

I think any discussion with you is pointless. You just love this editor, and whatever things you need to sacrifice to use it are file. This includes buying a new laptop each year, using only small files, buying more ram etc.

I'm just too old for flame wars with their-own-church believers. I just need to write code, so I switch tools to appropriate ones. It's just a tool. I'm sure that some hammer-loving guys do all things with hammers, even if that's terribly hard.

If you really think that Atom has "extreme performance", you really don't know other tools that are on the market.

Good luck, the hardware industry will love you even more.

I really feel I described why I think that pretty well.

If you are more productive doing things another way, that's fantastic! I use IDEA when i'm working in Java code, I use Atom when i'm working with web stuff, I use tail/grep when searching through log files, I use CLI tools as much as possible for everything else as they integrate with things like editors and IDE's very easily.

Everything is a tradeoff, and nothing is perfect. Atom enables me to be a better dev in some areas, and is frustratingly awful in others. But I do genuinely love the editor. I'm glad someone has finally made the tradeoffs that I prefer in an editor, as for me reducing memory usage by a few hundred MB will make literally 0 difference in my life, but adding the ability to click a spot in the embedded browser window and have it take me to the code that defines that component is a nice productivity boost.

This is unduly personal. That breaks the site guidelines. Please post civilly and substantively or not at all.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Atom's "extreme performance" for me is in my productivity

Yet there are lots of people who are extremely productive with vim. So I don't think you can pit subjective metrics (productivity) against objective (RAM usage) here.

Why not? Its just that for the subjective metrics people will have different opinions and therefore draw different conclusions about which one is "better"

Which is the OPs exact point. While some people value their editor being very light on ram, other people value other things, and that's okay.

Have you tried vim? When I say tried, attempted to actually get into it. Not accidentally open it && stack overflow how to quit. You can easily do what you mention in vim... and I have no doubt, much quicker. Let's not forget vim gives you the power of cli, in addition to all it's other text manipulation benefits.

> Atom's "extreme performance" for me is in my productivity.

Thats fair. I also find Nissan sentra lot more productive than high perf cars. But if I claim it is extreme performance car in a room full of people, I do not know people will be polite or laugh me out of room.

It does (to the op) and the op explains how. Performance is not always the speed of the editor.

Page polution - most mid-tier desktop software developers today don't even know what it is

It's much simpler:

If Atom is so resource hungry, and I have alternatives which are not = IMHO the editor is a bad editor.

Use whatever you like, but it looks like the most important thing is that you like it, not that it's resource hungry.

> Not to mention that a 6MB file is pretty fucking big for something like atom.

This it the most funny part of your comment. I want my editor to open my files as they are. Some people could be happy with editors allowing for max. 20 lines per file, and I'm sure they would also claim that longer files are bad, so it's fine that an editor doesn't support that.

Use whatever you like, but don't claim that using 3GB of ram to open 6MB file is fine, because programmers couldn't implement that properly. It's not the file's fault that it cannot be opened normally. Really don't blame the file.

I'm not blaming the file, i'm saying that using a hammer as a drill is silly, and that it's not the screw nor the hammer's fault, it's the user's.

Atom was designed as an editor for web developers. They took some trade offs when building it, and because of that opening large files is difficult for it. When I need to open large files, I use tail, or ed, or notepad++, or just grep or something else.

It's not that the Atom programmers couldn't implement it properly (FFS they built github, i'm sure they know how to open a file without using 1GB of memory...), just that it didn't make sense to for the usecase atom was meant for.

But it doesn't seem like i'm going to convince you, so I guess we can agree to disagree!

> I'm not blaming the file, i'm saying that using a hammer as a drill is silly, and that it's not the screw nor the hammer's fault, it's the user's.

No one is claiming the opposite. An appropriate argument is that some nails are bigger than others and this hammer in particular chokes on big nails.

> When I need to open large files, I use tail, or ed, or notepad++, or just grep or something else.

Breaking your workflow in the name of progress seems counterintuitive.

> I'm sure they know how to open a file without using 1GB of memory.

The realities of Atom prove otherwise.

>Breaking your workflow in the name of progress seems counterintuitive.

Using another editor where opening large files doesn't break my workflow, but needing to alt-tab over to the browser to see how my changes look does is much worse for me. I look at log files every few days at most, and generally while they are on another system.

I look at the results of my development on my app hundreds of times a day.

If it's different for you, then Atom might not be the best tool for you!

> If it's different for you, then Atom might not be the best tool for you!

Likewise for tools that imbue the user with a blind eye and patronizing tone.

> I'm not blaming the file, i'm saying that using a hammer as a drill is silly, and that it's not the screw nor the hammer's fault, it's the user's.

Except in this case, we're comparing two hammers - just different brands. If we were trying to use Microsoft Word to code, you'd have a point.

> Should I be just a brainless monkey, and be happy that it's fine? Well, my machine has lots of ram, but I need it to some other things as well.

To do what ? Open another terminal ? /s

Why complain and not just use another program? There's many options. But if you like using Atom and also like complaining - then you're like a helpless baby crying for attention.

Submit a PR and be done with it! Viva la open source revolución!

VS Code, I switched from Atom I have peasant-grade computing

Edit: can't remember off hand the reason I switched, idle ram usage or latency possibly

Why would I put in all that hard work when I could shame the maintainers on HN into fixing my issues?