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Comment by hacker_9 | Hacker News Reader

Honestly can't see why I'd use this - I have all the professional grade IDEs I need, why do I need one that is written in JS, is slower and consumes 5x more memory? Not to mention IDEs already have their own extension stores too. This seems like an 'IDE-lite', which doesn't make much sense in a world where professional grade IDEs are free.

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The same reason thousands of programmers use Vim or Emacs with various extensions as their development environment. It allows the same editing experience across multiple languages. A consistent interface, lack of need for learning many (often very different) IDEs, less proprietary annoyance, many many more options for customization, much easier to port your setup to various platforms, etc.

Admittedly I don't think Atom is a very worthwhile text editor, but using an augmented text editor as an IDE is a very common practice.

But that's what I mean - we already have Emacs/Vim, with their million of extensions, which are always going to be faster. Outside of that we have Visual Studio, IntelliJ, PyCharm, the list goes on. All downloadable for free.

> going to be faster

Fast is not the end goal.

it is when 'unusably slow' is the alternative..

At no time should my tool be the speed bottleneck. UI responsiveness is part of that. Correct code may require a certain slowness, but a slow editor will impose extra pauses that break up your workflow unnecessarily.

Emacs/Vim are far from being transparent. They have a very steep initial learning curve, and put off a lot of potential users as a result.

It's been years since I last used an IDE, but in my experience, they come with huge toolbars stuffed full of menus to open wizards with tons of options. The learning curve is just as steep.

Their advantage is that they provide lots of automatic features like spellcheck and autocomplete out-of-the-box, whereas you have to set these up yourself for Emacs/Vim.

I think that's why people are talking up what they see as an alternative to the monolithic IDE: the lightweight text editor with support for extensions. I know Atom isn't particularly lightweight in terms of memory usage, but it is in terms of functionality.

> I think that's why people are talking up what they see as an alternative to the monolithic IDE: the lightweight text editor with support for extensions.

Which is what vim and emacs, relative to IntelliJ, VS, VSCode, and Atom, are.

Lightweight text editor that doesn't drive you crazy the first time you try to quit it? ;-) As I said in another comment, I'm a daily vi user, but that's almost always when it's my only option. And that's been the case for well over a decade now. I just happen to feel more comfortable using sublime text; I always know how to do what I need to do, it's obvious, it's a pleasant experience. But I totally get some people have the same experience with vi/Emacs, and that's cool.

Lightweight in terms of functionality, not lightweight in terms of memory. Excellent combination.

One out of two ain't bad. At least they've left the one which will get 'fixed' if they just do nothing for long enough.

Oh, geez, cowboy up. Nontechnical secretaries learned how to use Multics Emacs back in the 70s and extend it using Lisp. Now you're telling me we can't expect professional programmers to learn it or vim?

If the return on investment justifies it, of course learn vi/Emacs. I use vi myself on a daily basis, but you must admit that not every professional programmer does. For those that don't, atom might be another option.

> we already have Emacs/Vim, with their million of extensions

My experience is that Vim is hard to use when you start to add too many extensions. There are just too many shortcuts to remember, plugins may interact in unexpected ways, and things like contextual information don't look as nice as they could. It just feels very 'hacky' to try to use it as an IDE.

I prefer to use more recent editors (first Sublime, but I'm sold to VSCode now) that are better suited to modern display and usages. I still use vim mode but I'm not even sure I'm really more productive with it. Sometimes I wonder if I shouldn't focus on just using mac os default binding.

I've never gotten into Vim, but a friend said something that piqued my interest.

Editing text is boring. Programming is fun. Vim makes text editing like programming.

I'm learning vim and I agree, even if there's no productivity gain (duh I'm new to it) it makes my work way more fun (I do have a contrived concept of fun though).

I find Atom to be the best editor for Markdown, though not much else. In particular, it has superb support for Pandoc as well as a good spell corrector built in.

Have you tried Typora[0]? It features inline rendering (i.e. images, formatting...)

I have barely used my standard editor (Sublime) for Markdown since I discovered it.

[0]: https://typora.io/

I think that's less relevant than it used to be. JetBrains is now the de facto best IDE for Java, JavaScript, Python and PHP. It has Android Studio and even support for C#. Visual Studio also supports a wide array of languages. I'm in IntelliJ pretty much all the time, no matter the project.

I program a lot in C, F# and Python. I mostly use visual studio code (electron app similar to Atom, but better). It's great if you're using languages which don't come in one IDE, or where you need to pay for the IDE (F#).

Take a look at full Visual Studio, it's a much better IDE for F#, the free version beats vscode for F# dev hands down. Though I like VS code for its portability.

IntelliJ is expensive if you want languages not covered by the free edition (like JavaScript), though, and even if you pay for it some things are frustratingly distinct such as if you have a Java/C++ app you need two different "IDEs" (CLion + IntelliJ), and you need to then juggle between those windows. Android Studio is able to work with both even though IntelliJ Ultimate isn't (why, Jetbrains, why!?), but getting Android Studio to work on non-Android things isn't the nicest of experiences.

I'd be more willing to pay for the quality if a nice, unified experience was the result, but it annoyingly isn't. To say nothing of the lack of support for things like Rust.

That's what this new generation of IDEs is exciting to me - the unified language server standards. Let the compilers handle understanding the code which is what they are best at. Especially if it helps make IDEs less tied to the build system in general (no, CLion, I don't want to use CMake)

Intellij Ultimate costs me £14 a month, with the plugins (which makes it equivalent to Phpstorm, PyCharm, Rubymine and Webstorm) thats less than I spend on coffee in two weeks, it's insane value however you look at it.

That said I still spend a chunk of time (maybe 30%) in vscode because for somethings I prefer it (it's git support with git lens is incredible) and for TypeScript it's comparable to Intellij with the advantage you can start it, do an edit and close before Intellij has finished re-indexing.

I keep seeing people writing about these "cheap" intellij subscriptions but on the website it's 400 pounds a year.

I really would like to see this utopian world where all other professions outside IT also get their tools for free.

My grandfather was a master carpenter, he had a saying I've always liked "If you use something for more than an hour a day buy the best you can afford".

I've never minded paying for developer tools as long as I could afford them, lots of professionals spend a lot more than we do on tools/professional development.

How did he feel about perpetually renting them? Even if the tool is currently perfect, I don't trust that the company's future plans will align with my future needs; I expect that they'll diverge.

edit: I stand corrected; didn't see the asterisk and the separate page specifying that an active subscription isn't necessary to continue using the current version of the software.

If you bother looking at the page you'll know when you buy a yearly subscription (or 12 consecutive monthly) with Jet Brains you automatically get a perpetual license for the current version.

You only need to keep paying if you want to keep getting updates. If you're happy with the current version no one is forcing you to keep paying or keep updating.

I can't speak to all IDEs, but at least with IntelliJ you're not just renting it.

They even give you a helpful info-graphic telling you how to minimize subscription cost if you just want to get a perpetual license for a particular version:

https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/article_attachments/203545445...

I looked at the page, but didn't read the definition of "perpetual fallback license". Thank you for the clarification.

It still seems bizarre that one standard case is that you pay for a subscription, presumably using version x, and then are pushed down to version x-1 if you didn't subscribe for at least a year under version x.

Thinking about it a bit more yeah, when you stop subscribing you might have to roll back 12 months of updates on your machine, which is pretty odd. Clearly they want to discourage you from doing it.

At least bug fixes are included:

"The license also includes all bugfix updates, more specifically in X.Y.Z version all Z releases are included."

I can understand giving you the major version at the time you bought the subscription but it's a bit stingy to exclude minor version bumps (Y releases).

It's not minor version bump. JetBrains doesn't use semver. X.Y is typically a major release, with X being the year (e.g. 2017.2)

That's an unrealistically forgiving outlook on this.

You're forced to upgrade when the language you're using upgrades. Or the ecosystem around the product evolves. The IDE doesn't live in a vacuum that will work in perpetuity.

It's realistically much closer to renting than buying as once the updates stop it's not that much longer until the product is no longer usable in a modern environment. Simple example would be if you want to use Kotlin 1.1.4 (latest stable) you must be using Intellij 2016.2 or newer to get the corresponding 1.1.4 kotlin plugin. And if you use an older plugin, the IDE will complain at you and things will be buggy and not work right. Similarly since gradle support is built into the IDE at some point that will fail if your IDE is no longer being updated.

It's not realistic to avoid updating the IDE for long. That's why Jetbrains prominently features subscription and yearly renewals - because you're very nearly forced into it.

You can hardly blame them for this situation though. They obviously have to do work to keep the IDE up to date.

With all subscriptions 1 year or greater, the JetBrains license grants you an eternal, irrevocable license to whatever version was the latest version at the time your subscription expired (look up perpetual fallback license).

I'm not a fan of their license change either, but calling it perpetual rent is just not correct.

Last time I checked it was the FIRST version you could keep forever. I guess they wanted to avoid having people buying a license every other year. I could be mistaken, though.

That actually happened with IntelliJ - which is one reason why I'm trying to move over to Atom.

It used to be there was a plugin package to allow you to use IntelliJ for C/C++ development, in addition to all the other languages. That changed, though - and they split CLion off the main branch.

So now - if for instance you want to do NodeJS robotics work, and interface to an Arduino (for example), you would need to use regular IntelliJ with the extensions for javascript, and CLion separately for C/C++ development. Essentially dinging you twice for what should be the same damn product.

It wouldn't surprise me in the least to see them split the javascript portion off into its own editor suite as well.

Atom may not be or have everything that IntelliJ does, but because it is open source, and extensible, and not controlled by a singular entity, I know that I don't have to worry about it changing like that in the future.

Don't get me wrong, though - I like IntelliJ, I think it's a great IDE (started out with PHPStorm). But I think it should have stayed general purpose and extensible, and not lock languages out to move people to another (but essentially the same) IDE. I'd have no problem paying the yearly fee - but I'm not going to pay for it twice.

Offtopic: I would also urge you if you want to solder not to buy a cheap soldering iron from radioshack, etc. If you don't have the money for a weller or hakko soldering station then at the very least buy a chinese temperature controlled hakko 936 clone. The difference between a crap iron and a decent temperature controlled iron is gigantic.

I used to solder a bunch as a kid, using my dad's Weller gun (which was built like a tank and still worked last I heard, even though it was something like 40 years old). When I bought my own cheap soldering iron "pencil" as an adult for one project, I thought I'd forgotten how to solder. It seemed so hard to get good joints with the cheap iron. The Weller gun wasn't even temperature controlled but it worked. The cheapo pencil iron just didn't get hot enough fast enough to be useful.

Then I bought a mid-range Weller station and things got super easy again. It's about ten years old now and still works fine. It's probably a worthwhile investment, even for rare use. I mean, it's only ~$100 to get a pretty good iron, vs. $20 for garbage.

If I ever could get my lazy butt in gear, I want to make a video to prove that you can solder competently with a cheap and crappy soldering iron.

I have a soldering iron that has to be the cheapest of the cheap, that I've had since 1991; I got it when I went to a local votech electronics school fresh from high school.

It's something like a 35 watt pencil iron, and the tip is janky like nobody's business. You have to wait like 15 minutes for it to heat up. The tip is not in the greatest shape.

But I can tin that puppy up and solder perfectly with it. Now, I'm not saying you could do SMT rework using it, but basic thru-hole is no problem at all. I've assembled tons of things with it over the years.

I also have a couple of older temp controlled irons - and they are great tools as well; honestly, I prefer them over my old iron. But I know, at least for myself, that what iron I use doesn't make a difference in the project, but rather the skills I bring to the table.

As the old saying goes, "a poor craftsman blames his tools"...

Sure, I'm a poor craftsman in this regard; I don't solder enough to ever be good at it. But, really, when you've gotta wait 15 minutes for it to heat up, and then after a few joints you have to wait some more because it cooled off in the process...really, is it a good, or even usable, tool?

I merely found it difficult to use the cheap pencil iron to get good results, because good results required a lot more out of me, mostly in the form of patience waiting for it to get hot. Also, I suspect cheap tools have gotten worse since 1991. I have cheap tools I bought in that era that are higher quality than the same brand/model today.

Nonetheless, it's just good advice to use good tools if you do something often. And, sometimes it's good advice to use good tools even if you don't do it often, but expect to do it again in the future (I find myself working on things that require soldering every couple of years, but expect that'll be true for the rest of my life, so I might as well use a decent iron to do it...it's not like they stop working after being stored for a year).

Not to mention this whole society which expects everything for free has made it very hard for a small company to get into the market and innovate.

If you think about how much money you can make from a professional tool and how much productivity it gains you then the price should be a no brainier.

Except that your grandpa didn't have to pay a monthly subscription for his hammer. I really dislike the subscription model for tools.

For a company, yes. Individual license is much cheaper, but the devs need to pay for it themselves.

Exactly this, work would pay for it but I didn't ask, I already had a personal subscription and I use it at least as much outside of work as I do at work.

https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/buy/#edition=personal

119 for Intellij 199 for everything.

I didn't need everything since Intellij with plugins is everything (for the stuff I do).

You're probably looking at the "Businesses and Organizations" pricing, where the org pays £499/yr per user. The personal ("Individual Customers") license is starts at £199, and decreases to £159 then £119 for subsequent years. There's a bunch of groups (e.g. Open Source projects) that qualify for free or heavily discounted licenses too.

And maybe importantly, you can use a personal license at work, on paid projects, etc.

I've never been particularly bullish on Atom or Electron, but I think Jetbrains is going to be eating their lunch for awhile at least.

You have to buy a personal license yourself, your organization cannot pay for it. I just don't want to pay for work tools, my employer should do that and then it is the higher price.

That's fair. Personally, though I could get the business license and expense it, I choose to pay for it as a personal license because I use it personally as well, and I'd be happy to pay the individual license price either way.

I don't know where these numbers come from. I just looked it up and my subscription to all IDEs JetBrains had to offer is $149/year. Given how much time I spend in RubyMine and IntelliJ this is a great price. Even if I wouldn't every once in a while use AppCode and DataGrip as well.

My only issue is lack of good Rust support.

IntelliJ ultimate doesn't include C++ support, though, which is an additional $100 to get the "all products" package. $250 for a fairly basic C++ IDE that insists you use Cmake is not exactly an "insane value" to me, but ymmv.

C++ tooling is fairly abysmal. Partly because the language is so darn complex and full of warts. You basically need to implement most of a compiler to get meaningful IDE features.

Point being, a higher price point for a C++ IDE makes a lot of sense.

C++ has libclang, which is "most of a compiler" and pretty good, so if you can plug libclang into your editor, which most editors like emacs can do, then it's pretty close to an IDE.

The reasoning I've heard why an IDE doesn't do that (as opposed to a beefed-up text editor) is that an IDE needs to continue parsing and analyzing even in the face of an error in your source code. Because, presumably, you still want features like "jump to the definition of FoobarClient" to work even if you've misspelled something in a header included indirectly by FoobarClient.h.

Compilers generally stop after the first set of errors in the first compilation unit. IDE indexers want to keep going as much as possible.

> a higher price point for a C++ IDE makes a lot of sense.

Except Eclipse does C++ better than CLion and it's $250 cheaper. The only real advantage JetBrains has here is consistency with their other products, but then they ruined that by putting it in its own standalone product. So you can't have, say, a Python/Java/Kotlin project with a C++ extension library in a single IDE window, at least not if you're invested in JetBrains technology.

Whereas that would work fine in vscode, Eclipse, Atom-IDE probably once it gets a C++ language server plugin which LLVM is working on, etc... Competition is good. IntelliJ is far from complete. That's really all I'm getting at. IntelliJ is not the pinacle, superior end-all-be-all IDE that some were saying here. It maybe is if you're in their primary supported set of languages. But it's not if you're at all on the fringes of what JetBrains supports (not that I'd necessarily call C++ a "fringe", either, but whatever)

The Eclipse indexer seems better. The CLion search tools and non-C++ features (integrated DB utilities, OOP-style refactoring tools, etc.) are certainly better.

Expensive?!?

It is a bargain compared with what I used to pay for programming tools during the 90's.

In other professions people care to buy their tools.

> In other professions people care to buy their tools.

JetBrains' tools have to be rented.

This isn't accurate. When you now pay for a year long "subscription" you own that version and can use it indefinitely. Exactly like buying a version-license previously.

> JetBrains' tools have to be rented.

That's not correct. JetBrains subscriptions come with a perpetual fallback license for the version available when you purchased the subscription. This is basically the same as the previous model where you would buy a license for a specific version with free upgrades for some period of time afterwards. Most people would continuously buy the upgrade license they wanted to stay on the latest version.

https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207240845-What...

Like when you used to have buy your compilers.

Relative to the productivity gains from IntelliJ it's well worth the price. It's pretty much the only development tool I gladly pay for.

I don't remember if IntelliJ Community Edition's license disallows usage of third-party plugins for languages already coered by JetBrains's paid products.

If not, anyone can create e.g. a free and open Python or Ruby IDE inside the familiar IntelliJ IDE experience, e.g. by adopting IDE-like software used in Emacs, Vim, or Sublime.

See also: language servers. I think that the future is "the editor of your choice" + "the language servers you can afford". JetBrains's IDE is already modular, but these modules just happen to run in the same Java process. This limitation of IDE architecture can be overcome, and companies like Microsoft keep pouring efforts into it.

Dunno I used to think it was, for businesses. But if you buy your own personal license you're paying a lot less than you would for Visual Studio overall. I was fortunate to have a discount for having had a student license, so I got like 40% off the price tag or something. I paid under $200 for software that allows me to make thousands every year. Not only do you get all those fancy Java IDE's but you get ReSharper and the whole family for Visual Studio. I say it's underpriced, and every year I renew they lower the price, but my license is perpetual the moment I stop renewing for a year. I think if they charged me $300 a year I'd still find it worth it considering all they give me in return. I'm able to be much more productive in not just .NET, but Python, Java, JavaScript, PHP and other languages, and hopefully someday a Rust IDE comes out of their workshop.

This is tangential, but the IntelliJ Rust plugin is fantastic, and just got officially supported! (http://intellij-rust.github.io)

If you check the changelog [1] you'll see the rust plugin has been officially support for a little over a year.

1. https://intellij-rust.github.io/thisweek/

I meant "officially supported by JetBrains" (https://intellij-rust.github.io/2017/07/31/changelog-47.html)

I get your pain ... the Verilog Synopsis integration party took about a decade to get over, and at $20K+/seat, it hurt to have to shell out for 2~3 independent-but-each-necessary licenses (as an indie).

But, for JetBrains, at $200/seat/year ... as an Indie making anything more than $150/hour, why would you even worry about it?

EDIT: I'm mostly a vi guy, so I don't really know my ass from a hole in the ground w.r.t. IDEs. It's just ridiculous to me that a professional might complain about a $200 tool being expensive. But, your constraints are not my constraints, so I'm probably being overly judgemental. And, for that, if I am, I am sorry.

Not true for Javascript, the cool thing about VS code is that it will automatically download the typescript definition files even if you aren't using typescript. So you get much nicer hover and autocompletion than intelliJ/webstorm.

He did say IDE, VS code is still considered an editor (like Atom, Sublime Text, etc.)

I'm not using JS anymore, but when I did I remember IntelliJ Idea using the typescript definitions as well. There was a section for it in the settings menu.

I love IntelliJ for most languages. When it comes to JS/HTML/CSS though I use VS Code...

I find it's IntelliSense and TypeScript support superior. Especially when I'm on a project using webpack/sass/etc. IDEA just seems to get lost. It either can't find a method definition or is constantly complaining about various things.

Did you try WebStorm? Idea is a Java IDE. AFAIK you don't get the same experience from Idea+Plugins that you get from the dedicated version (in this case WebStorm). If you extend Idea with plugins you get what's available for the limited community editon.

I have IDEA Ultimate, which, as you said, allows the same functionality via plugins but isn't the same experience.

WebStorm is somewhat better, but I'm not going to pop for another license when I technically already have that functionality covered.

I haven't tried WebStorm since 2016, so my last experience is dated but I've just gotten to like VS Code for front end work.

I still use vim over pycharm and I write quite a bit of python and spent quite a bit of time using pycharm and setting it up. Most big IDE features break down in large code bases and for simple code bases, vim's python support is fine.

> Visual Studio...

Isn't it basically an Atom alternative? What makes it, and not Atom, an IDE rather than 'augmented text editor', to borrow GP's phrasing?

I think you are mixing up Visual Studio Code, the free and open source text editor with Visual studio, the closed source and paid IDE.

Ah, guilty as charged, thanks!

Not sure if they mean Visual Studio or Visual Studio Code. VSCode is an Electron-based editor similar to Atom; full-fat Visual Studio does support many languages by itself, but it's Windows only.

That's not 100% true, there is Visual Studio Mac which is based off Xamarin Studio but has a lot of the internals from Visual Studio in it like InteliSense and Roslyn

I agree; I use intellij for the consistent experience across languages.

It's difficult to beat vim (or Emacs) for quick edits. But for deep-dive coding I'm gladly sold in on jetbrains.

defacto "BEST" for Javascript? I think you would be suprised how many people do not use JetBrains products at all if you went to a JavaScript meetup.

Best != most used. I think most Java developers still use Eclipse.

>>>> JetBrains is now the de facto best IDE for Java, JavaScript, Python

I can't speak for most languages, but for Python it seems to be very far from the "de facto"; I've only seen a few people, and most people strongly dislike it.

> The same reason thousands of programmers use Vim or Emacs

Vim/emacs give a better experience though: they work in a terminal/over ssh and they are FAST and lightweight (memory use). Atom has neither of these properties.

That's not false – but it ignores the point the grandparent was making, which is that minimizing switch cost is valuable to some.

Switch-cost between what? Vim has worked pretty well for me for all programming languages I've used and on all platforms I've used. I reread grandparents comment and I'm a bit unsure what you are referring to exactly.

I'm just saying that you're hijacking the point (that using a single editor, rather than switching between IDEs, is useful) and replacing it with a competition for size and speed. Yes, vim and emacs are lighter. Does that devalue Atom's consistency? No. I say this as an avid Emacs user.

Ah, I understand now.

I guess my point was that since vim/emacs already exist and have advantages, that use case for atom seems a bit unnecessary, but of course in reality many people don't use vim/emacs due to the learning curve, so I suppose the point is irrelevant.

I've been wondering if there's a way to use a more graphical editor over SSH, such as vscode or sublime. I get that I could just "learn VIM" but I already know a shitload of hotkeys for vscode/sublime (they're easily transferred), so I'd rather just use them.

You can open the file via SSH but use a local copy of VSCode/Sublime: https://codepen.io/ginfuru/post/remote-editing-files-with-ss...

You could do X forwarding

Electron apps are terrible with X forwarding. Even locally, on your own LAN.

It's all rendered bitmaps getting sent over, causing much lag and terrible performance.

Not recommended.

Surprising, considering it's origin from web tech.

> Surprising

Or not, your forcing rendered html/dom over the x window protocol. What web tech is in this stack? Only your rendered app on a gtk/qt/wtk(not sure what atom is using, etc) window. Nothing on the network side.

mmm I wanted to edit my post but it seems to get locked after time. So just adding a comment with some info and corrections on the topic.

- Atom on linux uses GTK+[0].

- GTK+ uses XLib[1].

- From the wikipedia link "Xlib makes the client synchronous with respect to replies and events." so much for js being async ;)

- Do anybody know how workable chrome or even firefox is over the x window protocol?

[0]: https://electron.atom.io/docs/development/build-instructions...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_System_core_protocol#...

Learning Vim -- even the smallest subset of it -- will continue to pay off years into the future! Then you can combine it with existing Atom/Sublime/VSCode keymaps where need be and really have a nice fusion of functionality.

(VSCode vim mode is A+ btw)

I gave VSCode's vim mode a shot a few months ago and found it nowhere near Atom's vim-mode-plus. Has it gotten better?

Well, I think it has (I'm one of the developers). Since the beginning of April there's been over 149 pull requests merged. It's definitely gotten better.

Nuclide has pretty good support for remote editing (it's Facebook's "official" code editor internally), and VSCode is adding similar functionality. https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/pull/30337

Just mount your remote folder with sshfs [1] and enjoy your local toolshed :) . X forwarding is overkill when all you need is accessing files.

[1] https://github.com/libfuse/sshfs , packaged by your distribution

Agreed. SSHFS is the way to go.

Well, I am editing remote code over SSH with Atom and Nuclide right now. It's been possible for a long time. Now you can even run a remote debugger on your Python program.

Ok, I take that back then. Vim/emacs only have a weight/speed advantage then.

I do, however, find it useful that I can be ssh'd into a machine, doing stuff in bash, and I can fire up vi. I suppose that's a separate discussion though.

Emacs has Tramp, which lets you edit files, manipulate directories (with dired), and do many other stuff you normally do on files seamlessly on remotes of all kinds, including ssh. If you're using emacs like vi where you start it up for each file and close when you save, you're extracting no value out of it, just use Zile.

This feature is somewhat less useful with the advent of sshfs.

It depends on what you do with it, as it does more than ssh. For example there's /sudo:: with which you can edit local files as other users. Also I have links to remote files in my Org files, and if I have ssh-agent running (which I always do), all I have to do to go to that file/directory is to click the link.

My vim process comes to a crawl if I forget to turn off syntax highlighting before opening large files. So I disagree.

That has not been my experience with vim (over the past ~12 years). I don't run a huge amount of plugins, but I do use a few. The only thing I have a noticeable occasional lag with is the parinfer clojure plugin (in neovim, and its more that the plugin lags before applying its changes rather than vim itself lagging - the author does acknowledge that its currently sub-optimal). Syntax highlighting has never caused any issues for me. I wonder why you are having issues... that does sound rather annoying.

I was also referring to the typing latency as measured by the benchmarks here: https://pavelfatin.com/typing-with-pleasure/ As you can see, vim's text input latency is measurably lower than most of the other tested editors on most platforms (zero-latency IDEA seems to beat it in some cases).

That’s a broken highlight syntax file. The good ones don’t highlight text until it becomes visible in the buffer. You should bug it if it is reproducible in neovim. The team is highly responsive.

It happens with large javascript files (bundles). I use this:

https://github.com/othree/yajs.vim

And my color scheme is:

https://github.com/nanotech/jellybeans.vim

Not sure which is at fault (if either).

Yeah, yajs hurts performance. There's actually a disclaimer on that landing page you sent me.

Neovim has its own js/json highlighting out of the box and it's pretty crazy fast for me.

Except that we already have Jetbrains for this.

> why do I need one that is written in JS, is slower and consumes 5x more memory

> The same reason thousands of programmers use Vim or Emacs

Uhm nope.

Dedicated IDEs seem targeted at “I'm going to spend all day living in this one big project.” Text editors such as Atom and Visual Studio Code seem better at editing a single file, or bopping between a few projects (either within the same or across multiple windows). Either can technically handle the opposite extreme, but seems out of its element there.

Also, I have yet to see an IDE that looks and feels like a native macOS application. (I'm looking forward to being corrected here.)

XCode?

D'oh!

(I also have fond memories of Think C and then Metrowerks, back in the day. A lot of us used them at Apple, instead of the official MPW.)

This brings up some other advantages of text editors versus IDEs, within my limited experience:

* More rapid support for more languages and syntaxes

* Many of the IDEs just feel sluggish. (Yes, Atom can get that way with large files, large numbers of files, or too many plugins.)

* Xcode in particular kept crashing on me last time I used it for Swift.

> fond memories of Think C and then Metrowerks

Me too, especially the former. It's so weird the things our nostalgia anchors itself to. And don't get me started on ResEdit. My emotional palette has a color reserved specifically for the feeling I got poking around applications and creating icons and cursors using it.

I'm preferring Visual Studio Code to normal Visual Studio whereever possible. Reasons for this is that I find editing (Ctrl-D) and navigating (Ctrl-P) there much more efficient, git integration is great, and I get more code on the screen (especially on a notebook).

For languages were the language service is good (typescript, C#) I barely see a disadvantage to full visual studio. For languages with weaker support (C++) I tend to open the project in both environments and use Code for longer editing tasks and full VS for compilation and debugging.

Tips: VS has a full screen mode. It also has a very configurable layout, much more so than VS Code or Atom.

But if you like VS Code then you should use it.

I don't use Atom but I do use Visual Studio Code (which is also Electron based). I use it because there are no real IDEs for Elixir and navigation is amazing. It is also lightweight (compared to JetBrains' IDEs). Another big plus is that it runs on Linux.

I wish they'd put this sort of manpower towards fixing Electron.

Or you know, move away from it entirely. But in all seriousness, I actually really like Atom as a text editor, and wish it didn't consume so many resources to run.

My primary complaint is that it can't handle large files at all. Why can't I use it to look at my logs without it completely freezing?

Too bad Mozilla is discontinuing Positron. With Servo coming up and Firefox nightly using Stylo it feels very fast compared to Chrome.

Configuration.

An IDE comes with its own text editor. Any Emacs user will tell you it is much more powerful to have an IDE come with your editor.

The ability to have your editor configured exactly how you want it (keybindings, fonts, etc.), and consistently use that configuration for all of your text editing is definitely appealing.

The same goes for having all the plugins you use with your editor available when doing "IDE" things (debugging, etc.).

TL;DR It just all-around makes more sense to have IDE features built into an editor instead of the other way around.

The fact that it also has "in collaboration with Facebook" as its tagline tells me two things:

1. This is designed specifically for React since Facebook wants to control that ecosystem.

and

2. Github is internally stuck in 2013 when FB was still "cool" and using the cloud (ooooohhhh, aaaaaahhhh) to power everything was the new trend.

Don't get me wrong, Github is a fantastic product and community. But they really shouldn't be writing desktop software.

It is just a web software masquerading as desktop software.

There are times when just using a text editor is nice. An editor with better language awareness is even more useful. An experience like that has been possible for a long time, but this looks like a much easier way to get there.

I concur. Although the thing that troubles me most about them is that for both Atom and VSCode, the binaries that are distributed by their parent companies are not a direct compile of the public source code. They use the MIT license to their advantage, clone the repo to make it private, make changes to that private repo and then distribute the binary compiled from it.

In this sense, among the popular options only Vim and Emacs live up to my expectations. Also IntelliJ possibly.

This is demonstrably false. Atom's official distributions are built on public CI platforms (Circle, Travis, and AppVeyor) from 100% public repos.

Oh sorry, I suppose I misunderstood something. It indeed is made from public repos.

But then again, I researched a bit and found the licenses to be a bit problematic, not that of Atom itself but the additional packages that are bundled in the binary. It includes some packages whose licenses are unknown and others such as Facebook's libraries(a lot of them) which have the non-free BSD+patents license. In totality the license of the binary doesn't seem to be a really good one.

I switch between Atom and JetBrains IDEs all the time. Atom is definitely peppier and has been for over a year. It has a better feel to it and much more customization. The only thing that is better about JetBrains is the exceptional debugger. Nothing in the Atom platform comes close to the JetBrains debug (and test runner) experience.

Because unlike the "profession grade IDEs", this one doesn't make me want to gouge my eyes out.

As a frivolous aside it's refreshing that the screenshot shows a light theme. Getting a bit tired of all the heavy black slabs.

I agree. A better approach would have been to take something like IntelliJ platform as a base.

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