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Comment by joehewitt | Hacker News Reader

Don't get all the gripes about slow startup time. How often do you launch your editor? We're programmers - the editor stays open all the time!

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Every time I type `git commit`. Every time I visualise files with ranger (terminal based file browser). Every time I typed an email, back when I was using Mutt —which I might again.

For such quick jobs, launching the editor should be instantaneous. And I don't want to use another editor for them, I like the key bindings of my main editor.

> Every time I type `git commit`

This is true with something like Vi but with a separate GUI app, wouldn't the most common case be setting EDITOR={atom,code,etc.} and it simply opening a new window in the already-running app?

(Or, for that matter, don't most people using something IDE-like use the built-in UI to make a commit?)

Opening a new window in the already-running app is also slow; they cover a strategy for increasing that performance in the linked blog post.

No doubt but e.g. VSCode’s sub-second performance shows that’s not a huge stretch while sticking with Electron and it has a subset of the challenges for startup performance

Have you considered that Atom is not an editor meant for "quick jobs"? It's a workhorse for programmers who are coding all day every day.

I don't think that's a good justification for slow startup time and general sluggishness. Despite having 30+ plugins and 800 color schemes installed vim starts up in just a few milliseconds on my work rig. I code all day every day.

There is also time to open new files as a subset of startup. Atom is significantly slower on large files than sublime.

I launch instances of neovim all the time. So often that I have a keybinding for it (super + v). It launches and is ready to use in under 500ms.

I use vim, which launches almost immediately. I launch a new instance for every file I open, each in a new screen. It seems to work fine. Yet I wouldn't be able to do that under atom... (ignoring the issue of it doesn't work with tty).

I don't either. It's pretty fast as it is. Even if it took 10 seconds I don't think I'd mind too much as I close atom maybe once every few days, mostly by mistake (stupid cmd+q)

VS Code's update cycle is like once per month which requires a restart. It starts up so fast that it doesn't even matter. Can't say the same for Atom.

If you're on the insider channel, the update cycle is daily. Microsoft's Code group is really knocking it out of the park with attention and responsiveness.

I would like to be the first to welcome you to the world where your personal preferences and experiences aren't universal. I don't use my computer exclusively for editing text, and therefore my text editor is not open all the time.

> I don't use my computer exclusively for editing text, and therefore my text editor is not open all the time.

Ok, well if I was developing a programmer's text editor I'd consider you a marginal user and design for the use case of the editor staying open 24/7. Startup time seems pretty low on the priority list.

Design for whatever you want to design for. Plenty of us are programmers who program all day every day and still don't agree with you. What you choose to prioritize is different from what you understand, though. So at least now you should "get" the gripes.

Well if the Atom developers are reading this I want to encourage them not to waste energy optimizing startup time due to Hacker News complainers who are using the product for a use case better suited to Notepad.

I imagine you use arrow keys too.

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