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Comment by plg | Hacker News Reader

What’s the main argument for using Atom over say Sublime Text? (argument other than price—-I’m willing to pay $ for good software)

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For me the biggest argument in favor of atom is that because it's based on chromium it displays emojis properly, in colors. As someone who makes use of emojis extensively as variable and function names, this is very important.

Same. I also use this extensively https://github.com/sferik/active_emoji.

Haha, this is Ken M quality.

I am quite curious of the domain where you use emojis in function name? That sounds fun, and also from what I have seen of unicode support somewhat terrifying.

I work mostly in enterprise backend so variable names are typically boring, but I have never heard of emojis being used in var names.

To me, it seems clear that they were joking.

I could be wrong there, but I don't think I am.

That being said, the poop emoji would be great to use instead of "temp"

Yeah, I think op was joking/trolling as well and I fell for it. Honestly I expected something like Scratch as an answer.

I really hope they were joking. lol

Joking or not, Sublime renders emoji just fine as far as I can see. I am not using them for variables, but they are sometimes embedded in strings, and in this case it's nice that they render correctly. How does Atom improve emoji experience?

I think you're being sarcastic but others seem to think you're serious. Care to clarify? I'm leaning towards you're being sarcastic. I'd flip a table if I opened up code full of emojis.

Emojis make your code a little more like math formulas. In math formulas you use single letters. This makes the syntax easy to parse, but has the drawback that the letters are mostly meaningless and so not very suggestive. Names in programming language tend to be words. This makes it easier to remember what they are supposed to stand for but also make the syntax hard to parse and other occurrences hard to spot

Emojis combine the best of both worlds. Like the letters used in math they are easy to parse and it's really easy to find other occurrences of the same var when the name is an apple . But like the more verbose names in programming languages they can carry meaning. Eg I use the dango emoji for arrays and the monitor emoji for window instances.

Dango would be more appropriate for a dequeue, as it's not random access - you can only remove pieces from either end of the skewer. The bento box makes more sense for an array, because you can pick from any compartment.

Pancakes for a stack, popcorn for a heap, burrito for a monad.

So... just to be clear... you're serious...? I smell a clever troll.

Ah yes, because nothing says “data structure consisting of a contiguous block of memory broken into uniformly sized chunks so elements can be cheaply accessed by index” like a little picture of rice dumplings on a stick. Much better than just using the accepted technical term “array”.

Personally I prefer the abbreviation arrr, or sometimes yarr. Lets anyone reading the code feel like they just downed a pitcher of grog.

I see you’re a beta tester for Pyrate, the super-secret code name for Python4.

!Arrrr[g]

I'm not sure if it is more horrifying or beautiful that we inhabit an internet culture where we can't immediately write off "I use emoji as function names" as sarcasm.

In a culture where sufficiently novel things get brought up with sufficient frequency, dealing in sarcasm becomes dangerous territory; more generally jokes whose punchline rely on a phenomenon being sufficiently improbable cease to be humorous.

Maybe not emoji, but particularly when doing stats-heavy code, I've actually found it helpful to be able to use unicode lambda/delta

You know what really boggles my mind? You are the only person so far who has had a sane reaction to this. All these other people saying "this sounds like fun" are making me cringe in revulsion.

I can see it being 'fun' in something like Scratch. I expected op to reply with either some edutech or some domain I hadn't heard of. It does however seem that op is trolling, and I missed it.

Wow, would you mind to share some code? I've never seen that approach

Ask and you shall receive:

https://twitter.com/ChrisRackauckas/status/10064014612263321...

To me Atom feels slower and outright chokes on large files.

However, the ecosystem is nice with some good tooling for Go (go-plus) and a nice GUI to install and configure plugins.

If Sublime had the plugins I like to use I'd go back. The size, slowness and constant restarting to install updates is a pain.

The big reason I still use Atom is that it's both more visually customizable (VS Code is somewhat locked to its core layout) and that it BY FAR has the best ESlint support. VS Code is nice, and definitely faster, but it just has rougher support for addons at this point, and is just a worse UX for more complex integrations.

In general I use Sublime when I need fast editing of a one-off script, or basic work on things. I use Atom for JS development, and VS Code for the rest. If Atom was faster for starting up and handling larger projects, I'd much prefer it, but for now, I make due with VS Code.

Really, one of my biggest gripes with all of them, and VS Code especially, is that the addon ecosystem has a serious discoverability problem. If I want to find a new theme, or find a new addon for a specific language or whatever, it's much easier in Atom than almost anywhere else. When one of them fixes that, I'll be happily in on it.

I own a Sublime Text 3 license but either VS Code or Atom have a much richer plugin ecosystem. Sublime Text 3 opens in the blink of an eye so I use it to save work notes since it opens and closes so fast.

for me, atom’s initial value proposition way back when was, (well, in addition to the customizability/programmability) the third party plug-in ecosystem. It was a pretty big deal for me at the time not to have to wait for my code editor to release an extension for that-one-thing-I-use.

Atom is slow for larger files, but the vast amount of third party plugins is a great asset.

It became unusably slow for me when I got downgraded to a spinning disk machine. It was fine on the SSD machine I had before that.

I’ve only used SSD’s since 2012.. and it’s not always the case but it’s noticeable on large files. For example sometimes I open a gigantic CSV file (at least tens of thousands of rows) or JSON file in Atom, and it really chokes. But at the same time other tools are probably better for handling such large data files so it’s not a deal breaker.

What’s the main argument for using Sublime Text over VSCode?

I used Sublime for like 5 years but VSCode is better in my opinion. With updates every month and a good support team. For free.

Large files. (hundreds of MBs or in the GBs) For many this isn't a use case, but if you do a lot of data loading, troubleshooting CSVs is a common need.

Is subl really that much faster at big CSV's for you? I made a quick 10 million line, ~1GB CSV in Python, opened it in both sublime text and code. code opened in 20seconds, subl took over a minute.

Honestly, it's been a while since I tried. Perhaps I'll take another stab at it and see how VS Code has improved. Out of curiosity, how wide is the file? Some of the files I open are 250+ field invoices, so each line is easily 1k characters each.

It's easier to configure and extend.

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