Ask Stack Overflow for Atom | Hacker News Reader

Ask Stack Overflow for Atom

atom.io

165 pointsChris91137 comments

i guess the vim, sublime, etc people that don't know it yet are gonna be happy, because it means that they'll find out about howdoi now:

https://github.com/gleitz/howdoi

    pip install howdoi

vim plugin: https://github.com/laurentgoudet/vim-howdoi

one of the emacs plugins: https://github.com/atykhonov/emacs-howdoi

one of the sublime plugins: https://github.com/azac/sublime-howdoi-direct-paste

howdoi uses Google to find results on Stack Overflow while I used the Stack Exchange API for this package. I'm a bit disappointed with the results returned by the API both sorted by relevance and by votes. Down the road I'd like to merge the results from Google and the API to get the best set of answers.

Love the links, ty!

I think this is less useful than it looks like.

When editing code, I'm not browsing StackOverflow or switching to StackOverflow so much that the actual Alt+Tab-ing to the browser window is the bottleneck. And when I do Alt+Tab to the browser window, I usually search Google for what I want to achieve, and yes, most of the times I end up on StackOverflow, but sometimes other sites, most notably Wikipedia, can help me better. Periods when I'm on StackOverflow are more of a small research session within a development session. Quick look-ups constitute a smaller fraction of my Google searches, especially when I work in an environment/language I have grokked.

Pasting from the answers I see even less useful. What was the last time you actually pasted verbatim a code snippet from a StackOverflow answer? In 95% of the cases, I read the answer to get an idea and then implement it appropriately in my code. Such copy/paste solutions are most often just hackjobs full of kludges that are worth marginally more than a pile of dog shit.

> I'm not browsing StackOverflow or switching to StackOverflow so much that the actual Alt+Tab-ing to the browser window is the bottleneck.

Ever used multiple monitors? I used to have the exact same issue but multiple monitors save so much minimize maximize time.

Perhaps my wording wasn't clear enough—I was actually saying that minimize-maximize time wasn't a bottleneck in my case because I don't switch so much.

But I agree with you, multiple monitors would help tremendously. Even more so when doing some web development work, when changes can be immediately previewed.

It depends what language I'm working with. Is it one I've used for years? My questions tend to be much more abstract and structure oriented, and I rarely copy anything verbatim.

However if it is something I have less experience with, or just starting to learn, most of my queries I am concerned with the exact details and end up copying verbatim more frequently.

Genuine question.

Are people actually using Atom in production projects? I found it unusably slow because it's browser-based; a generation behind Sublime Text in speed.

I set myself a target to use it for a day, but it slowed me down far too much and I ditched it within three hours. I'm going to try again when there is more stability and speed.

I am. I was heavily using Sublime but switched over for a trial period to see if I liked it. Overall I'm quite happy with it; it's incredibly snappy for me (almost as snappy as Sublime) but it's start-up time is a bit slower.

So for now I'll probably keep using it but on some larger files it can become slower much quicker than Sublime or others. Fortunately I practically never work with large files so it's not that big of a deal.

I switched to Sublime from Vim because it looked prettier, but Atom looks better out the box. Also, Sublime barely moves on my 09 tiny macbook air, while Atom performs well.

On the 2014 iMac, slowdowns on big files I barely noticed, what I don't like is that if you have the editor open forever, it starts moaning like a dying whale, regardless of the beefiness of your rig.

>I switched to Sublime from Vim because it looked prettier

I find this to be a very curious reason to switch from Vim... were you a very experienced Vim user? Ever give MacVim a shot for the different color schemes? Don't get me wrong, I like my editor to look nice also, but Sublime isn't exactly a prettier version of Vim - they have very different strengths and weaknesses.

Yeah, about 5 years or so. I'm using the vim plugins for both atom and sublime. I liked the minimap, and the default font. More importantly, it was hard for teamates to get used to when doing pair programming.

Also, it's not really that different, save for the modal editing stuff. Anything else there is either a plugin, or a clone, or better stuff.

I used it a month or two ago and found it unusably slow but recently gave it another shot after they released an update and now it's pretty much on par with Sublime on my system. It might be worth you giving it another go.

I'm used to heavyweight IDEs like Eclipse, so it's pretty snappy by my standards.

I use it pretty interchangeably with ST3 since most of the keybindings are the same. For Rails, JS and general web work, it's pretty nice. The Atom Linter plugin is nicer than at the Sublime linters I've tried. I've been on it from day one and have encountered a number of bugs, but I do prefer its settings pane and ability to reskin the entire ui easily, the ability to quickly tweak themes and plugins with just html, css and JS and the fairly quick pace of development. I like that they're curating an official package manager with an update UI and an official repo instead of it being 3rd party bolted on functionality. Remapping keys is easier and profiling a slow/problem plugin is doable without resorting to trial and error.

I do wish there was a good way to resize split panes though. And the file size limit sucks when wanting to view logs. Their vim mode is still not emersive (my only comparison are evil-mode, which does a damn fine job, and ST Vintage mode, which is... ok).

It's still new, I'm willing to forgive growing pains and I think it could easily overtake ST eventually, given that it's fully open source, is making faster progress, is free, and offers a whole lot of feature parity. Speed has never really been a problem for me and my codebases, but i can imagine that the web stack its built on could be a source of problems in some scenarios.

This is really neat, and it will probably be very useful to some people, but it sets off some very loud warning bells in my head. Is s/o really for copypasta mining? Sometimes, I guess... but still.

I agree. I mean, I can see it being useful for things that you "know" how to do but just forgot the syntax... But the chances that a random javascript snippet on SO are right seems pretty damn low to me!

> Is s/o really for copypasta mining?

Based on the questions there, it's primarily for that.

Watch out for the license. The source appears to be licensed under CC-BY-SA, which at the very least requires attribution, and might be GPL3-style viral.

http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/12527/do-i-have-to-w... http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/06/attribution-required/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/

Same thing for VisualStudio/Bing

http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/a1166718-a2d9-...

This is neat. I use a similar tool on VS 2013 [0]. MS launched it very recently. It's called Bing code search. Pretty nifty, Although it's lot advanced but I hope tools like this grow to be better and comparable to this one. Anyone using vs 2013, do check this out.

[0] http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/a1166718-a2d9-...

Personally, I am shocked that everyone applaudes such a thing on HackerNews. Is that what programming means nowadays ? Copy-pasting random code snippets from StackOverflow, gluing them with other code snippets found elsewhere and hoping that it compiles. Anyway, OP seems to have done a good job; he has identified what modern programming means and provided an excellent tool to increase today programmers productivity. Excellent ... and hopeless.

Microsoft did it before:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudio/archive/2014/02/17/intr...

http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/a1166718-a2d9-...

Copy-Paste, evolved.

Dash App also have an offline Stack Overflow access (20gb): http://blog.kapeli.com/offline-stack-overflow (great for developing on the airplane)

I see it is a pretty useless package because switching to Stack Overflow once in a while isn't a big productivity hit for me. I would prefer not having anything except my project code on my window.

seems to be done atm.

here's a cached version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:/...

This might be an interesting idea for a vim plugin too, need to teach myself vim-script first...

plagiarism y/n?

Is there a precompiled binary for windows somewhere? Why is it only available for Mac? I think this feature is very useful.

You can install it via Chocolatey. If you already have Chocolatey installed, then just run:

  C:\> cinst Atom

http://chocolatey.org/packages/Atom

that is super nice.

You can use my builds, http://atom.someguy123.com

They're well tested by a lot of people, and I offer both stable and unstable releases

github, we want atom on linux

You can compile it for Linux now that it is open-source, I believe people have made binaries too, e.g: http://www.webupd8.org/2014/05/install-atom-text-editor-in-u...

If you are comfortable building from source it's already out. I've had it installed for a few months now

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