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Comment by kolev | Hacker News Reader

I've used React since it became available and the editor is still pretty slow, to be honest. Can't imagine using it with the option enabled. Honestly, Sublime Text is great, I've purchased a license, but the speed of development will kill it. Every day I "Check Update" and I get disappointed. Not that it needs that much new stuff, but still. You don't feel the heartbeat, if you see what I mean. One great feature of Sublime that I miss in Atom is persisting unsaved changes between restarts, which I abused for temporary To Do lists and stuff.

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Upon downloading and running Atom, that was also immediately the thing I missed most. I really love the scratch-space as a feature that Sublime Text gives me, and I find that I want it in more and more things.

It's not really the same thing, but there's a scratchpad plugin for Atom that might be useful for you.

https://atom.io/packages/scratchpad

Thanks! Looks like a good plugin for quick notes.

Although it advertises persistence, it doesn't look like it works. Everything I put in there is gone upon restart.

Interesting idea though. Thanks for pointing it out.

Yeah, since this is generally how things work in OS X it makes Atom feel quite ancient to me.

It's such a major step in the wrong direction to have to go back to trying to avoid shutting down applications/your computer since it's such a big hassle.

If I want save something I'll save it and if I want to close something I'll close it, just keep it "open" for me in the mean time.

Atom persist the workspace per directory.

   $ atom some/where/to/my/project
   # open files
   # close atom
   $ atom some/where/to/my/project
   # atom reopens everything I had open for that project

Much more sensible for me than the reopen every single project I had open last time.

This is incorrect: unlike Sublime, Atom does not persist unsaved files across restarts.

(If step (2) is "create new file", Sublime will preserve it, even if it's not saved.)

It does, just not for `untitled` files.

This just shows how hard it is to please everyone - when I was using ST, disabling the open file persistence was the first thing I did. My usual workflow has me editing / looking up information in many different files, usually just a bit here and there, so at least once every two hours I'd cmd-q the whole mess and `e .` in the project directory and re-open the files as I need them.

I think it just shows that you do computers wrong.

Okay sorry that sounds snarky and unproductive- What I mean is, as a model for how human evolved navigation works- a persistant work space with effectively no need to "save" work is more like reality. If you scribble something on a napkin, and leave it on your desk, the desk doesn't demand you name the napkin when you try to leave the house. At the exact moment you need to leave to go to work, is the exact moment you are least prepared to think of a name and location to find something later.

But with a persistent workspace, you can just shut the program instantly, without being spammed by 15 "save, discard, cancel" dialogues. Pressing the power button on the computer, and having the computer just.. turn off… and then turn back on having not forgotten anything by accident or otherwise. You can name and save stuff AT YOUR LEISURE.

that. is. the. future.

…. of 1996. It's 2014 now and we've just now gotten round to adding it… to one program. a text editor. now we just need to get the rest of the developers in the world on board with this really obviously correct thing to do.

actually, several programs of the OSX stack behaves like this, take the Notes app for example

On the bright side, if memristors work the way I think they do, by 2030 you should be able to shut down any computer and turn it on in to precisely the same state as it was before, even if things are in mid-computation.

I have this feature I really like in Windows, Linux and Mac OS X that's called "hibernate". It basically works like you described :-)

(Expecting explanation on why hibernation is considered harmful. )

Is there an argument that hibernate is harmful? I hadn't heard that one.

It's certainly useful, but I think the comment you were replying to was thinking more along the lines of saving that state without doing all the work our computers have to do to go into hibernate.

I for one would love a faster and less error prone sleep/hibernate feature. (Although recent Mac OS implementations have really cut down on the error prone part of that. I'm not sure where the Linux/Windows crowd is on that, I would assume the story is the same/similar.)

OS X has also really cut down on the time it takes as well. I close my Macbook Air, and the lights cut off instantly. I open it up, and in the time it takes me to type in my password, it's loaded itself to the exact state I left it in (actually did it while typing this comment). I haven't used a Windows or Linux laptop in a while, but I hope for the sake of people that have, that it's a similar experience. Having the freedom to close your laptop without a second thought is great.

> If you scribble something on a napkin, and leave it on your desk, the desk doesn't demand you name the napkin when you try to leave the house

Maybe if they did, my desk wouldn't be so untidy right now.

The save/discard/cancel dialogs are there for a reason: the computer doesn't know whether you want to save or discard! "Keep everything" is not a solution.

Usually I will keep about 50% of the "unattached" files I create. Some will be good ideas: they get saved. Some will be go nowhere: I throw those away.

For files attached to a project it's more like 100% -- so they should be named upfront on creation.

Besides, doing something "at your leisure" is a euphemism for never doing it at all. People are difficult like that.

so when you're trying to do something else is the time to be making these decisions?

Learn to use emacs! What's great about it is that it's so flexible and powerful that any one can make it please them. Pretty much every feature that ever shows up in a cool new editor I end up seeing in emacs too.

Very powerful editor (vim too), seriously consider challenging your assumptions around text editor productivity...

Also, use The Silver Surfer for finding stuff in files + [e,c]tags. Emacs has some nice modes for interfacing with those tools too :)

I too feel this way, it seems to still have that signature javascript 'lag' where ST3 is very snappy, also it still can't load files > 2MB.

I like that core Sublime Text is stable and fast. Where 'interesting' things mostly happen in the thousands of available plugins.

Speed, good core API design, and stability take time.

Use emacs and melpa and you'll really feel the thrill of constant updates.

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