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Atom: Hello Windows

blog.atom.io

74 pointsandrewnez33 comments

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The joke: a past Microsoft keynote by Steve Ballmer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vhh_GeBPOhs

That was a nice touch by them ;)

The remix is even better :-) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYMH3qrHFEM

I thought the "web developer love" reprise was done in very good humour:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I14b-C67EXY#t=102

There's a rough and ready likeableness about Steve Ballmer's personality I've always kinda liked.

I'm glad I didn't waste the time to build this my self several weeks ago. It's completely inaccessible with my screen reading software.

Atom can't handle opening files more than 2mb in size right now. That makes it stunningly useless.

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/2a80ae/atom_now...

Also, the install has 11,000 files in it.

This is amateur hour.

The 2mb size limit is pretty ridiculous, but how is "number of installed files" relevant is to the quality of a project?

Can't remember the last time I opened a 2mb file in my code editor.

And who cares about the number of files. It's not claiming to be usb-stick portable.

I don't have a separate code editor and data viewer... I have a program I'm running that allows me to view and modify text files. The data I work with is often in flat files, and frequently in the ten to hundred megabyte range. Sometimes gigabytes or even tens of gigabytes.

Number of files... Let's move it around a few orders of magnitude to see how you feel. All else being equal, which program would you rather have on your system, one which is in 10 files... or one which is in 10,000,000 files? At some point, I think you'll agree, the large number of files installed for a program is an indication that the developers are doing things wrong.

> Let's move it around a few orders of magnitude to see how you feel

Haha! What a tactic for an argument. I'd love to see that added to yourlogicalfallacy.is but it's so absurd it'd never make the cut. I do feel like you've captured lightning in a bottle there though sir, you've made my day :)

Your argument is "you don't care." My argument is, "yes, you do, outside of some limits. I'm not willing to GUESS those limits to convince you, so let's push the numbers hard. SEE, you do actually care at some point."

Your argument that "you don't care" is not the whole truth.

Calling my argument absurd is rude. Feel free to say you're not convinced.

Hopefully the Linux version isn't too far away!

Speaking of which, their distribution mechanism (Chocolatey) seems interesting. For folks who use Windows, I'm sure an apt-get/brew equivalent would be really useful. The last time I tried to develop on Windows, I was totally shocked to discover that there wasn't any kind of package manager inside Cygwin -- and trying to install command line utilities outside of Cygwin was even worse.

http://www.webupd8.org/2014/05/install-atom-text-editor-in-u...

I've had it running on xubuntu 14.04 for close to a month now. The biggest pain was during installation, it only gave root the read flag on some of the installed files. It had weird side effects like having to run as root before changing the theme. Once the permissions were fixed, it ran smoothly.

Which utilities were you trying to install? In my experience, I have a much better time using PowerShell and native tools for Windows.

Chocolatey is good, but last time I set up a PC and tried it, I had issues figuring out which version of the package to install (installer or portable), and I couldn't specify the location for each (I want small & frequent apps on SSD, everything else on HDD).

But I understand Chocolatey is just a suggestion, they also distribute Atom windows builds directly (link in the frontpage), right?

> Hopefully the Linux version isn't too far away!

I agree. I had problems building atom from source on a linux box that sits behind a company firewall (due to it effectively blocking the git protocol). Can't wait for the Linux version.

Huge kudos for using Chocolatey. It's the Homebrew of Windows and it's magnificent to use. I hate trolling around for installers on dodgy websites.

Is there a way to speed up boot time? It takes a bit less than 4 seconds on i7 to load up text file, which is way too long for a text editor.

Notepad++ takes ~10 seconds to load on my Windows 7 dev machine...

Loads under 400ms on mine. Not sure why Atom takes so long.

Looks like it is profiling it's own startup:

   Packages->timecop->show

Doesn't show useful info. Window load time is 1809ms, workspace load time 94ms, everything else is under 20ms. I hate being nitpicker, but thats a lot of time to load window.

Not yet, they promised to work on performance after proper Windows support though.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8008432

Thanks. Burying this one as a dupe.

Jesus, I've never realized how similar it was to Sublime Text.

In use, it is very different from Sublime Text. Especially the plugin system is far more powerful.

I still prefer Sublime though, Atom is still too immature, and some packages I need don't exist yet or are far too unstable.

That, and Atom is just far, faaaar too slow at the moment.

care to list a package that you need to that isnt in atom yet? (i would love to take a crack at building it)

Most importantly I miss SFTP. There's already a github project for sftp, but at the moment it's almost unusable. https://github.com/jules-r/atom-sftp

I also really miss bracket highlighter, it's a super small tool, but very useful. You could tackle the bracket highlighter plugin, it might even be possible with pure less/css depending on if Atom already has this built-in.

And I miss being able to run a Python REPL in Atom. Python and JS are my main programming languages.

I said something similar on seeing Sublime after using TextMate for 5 years.

I will switch when Atom gets more stable (I still encounter bugs everywhere), and more performant.

I have already developed a plugin for Atom, I hate the living shit out of Coffeescript, but I like Atom's API. It's a shame that the spacepen API was built in such a way that it's unbearable to write plugins with it in pure js.

meh

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