Comment by awalton | Hacker News Reader

Comment by awalton | Hacker News Reader

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It needs to be amazing at something though.

And well... it isn't. The biggest thing I can tell is that it's "hip". Meanwhile Sublime Text spins around it at 40MPH doing donuts.

I tried. I really tried to use Atom. But the text editor is just so slow and unresponsive, and that is a flat out dealbreaker for a text editor. Its extensibility isn't any better than Sublime's, and I feel like Python's a way better language than Javascript, so I'm happier tooling against Sublime.

I too wish Sublime Text was open source, coming from an open source development background, but I understand exactly how hard it is to develop open source software and feed and clothe yourself - people only buy "support contracts" for the first year and rarely renew, and only for software they feel is technically complex enough that they might actually need help or customizations.

For the record, I also backed GNOME Builder (which I also already find superior to Atom) in the hopes of some day it becoming the text editor and development environment I lust after. But my greatest fear is that more time will be spent on the shiny features and not enough time on the things I really care about like a decent GUI debugger so I don't have to live with poking at GDB, ahead-of-build compiler warnings/errors, and code refactoring tools.

I was really interested in Atom but I found it to be a little sluggish (particularly when I switched it to the background) and sometimes unstable on my Macbook.

Perhaps your computer might be older. Its blazingly fast on my machine. as people move to newer machines then speed is not going to be an issue.

Compared to Sublime, Atom developers can build much richer interfaces.

my own supercollider IDE in Atom:

https://atom.io/packages/supercollider

this is a full repl with a debugging call stack

haskell IDE:

https://atom.io/packages/ide-haskell

preview your development work in a web pane:

https://atom.io/packages/mobile-preview

but yet I think the packages are still young and there is much more that can be done. its early days.

The trouble is that an editor shouldn't require a 2010+ MacBook Air in order to be blazing fast. As I recall, we were running syntax-highlighting editors on ~166 MHz Pentium machines in the mid 90s. Hell, maybe I even ran one on my old 80486 laptop.

I have a 2014 Macbook Pro and it's sluggish there. I have half a dozen Linux machines around me daily and it's entirely unusable on them. You can visibly tell when the GC is running, it's that terrible.

Time to launch various editors on my SSD-backed, 4x4ghz Windows desktop:

ST3: Instantanous, VS2013: 1 second, Atom: 3 seconds

You know you've got problems when Visual Studio is running rings around you.

You just described a load of things that it's amazing at:

- it's hip (dont discount that, its important. it excites people, and gives contributors a reaso to contribute)

- it's in JS - maybe not right for you, but there are lots of people who have the opposite opinion.

- it's open source: for some, a closed source editor is a deal breaker. Imagine the people who say "i hate emacs and vim; I'd love to use sublime but it's closed source" - they'll run to atom.

- its got corporate backing (gnome builder may die or wither, there are many who can believe that atom wont because of GitHub's backing)

So those are some pretty big niches right there!

None of those things are actually features.

Doesnt matter. They're reasons to use it. (I'd argue being in JS is a big feature for many, but since it doesn't matter, nothing to discuss :)

Sublime seems to be back on track. In the last week it received two updates :)

The biggest issue with Sublime is that it's been unchanged for over a year. I think that's the big problem that Atom is solving - Sublime + active development.

What is it that you would like to see fixed in or added to Sublime Text?

I don't use it; I just know that this is the reason many of my coworkers are moving away from it. I've heard concerns about it breaking on a future OS upgrade, or just failing to keep up with others in features.

https://twitter.com/sublimehq Development will speed up in 2015. 2 releases in a week 'stable' enough for you?

Is my Twitter screwed? No tweets since Dec 2013.

Except it HAS changed. http://www.sublimetext.com/3dev

If you're looking to lose any and all good will you've established, charging all previous customers $70 to get updates is a great way to do it. ST2 dev is dead, which is what matters to the people who already paid for the product.

Sublime devs released a build today:

http://www.sublimetext.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=17509

The product is alive but understandably slow with a single developer.

Single developer shouldn't be that big of a factor in slow development and complete media silence for six months to a year on end; any half-decent developer can churn out an update every week, whether it's a new feature or just a bugfix. That's how you keep people excited about your program, and how to prevent it from seeming stale and dead.

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