Hacker News Reader

Comment by tmikaeld | Hacker News Reader

I have tried Atom, many many times.

But i always get annoyed by how SLOW it is.

I'm kind of glad that Atom is written in a language I seriously dislike, otherwise I might have spent a lot of time trying to help them improve it.

I tried it once and had the same experience. I'm really just waiting to meet even a single person who uses it as their daily IDE in a work environment (or even at home - I still haven't seen that.) At that point I'll consider trying it again.

I love the concept. Just not enamoured with the execution.

I am using Atom daily and I'm super happy. It's missing a thing or two from ST 3, but I got more than I had taken away, honestly. I have paid for Sublime unlike most here who gang up to silence me. I've bought a bunch of plugins for Sublime, too, so, I've invested more than $100 in the ecosystem.

I like Atom too, but the startup time between the 2 is night and day. I also get really odd Atom behavior, especially on full screen.

I think startup time is a non-issue given how you can just leave it running in the background.

My Atom is up and running all the time until there are new app updates, which require restarts.

I use my text editor for a bunch of ad-hoc edits, not just working on projects, but you are right. Speed is less important than buggy behavior (I say this not as a hater, but as someone who is working in Atom all day)

I've only experienced bugs in the early days where you couldn't precisely select a character with the mouse and everything else I've experienced is usually third-party plugins. At least Atom does a great job identifying with plugins are causing issues and collects deprecations and exceptions, and those can be reported by one click. That's why I think Atom brings unique solutions to common problems and, yes, it's a bit slower, but if it becomes popular, maybe it can get a native renderer - who knows. It's too early to predict its fate! So far, given it's infancy age, I think it's done a great job!

I do use it as my daily IDE. It is MUCH slower than Sublime, but I'm trying to ride with it through its bugs and builds. I occasionally use Sublime still, and go through periods of time where I use RubyMine.

Have you tried Adobe Brackets? IMO it's a lot faster + you get CSS hints from .psd files. Also you have inline editor, which is super useful.

It's still a lot slower than Sublime, but it's fine for me. (im not primarily a developer tho)

I use it daily as my IDE. I find that startup time is indeed slow as a dog, but once it is up and running (and it's typically open all of the time, so startup time isn't a real issue) it runs fast enough. At certain times I notice small delays on more complex ops compared to sublime, but nothing significant. The main pro's for Atom, for me, are the way the eco-system is developing, the open-source nature of it, and I'm slightly more happy with the interface. If push came to shove though, I could be happy in either sublime or atom.

The difference in speed in these editors is so small that, if you find it's having a measurable effect on your productivity when coding, you may want to re-look at how you measure productivity or indeed how much time you're churning out code versus other development activities (thinking, planning, testing, talking).

The issue with speed in an editor isn't so much that if your editor is slow that it makes you code faster, but that if your editor pauses, it interrupts your thinking and prevents it becoming very natural and quick to use, like an extension of your mind.

So it's not so much '60 seconds of waiting for the editor in a day', as '2s delay opening that file so my brain switched to thinking about something else, slowing me down for 10+ mins'

I guess I don't really really notice it being slow (I'm on a new mb air nothing fancy), I've been using atom for 6 months now without any problems. I hear people often speak about it being slow and buggy, when specifically is it running slow so I can compare it to my own environment?

I love using atom, and sublime is nice but I haven't found a reason to purchase it and switch over yet.

Over the years I've gone back and forth between Sublime, vim and emacs. Atom is the first editor I really love. I've been using is for about a month now for serious haskell development. Yes it's still a bit slow to start up and a little buggy but it's not even at version 1.0 yet. I just really like the UI and the simplicity of installing and configuring packages.

Imho slow is one thing (I could probably even live with the performance) - the other thing is that font rendering in Atom is horrible. At least for me on Windows the text is blurry as hell. No comparison to the clearness in Sublime Text or other native editors (Visual Studio, Eclipse, Notepad, ...).

Brackets is better in that regard. Both brackets and Atom provide better extensability APIs than Sublime - but that doesn't help when the performance is worse than complete IDEs.

It's slow with huge source files, agreed, but you shouldn't have huge source files anyway.

Tell that to the vendors and various api-s that love to produce 20-50 MB xmls

That sucks, but it's not the common case. I personally wouldn't use even Sublime for these either as you can't do anything productive with a 30MB XML document in a text editor anyway.

That might be true but my tools should never dictate how I work.

You've never wanted to open a multi-megabyte data file in a text editor before?

"You shouldn't be opening large files in it anyhow" is a cop-out. My text editor needs to edit whatever text files I throw at it. Choking on too-large a file is a showstopper.

Atom has a 2MB file limitation. That's why I wouldn't use it professionally yet.

I'm not sure that's even 'large', let alone 'huge'.

For real. I think I've had to open multi-GB files in Sublime a few times. (And if not that, then certainly hundreds of MB.) Worked like a charm.

I need to view and edit CSV files which are consistently hundreds of MB, sometimes a couple of GB. It's the way it is, I can't help the format in which vendors send us files...

Sublime could possibly choke on these file as well. I've had issues with larger files with it.

Yeah, don't get me wrong, a few times Sublime has crashed, but then it's usually syntax highlighting, I turn it off and it works a treat.

True. You have to agree though that this is unfair to Atom. It's new, yes, it uses WebKit now, but it may have native rendering tomorrow. To shoot it down in the early beginning given it's doing many things right (like native package management) - it's not the right thing to do in this forum!

Automatic code generators have a nasty habit of spitting out huge source and header files, I'm routinely digging around in such files (ASN.1 to C++, multiple files 10MB and up) and switching editors to do that would be completely unacceptable. It would be more of a hassle if the compiler split up the output.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com