Switching to Atom from Sublime Text | Hacker News Reader

Switching to Atom from Sublime Text

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Sublime 3 user here. I wanted to try Atom mainly because it's open source, and I was a bit concerned with Sublime not getting updates. I tried Atom when it first came out and it was really slow and buggy. I decided to try it again a couple of months ago and, while it's faster and more stable than it was before, it's still way slower and less stable than Sublime.

Now Sublime is getting frequent updates again. It's a beautiful piece of software. Fast, stable and pleasant to use. I payed the license without hesitation.

I would like to see an article telling me the advantages of Atom over Sublime, because so far, I'm unable to identify any one but the fact that it's open source. All the packages that I use in Sublime are either non existent on Atom or not as good.

This article list out these points.

Fuzzy file finder (cmd+P or cmd+T).

Command palette (cmd+shift+P): Execute any command offered by Atom by typing its name.

Split editing: Edit multiple files side by side.

File (cmd+F) and project search (cmd+shift+F).

Git integration.

Key binding resolver (cmd+.): Best way to learn keyboard shortcuts.

And lots more: Project tree view, go to line/symbol, multiple cursors, markdown preview…

The power of reading.

Sublime has all of those things, though? (except possibly the key binding resolver, I've never tried that)

Not only these features are already in Sublime. They were there long before Atom was released. They also work much better than in Atom. For example, the fuzzy file finder feels slow with a 50K files repo. Go to symbol doesn't work with many languages, e.g. Perl.

Also, I miss a few things in Atom: Macro recording. Go to Symbol in Project.

Maybe a project with 50k files isn't a good use case for Atom. I work on a large (for me) Rails app with a couple thousand files, and never experience any slowness or issues.

With the power of reading, you can see that these are all features Sublime already had. I find Sublime's fuzzy search to be far superior as well (both in terms of how quickly I can find what I'm looking for, and in the sense that if I say Cmd-P in Sublime to do file fuzzy search, I can then type "@" to see the definitions in the current file instead, or start fuzzy searching, and once a file is highlighted, append "@" to look at the definitions in that file. Or if I want to jump to a line just add ":32"). Atom doesn't support that.

Atom does support adding ":32" when fuzzy finding, to jump to a line.

That is literally what I said in my comment. :S

Yes and people responding to me didn't read the article either.

> All the features that make Sublime great are also available in Atom, and some extra ones:

Is what I quoted.

Then you didn't read the comment which said:

> I would like to see an article telling me the advantages of Atom over Sublime, because so far, I'm unable to identify any one but the fact that it's open source. All the packages that I use in Sublime are either non existent on Atom or not as good.

He's saying there's nothing Atom can do that Sublime can't -- furthermore, the the things listed in the article are oftentimes done not as well in Atom (as I gave an example of.)

Glad I got a vote down for answering a question when the article listed out this items. Hacker News can be very encouraging.

Atom can be brutal on RAM and CPU usage, so keep an eye on it. See http://www.linuxbsdos.com/2015/02/17/for-an-editor-atom-uses...

I guess this is what happens when you base your text editor on the hungriest web browser available and also write it in JavaScript.

Correction: CoffeeScript.

It's easy to mock Atom's technical decisions, but it might just be crazy enough to work. Computers are only going to get faster. Browsers are only going to get better at running JavaScript. And it makes a ton of sense for plugins, extensions, and theming.

Also, you get browser stuff for free. XHRs work in Atom. Even WebRTC video chat works in Atom.

Sure, but Coffescript compiles directly to JS.

> Computers are only going to get faster. Browsers are only going to get better at running JavaScript

Sure, but it will still take a long time for it to reach parity with other text editors (and even if/when it gets better, Atom will likely get Vista-ized, where people just remember the bad parts of the early releases and refuse to use the later release). It's not like Atom does terribly much that others don't do; this might be more excusable if it were a whole new editing paradigm.

> Also, you get browser stuff for free. XHRs work in Atom. Even WebRTC video chat works in Atom.

Well, not exactly for free since we're discussing Atom's performance issues. Couldn't it have worked better to write most of the editor more typically and then extend it to work with these after the fact? Then the people that need them have them, but the people that don't aren't saddled with the overhead.

>Computers are only going to get faster.

Not that much, and not in single core performance (which JS basically uses).

Besides, native will get faster at the same rate.

+1. That's why I continued with Sublime Text. Atom is actually a browser (Chromium). Safari/Chrome/Xcode are using too much RAM on my Mac. I don't like a text editor eating too much RAM.

I repeat the same thing every time there's an Atom discussion because it's a a deal breaker: While Atom is slower, that's manageable. I have a MBP with a Thunderbolt display, and typically have 2 or more full-screen editing windows going at a time that I swipe between on the large screen. Atom often loses track of these, putting modals on the wrong one, but causing it to go away when you swipe to the instance where it is. As a result, the modal blocks, and often is something like a Save As. Forcing me to hard-kill and potentially lose work is unacceptable. I've been using it for about six months, upgrading often, because I really do want it to succeed, but at the end of the day, I'm a developer with work to get done.

Would you mind opening an issue for this on atom/atom? There are a couple of open issues related to full-screen on OSX, but this sounds more serious than any of the existing issues.

Will do. Every time I've felt inspired to, found the almost 1000 issue a bit overwhelming in searching, and like most, I want to help with open source but don't always have a lot of time. I'll find time to report it.

The main selling point for me is the potential speed of improvement. Young or not, Atom's well publicised and open sourced nature is much more likely to overtake Sublime in the long term.

I think people underestimate this. Yes, Atom is quite slow. But probably won't remain slow forever. And with the open source structure I think it will receive a great deal of contributions (languages, plugins, etc). I think over 2-3 years this will be very hard to compete with.

Great points. At least for me, though, Atom isn't slow at all. Other than start up (which takes a couple seconds), I never experience any slowness or perception of slowness. Not even while searching through a gigantic project.

Making it simple: I'm a Sublime user but as soon as Atom gets as fast as Sublime, I will be very happy to switch.

Atom has a lot of advantages over Sublime (from a front-end developer point of view): open-source and javascript (coffeescript) based.

But for now I prefer Sublime.

Other than startup time (a couple seconds), I don't notice any slowness at all. Never is there a point where I think "wish I was using Sublime, because this is slow."

I really want what Atom is trying to achieve, which is essentially an open source Sublime Text, but I can't help but worry they're shooting themselves in the foot with their architecture.

Limetext[1] is an actual open source sublime text.

[1]https://github.com/limetext/lime

It aims to be and I keep an eye on it, but it's very far from that goal at the moment.

It looks very promising. Many collaborators are actively working on it.

Why do you think they're shooting themselves in the foot?

Because it's very slow and uses more resources than any text editor should.

Do you find Chrome slow?

If Chrome were a text editor I'd have different expectations of how it should perform.

On my setup, Atom isn't "very" slow. It's actually not slow at all, other than start up (which takes a couple seconds).

It does use more memory, but that hasn't been an issue for me, either. The 4GB of Ram in my Macbook Air seem to be able to handle running Atom and anything else I need at the same time.

You keep saying this but your use case isnt the necessarily the same as everyone elses. I work on three python files thats are all greater than 50K lines at work sublime text opens them in under a second AND i can instantly go to any definitions with no lag.

I tried the same in atom and it felt like my $3000 workstation was a netbook.

Umm holy crap. I get annoyed with 3k line files. Why in the hell are those files 50k lines?

Yeah it sucks... I inherited it when i started my job. Code written by scientist who had never programmed before...

That's exactly my point, so I'll turn your argument back on you. Your use case is not the same as everyone else's.

All the comments here keep saying that Atom is slow. For my use case it's not, and I'd like there to be some recognition on here that there's a very large subset of users for whom Atom will not be slow at all.

If Atom doesn't work for you, then it's cool for you to not use it. Seems like your circumstances are pretty extreme though. Most users will be fine.

Most users would be equally fine with another editor. You seem to be backpedaling here, since you admitted it's slow to start up for you earlier.

Additionally, I'd be interested in seeing how Atom affects battery life. That's probably a pressing concern for many users even if speed isn't.

>That's exactly my point, so I'll turn your argument back on you. Your use case is not the same as everyone else's.

One wants an editor that can handle all common use cases though, not some kiddie editor that's only good for smaller setups...

How do you explain the presence of for example Kate which makes search and replacing newlines bafflingly difficult?

http://mandrivausers.org/index.php?/topic/30507-replacing-li...

I don't want to single out Kate. There are a gajilion text editors, and for most people most of the time most editors are fine, even though a lot of those editors have other equally weird ahem features.

>How do you explain the presence of for example Kate which makes search and replacing newlines bafflingly difficult?

I don't see anything bafflingly difficult about how Kate handles it. In fact it's similar to how most editors handle it.

Either use search/replace with regex (like Vim would do it), or or use the Control+J shortcut ("join") if that's just what you need (there's a similar command option in Vim too).

Im just saying its more convenient to have on editor than can handle whatever

Is someone else seeing that over-engineering pattern with Atom? What people want is an open source Sublime (because now we have all learned that power to the user means open source), what Github really wants is a development environment with good GUI based git integration (because that's what's limiting their business opportunities), but Atom wants to be a cool piece of engineering art, and nobody beside its developers really need that. It's really a pity.

Not seeing it.

Something I'm having trouble with in Atom, having recently switched too, is undo. Unlike in Sublime, where undo is very granular and predictable, I can never really predict how much text it will undo. It often removes entire lines of code.

> Around 6 months ago I read about Atom, an open source code editor developed by Github, and I decided to give it a try, but simply scrolling through a file had a noticeable lag, so I continued with Sublime.

> A couple of months ago Sublime became slow in my computer due to a problem in the new version of a package, and I decided to give Atom a new opportunity; this time I stayed with it.

I wonder whether the writer has just upgraded to Ubuntu 15.04, or perhaps an equivalent other Linux system. I have tried Atom on 14.04 and 14.10, and found as he says a really bad lag just in simple text input. On a middling windows machine it runs very smoothly, just like any other text editor. Apparently the issue is gone in 15.04. I wonder how much of the discussion about Atom has been affected by this bug.

I attempted the switch to Atom in December and had lots of performance issues. Specifically, the startup time for the program very slow, and opening large text files was very difficult. For me that was enough to switch back to ST3.

It is being worked on. They hope to make significant improvements when this is done. https://github.com/atom/text-document

Sublime Text is still the only one that just works among its kind, but it needs to stay on the pace of improvement, otherwise it'll gradually age out just as how TextMate did.

I tried Atom for a month or so, but I ended up switching back to Sublime Text. Atom is slow to the point that it crashes hard on difficult files (minified JS files are the big pain point for me). It also never seemed to respect my preferences for using spaces instead of tabs and two spaces instead of 4 for indentation. Changing configuration was also excrutiatingly slow.

While not perfect, Sublime Text has none of these huge warts.

No-one have mentioned Nodepad++ I would switch to Atom any day though, if it had any JS code analysis tools. At least Notepad++ has a function list! (Although I use the old deprecated one).

What's also off-putting about Atom is that everything is in Coffee-script. If they could make some guides for plain JS I could probably glue code in something like TernJS or something of my own.

The only thing that matters- does it have cmd+d?

Yes.

The author says they were on Sublime Text 2. I wonder if they would still see the same lag and problems on ST3.

has anyone tried lime?

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