Atom 1.0

http://blog.atom.io/2015/06/25/atom-1-0.html

by mrbogle • 11 years ago

1096 441 11 years ago

blog.atom.io

jscheel• 11 years ago

I still haven't given Atom a go. Is it worth switching from ST3?

jszymborski• 11 years ago

I prefer Atom, although I never was quite a ST3 super-user.

The speed issues are all but gone imho (start-up is a bit slow, but I have it open almost all the time so I hardly notice).

The main reason I switched was because Atom is FOSS, and that always bothered me about ST3. It's also very easy to hack on, which is nice as well.

Kequc3• 11 years ago

Both are good editors, I haven't tried Atom in about a year. Try it and then report back.

flytwokites• 11 years ago

I only keep using ST because of:

https://github.com/atom/atom/issues/5344 https://github.com/atom/fuzzy-finder/issues/57

to3m• 11 years ago

People just don't seem to know how to do fuzzy searching. Xcode has the same problem. I used Xcode every day for 2 years and its fuzzy matching never once made me happy.

Fortunately, I have a concrete solution: copy what Visual Assist does. Space-separated substrings. It makes it very easy to be more precise about what you're looking for, while still letting you be vague when you'd rather, and the computer never has to make a judgement call.

See here: http://docs.wholetomato.com/default.asp?W193 and search for "filtering in the dialog" (their page has no anchors! - I'm certainly not suggesting you should copy their HTML style)

iamd3vil2• 11 years ago

Atom is nice but much slower than ST3. It takes 30 seconds to open a file while ST3 almost instantly loads. It's not worth switching from Sublime.

Klathmon• 11 years ago

I've been using atom for several months now, and i've never had a file take 30 seconds to open..

Granted all my devices use SSDs, but still for me it's been like 10 seconds at the worst, and currently it opens in like 3-4 (and i have about 30 plugins too)

teamhappy• 11 years ago

I switched from Atom back to ST3 a month ago.

grayrest2• 11 years ago

If you have a setup that works for you, probably not. Atom's main advantage is that it's in a DOM environment and people could do neat things with it but at the moment the efforts have gone into putting it roughly at feature parity with ST3.

rcchen• 11 years ago

I would say that it's at 90+ percent feature parity with ST3; the only real downside is that the package/extension ecosystem is nowhere near as mature as with ST3 right now, but that looks like it is changing very quickly. In addition, ST3 is closed source vs. Atom is open source, and that alone could be a good reason for a number of people to switch.

My recommendation is to give Atom a chance, see if it fits into your workflow (whether it has native support for the languages/frameworks you work in, or if packages exist). If it works out, then you have a viable alternative to ST3 :)

jdc05892• 11 years ago

the package ecosystem isn't on par yet, but the package DEVELOPMENT ecosystem far surpasses sublime in every way imaginable.

I really did not enjoy writing plugins for sublime. The development/debugging/testing experience isn't especially pleasant.

szastupov• 11 years ago

At least worth trying. I like atom a lot but it's still noticeably slower than ST3 on my late 2011 Macbook, even with SSD.

MozMorris3• 11 years ago

I'm running this spec and I personally don't find the speed is an issue. I waste far more time when once a week Thunderbolt causes a kernel panic.

rev_bird4• 11 years ago

I'm not a heavy plugin user, so I don't get a lot of the power-user benefits of ST, but the git integration alone has been worth switching. If you're editing a file under source control, it keeps track of changed segments (and files) out of the box. Nice, simple tool that's been really handy even though I only switched last week.

veidr• 11 years ago

No, it still fares very poorly when matched up against ST3 (or Textmate 2, or basically any high-quality native editor). It is slow slow slow, and has lots of little quirks which are clearly a result of the wacky way they decided to build a text editor.

BUT.... it is way, way better than it used to be. I keep it installed and use it from time to time, to let it update itself and see how it has grown.

It clearly has momentum, and computers clearly are getting faster... probably one day the slowness of it won't matter. But it still matters today -- Atom is noticeably slow on the fastest Mac notebook you can currently buy.

MozMorris3• 11 years ago

Sorry be that guy who posts his specs and disagrees... :-)

Running on a stock mid-2011 Air w/ 4GB Ram plus a Thunderbolt display. If it was slow, I would have switched or upgraded my machine sometime ago.

Things that are slow to me are waiting for node-sass to compile on save, server-side code reloading, npm installing... and so on.

agmcleod• 11 years ago

Comes down to preference. I still use sublime for opening really large files. But otherwise i stick with Atom. I've found when using linters, typescript compile checking and such Atom is just better. The notifications built in and such are great, where as the bottom bar for listing that kind of stuff in sublime feels archaic.

bshimmin• 11 years ago

The consensus seems to be that Atom is still much slower than ST3; I'm still on ST2, and I find it terrible for opening large files and mostly resort to Emacs for that sort of task (and anything involving search and replace with regular expressions on even moderately-sized files). Is ST3 markedly faster than ST2 and generally worth upgrading to now?

(I've held off upgrading because I've always been in the middle of a project... but I'm now realising that I really am just always in the middle of a project, so I might as well just get it over with.)

AlexMax• 11 years ago

As a paying user of Sublime Text 3, I finally jumped on the Atom bandwagon a few months ago and have overall been pretty happy.

It's certainly a slower editor - I have found that opening it, creating a new window, and quitting all take more time than I would like. However, I have stuck it out primarily for two reasons:

1. It's far more extensible. Sublime Text has a thriving package ecosystem, but the limitations of the extension API show up in lots of little places. Atom being browser-based comes with its downsides, but it also allows flexibility that Sublime could only dream of.

2. It's open source. Sublime Text is a great editor, but it's closed source, maintained by a single guy, and updates have slowed to a crawl. It's not something I ever felt 100% comfortable with relying on as part of my day-in-day-out workflow.

jjawssd6• 11 years ago

Amazing how a single guy can outdo the design by committee that is Atom?

LoSboccacc2• 11 years ago

what's up with name reuse these days. atom (the syndication format) may be on the verge of becoming obsolete, but it's also forgotten and irrelevant already to warrant a name reuse?

kbody• 11 years ago

It's not really a big deal on this case.

But either case, there are so many things, unless you are competing or there is a big player with such name, I think it's fine. Also, in these cases you usually say Atom editor or Atom feed.

sehr2• 11 years ago

Is anyone really going to be confusing a text editor and an outdated rss format

treve2• 11 years ago

How is it outdated? Atom is absolutely everywhere and there's no replacement, or a need for it.

sgustard• 11 years ago

Yes it is confusing when the HN title is "Atom 1.0".

For further confusion possibilities, try any of these sentences.

  - "Hey, Atom 1.0 is out."
  - "For my next project I'm using Atom."
  - "I can't believe Atom took this long to get to 1.0 and it's already obsolete."

Spiritus• 11 years ago

I don't see the problem, they aren't even in the same domain.

rev_bird4• 11 years ago

Why would we name a text editor after a particle?!!?! I THOUGHT I WAS INSTALLING A HYDROGEN MOLECULE.

yincrash• 11 years ago

Yet when you see a Hacker News headline that is just "Atom 1.0" it is close enough in the same category (tech news) where it can be confusing.

Kequc3• 11 years ago

A friend of mine develops in Swift, we're doing a project together involving audio processing... there are a lot of audio and Swift related questions. You have no idea how much people talk about Taylor Swift on the internet.

clayh• 11 years ago

To be fair, Swift 2.0 really did mark the obsolescence of Taylor Swift.

theophrastus• 11 years ago

Yes indeed, please folks, when you're about to embark on some grand new project give it a name which can be searched and considered nearly unique. There is a vast ocean of untapped letter groups, pronounceable by most, which don't already have a dozen other usages. (woe upon those which need a quick find for something involving "R" or "blender")

gjm11• 11 years ago

Do you mean that syndication is on the verge of becoming obsolete, or that Atom specifically is on the verge of becoming obsolete?

(And: Is either of them actually true? There are still plenty of blogs around, and I thought quite a lot of them had Atom feeds.)

LoSboccacc2• 11 years ago

Well, this is kind ot but the trend is to include less and less content in the feed to drive views and clicks, they are not dead per se but I find them less and less useful. Yahoo pipes did work for a time, but maintenance time and effort is just too much and I just stopped caring about most blogs fighting back.

Just doctor mc ninja I follow because it's awesome, but these days if there is not a third party maintained pipe and there is no content in the feed I just skip town.

rev_bird4• 11 years ago

Personally, I really miss the "heyday" of the RSS reader. That was a great way to consume content.

ianstallings• 11 years ago

I guess you'll have to use that cognitive decision machine on top of your neck to distinguish the two. I know that's 1 second of compute time but unfortunately it's the only known method.

sneak• 11 years ago

I had initially dismissed the whole thing as folly as JavaScript is really stupid, but I had someone install Atom the other day and came to learn that it is really quite an impressively great editor these days.

The ease of finding and installing themes and plugins is unparalleled.

Considering trying it for a week or two as my daily driver (with vim mode, of course.)

facepalm• 11 years ago

What is it?

rev_bird4• 11 years ago

-_- a text editor.

a1b2c32• 11 years ago

LOL my thoughts exactly.

engi_nerd3• 11 years ago

Is it still limited to only editing files < 2 Megabytes? For most people that is not a showstopper, but it may be for some.

romanovcode2• 11 years ago

No, recent patch increased the limit to blazing 4 MEGABYTES!

hugozap• 11 years ago

People editing files longer than that are certainly in the minority.

andreamazz• 11 years ago

Without code highlighting though, if I remember correctly. I don't see myself editing a >2MB file containing code, but still...

laichzeit0• 11 years ago

Yeah this is crazy. I regularly work with log files in the 100mb to 300mb range which open perfectly fine in Vim/Sublime. If I had to invest time in learning Atom I'd have to multitask between editors for certain use-cases. Maybe if they could switch to a light-weight read-only type of text "viewer" for large files, that would even work. But I really do need to open big files on a weekly basis.

izuzak• 11 years ago

No. See these release notes: https://github.com/atom/atom/releases/tag/v0.208.0

13years• 11 years ago

This has been improved and no longer has this limit. However, I still find Brackets more responsive in general and is what I still use mostly.

I think the future has a lot of potential though, as Visual Studio Code has demonstrated you can indeed have a very responsive editor built on javascript.

squeaky-clean• 11 years ago

They've removed the hard limit on this, but the app will still lag or freeze on large files. Sublime is much, much smoother on a 10mb file for example.

pwenzel• 11 years ago

Handy tip: If you ever have a really large file to edit, Textwrangler is awesome. I've opened 1GB SQL dumps in there, and it happens almost instantaneously -- with syntax highlighting. Strangely, BBEdit and Sublime Text took longer to open the same files.

engi_nerd3• 11 years ago

I've not tried Textwrangler, but for the 100 MB or so XML files that are the project definition for the primary system I support, Ultraedit works well.

hitlin372• 11 years ago

i have been using it for 3-4 months now and its getting there each month. Sometimes the plugins fail but this could be because of the rapid development cycle of atom. On the positive side, its a good text editor, easy interaction, plugin install super easy. A downside is that its not easy on your ram though. Consumes more than what vim would do. But overall, if you need a modern editor, this is the way forward.

melling• 11 years ago

How well does it support other languages other than JavaScript? Will I be able to do mobile Android and iOS development at some point, or Haskell, Go, etc?

edvinbesic• 11 years ago

Facebook has built a set of plugins for doing just this. It basically turns Atom into an IDE. Haven't tried it myself but from the videos it looks nice.

http://nuclide.io

danhardman• 11 years ago

I regularly work on Go projects with Atom using the go-plus[0] plugin

[0] https://atom.io/packages/go-plus

hitlin372• 11 years ago

i use it for some c development markdown, python, etc.

smrtinsert2• 11 years ago

What does modern editor mean? flimsy plugin system and multiple cursors come to mind.

jjawssd6• 11 years ago

s/modern/shiny new/g

snarfy• 11 years ago

The site is severely hammered right now. I'd like to try it again to see if the performance issues have improved.

WorldWideWayne• 11 years ago

You don't have to go through their site to download it. Just go here - https://github.com/atom/atom/releases

tauchunfall• 11 years ago

Downloads are also available from https://github.com/atom/atom/releases/tag/v1.0.0.

octref• 11 years ago

Congrats!

I started using Atom a year ago, but at that time it was very unstable and the performance sucks so I switched back to Vim.

This 1.0 still has something to pine for: some of the essential packages are still not updated for the 1.0 API (vim-mode, etc), and when processing large files it still slows down significantly, but as they say, it's now a good foundation to build upon.

bnferguson• 11 years ago

While I can't speak to all of your favorite packages, vim-mode is most definitely updated for 1.0 (it's very, very actively developed).

If you ever did any development on packages, you may have a development version laying around preempting things. Check in ~/.atom/dev/packages and remove old versions (or git pull them up to the latest dev version).

I had a super old version of tree-view for a long time this way. :)

tw042• 11 years ago

I get the impression that the large file issue isn't ever going to be fixed. Every time there's an update to Atom posted here on HN, and I ask about it, I get down voted into oblivion. It's a bummer too - I love the interface, I love the package, but the refusal to address opening large file makes it a non-starter for me. (No, I don't want to have two separate workflows for reviewing log files and writing code).

grandalf2• 11 years ago

Congrats! I still prefer emacs but perhaps not for long (I use both day to day)...

brlewis• 11 years ago

I use emacs but might try atom when it's a true replacement possibility. How can I know it's crossed the threshold?

grandalf2• 11 years ago

I'm really looking forward to emacs-like tab behavior and also now that the rate of change will slow down we'll likely see the best quality extensions rise to the top and stabilize a bit.

Also looking forward to seeing Facebook's fork of Atom for React...

_lbaq• 11 years ago

if it have org-mode and a mail reader...

kansface2• 11 years ago

Try it in a couple of years.

justinhj• 11 years ago

I feel the same. I've been using emacs everday for over a decade but I am keeping an eye on Atom and LightTable. With the amount of community involvement one of them could well eclipse it soon.

dothething• 11 years ago

Have they resolved the long-standing performance issues present for the last six months? I've tried using Atom numerous times, but the longer it runs, the less stable it gets.

jdc05892• 11 years ago

this release includes a lot of performance optimizations. Check out there blog, there have been a couple articles in the past week or two talking about some of them.

I haven't been using atom for those exact reasons. Definitely going to give it a shot again now.

freshyill• 11 years ago

I'm brave/a masochist. I've been using it since the very start. It has come very, very far—performance especially.

joefitzgerald• 11 years ago

The killer feature of Atom to me is the ease with which it can be extended (via packages) and the openness to community contribution on core features. That's not a knock against any other editor (some of which share similar characteristics in this regard) – it's just what draws me to Atom.

It's super easy to hack on and contribute to.

omouse• 11 years ago

Welcome to what I've felt with Emacs since I first used it.

Might be time to work on some tutorials and examples to make Emacs easier to hack on and contribute to...

davidshepherd7• 11 years ago

The ease of installing packages in Emacs has improved hugely in the last few years, so I think it's getting better for beginners already.

kajecounterhack2• 11 years ago

I've felt largely the same about vim. I think atom is the GUI'ed equivalent of excellent extensible minimalist command line tools.

jflatow• 11 years ago

Yes. I keep trying to like Atom because I want to have native WebView buffers while I'm editing. Every time I try it, I end up wondering how anyone can be comfortable using it. I'm not sure how much of that is due to instability that will be fixed over time, and how much is because I'm coming from Emacs.

Have any experienced Emacs users found that Atom makes them more productive in any dimension? I want to like it but I can't see the light at the end of the tunnel.

jastanton• 11 years ago

While I see that as a strength it might be a double edged sword. I installed a few packages I thought were necessary and soon Atom was crashing constantly and was riddled with bugs. I think it's possible that too many people have the ability to control core pieces of what makes Atom so good and as a result the experience degrades.

pvdebbe• 11 years ago

The inverse also applies. Take Chrome/Chromium where the extensions are generally powerless against core components, making the whole browser useless for decent customization.

jerf8• 11 years ago

It's the Cycle of Bloat.

    1. Develop tool. It's small and fast and minimal! Woo!
    2. It's easy to modify because it's so small! Woo!
    3. Look, there's a budding ecosystem of packages! Woo! (Let's
       not talk about the fact the packages exist precisely because
       the original product wasn't big enough.)
    4. Oh dear, some of them conflict, a lot of them suck. Well, 
       here's some winners, let's pull them into the core. Now the
       base system is that much better! Woo!
    5. Repeat 3 and 4 a few times.
    6. Crap, this tool is all bloated and slow. I'm going to go
       create a small, fast, minimalist solution!

Repeat indefinitely.

See also: "minimalist web framework", "minimalist Linux distribution", "minimalist programming language".

crusso• 11 years ago

There are projects like Linux Kernel, Mercurial, and Rails that have managed to be very extensible and have had good leadership in knowing what to put into core and what to cut from core as time goes on.

coldtea4• 11 years ago

Do people believe that having access to packages and add-ons makes an editor (or whatever else) "bloated and slow"?

First, whatever you don't use, it's not even loaded in memory.

Second, bloated is all about having tons of options you don't need or use. Not about adding stuff you DO need piecemeal.

Third, bloat is mostly a UI thing, not a "number of add-ons" or "too many lines of code" thing. Programs don't get slow because they are "bloated" with extra code (if it doesn't run, then it has 0 effect on their speed). They get slow because they are badly programmed (e.g. loading one big text file all at once in memory instead of having a paging system).

The availability of tens of thousands of packages hasn't made Emacs "bloated", much less Vim or ST. Or even installing those packages doesn't make those editors feel bloated.

Whereas something like Eclipse was bloated from the start -- because it was a very heavy design with tons of abstractions layers, ton of built-in options and visual clutter etc, created on a GCed language with frequent stops on larger codebases etc. That's even without any third party plugin added, just the Eclipse Java SE core packages.

matwood• 11 years ago

Atom is cool in that it shows how much time a package adds to startup. It's also so modular that you can remove most of what you don't need or want.

For your step 6, it just means disable all packages and add them back only as needed.

zacharypinter• 11 years ago

See also: "minimalist web browser" and the history of Firefox :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox#History

steego4• 11 years ago

I disagree with your characterization. Take jQuery for example.

    1. Small, fast and minimal.
    2. Easy to create plugins.
    3. Budding ecosystem and explosion of plugins.
    4. Conflicts ensued and some plugins got pulled into the core project.

Eventually, the growth of jQuery tapered off as the project stabilized. Not only did the size taper off, it got smaller as well. After nearly 10 years, we're talking about a payload of 30K minified and gzipped. https://mathiasbynens.be/demo/jquery-size

The cycle of bloat doesn't always take hold if your team is disciplined and dedicated to keeping it small. You simply can't expect to your 3.0 to be as small as your 1.0 because it's very unlikely you're going to know upfront how people are going to use your software.

robogimp2• 11 years ago

This. This needs to be a musical number along the lines of the Lion King's "circle of life"

nchudleigh• 11 years ago

This is true for some projects, but with atom you can strip away core packages as needed. Just go to settings and disable!

hawsome• 11 years ago

You're probably one of those people that pull in jQuery to use just the selector.

erikb• 11 years ago

Yeah the moment people realise this they tend to start to learn the basics of an old, bloated but still maintained and loved tool like emacs or vim in the case of editors. Nobody wants to relearn the same things over and over again every three years. And you can't really get away from the disadvantages software has (either too small or too bloated). But these old tools will stay.

I can't access it, but I bet even my WIFI router, tv and PS4 have a vi somewhere laying around, ready to help with debugging in case a corresponding core developer comes around to take a look.

macjohnmcc• 11 years ago

I have suffered the same with Visual Studio addin's. My main extension Visual Assist X works great. Once you start adding others the performance gets really poor really quick.

rndn• 11 years ago

I do this all the time, the number of my installed Emacs packages and Firefox add-ons looks like a sawtooth wave when plotted over time.

crucialfelix5• 11 years ago

True story. To mitigate this all of Atom's core are implemented as packages that you can disable or completely replace with other versions.

Basic things like https://atom.io/packages/find-and-replace

Facebook's nuclide project replaces a bunch of core features like the tree-view and the quick file opener.

let's pull them into the core

That doesn't actually happen. They may adopt a package or publish a more official version of a package, but all major functionality is in packages.

hollerith• 11 years ago

Your cycle of bloat might describe many other projects, but not Atom because from the start, Atom depended on 10s of millions of lines of code -- a different copy of those 10s of millions of lines than the copy in your web browser.

sklogic• 11 years ago

How exactly it is easier to extend than emacs?

lettergram• 11 years ago

This is kinda the reason that you have quite a few die hard emacs fans.

ffk• 11 years ago

The trick is to not pull them into core. Let others curate a set of high quality plugins. This is exactly what is happening. Examples include Microsoft's Visual Studio Code and Facebooks Nuclide.

This pattern is also not uncommon. There are many high quality linux modules and distributions built on the linux kernel.

It is likely atom will take a similar architectural approach. Make it easy to build and add plugins and let the community shepherd them.

carussell• 11 years ago

Visual Studio Code is not a set of Atom plugins.

r0muald• 11 years ago

Still, there are six "highlight features" right on the home page:

- Cross-platform editing - Built-in package manager - Smart autocompletion - File system browser - Multiple panes - Find and replace

Is it me, or most of these are so basic that of course any text editor would have at least this set from the start? Right, autocompletion came in several steps for Atom, but .. I have used Atom for a while and it seems to understate the real advantages over other editors, such as: it's a GitHub product!

Which brings me to the part where I couldn't stand Atom: I should be able to do any git operation strsight from Atom, no configuration files needed, with a default plugin! Instead, we are left with many community plugins, like git-diff and atomagit. I hope things will evolve in a way similar to autocomplete.

lpgauth• 11 years ago

alias mate="atom" - old habits die hard.

rkuykendall-com• 11 years ago

I still keep TextMate 2 around for simple text processing.

Atom treats everything like a project, which is great for projects, I don't mind my project taking 5 seconds to open, since I rarely close it. But for a little note, a copy-paste bin, or a quick regex? Textmate 2 is instant, better at larger files, and has the best find-replace window of all my editors.

ahoge3• 11 years ago

Eh. Why is 1.0 out already? Keyboard layouts which use AltGr are still broken.

E.g. I can't type '@', '\', and 'µ'. Yes, I can't write metadata annotations or escape some characters.

coldtea4• 11 years ago

Eh. Why is 1.0 out already? Keyboard layouts which use AltGr are still broken.

Perhaps such keyboards don't concern that many people?

ahoge3• 11 years ago

AltGr is used by many layouts such as German, Turkish, French, Polish, and US International.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AltGr_key

Also, this was supposed to be fixed in 1.0. I don't know why they decided to release 1.0 prematurely.

GolDDranks2• 11 years ago

That's going to render whole countries worth of developers reconsider using Atom. AltGr is widely used at Nordic countries at least and I wouldn't be surprised if elsewhere too.

hello_there• 11 years ago

I'm running Atom 0.116.0 on Xubuntu and AltGr works perfectly fine. My keyboard layout is Norwegian.

ahoge3• 11 years ago

Norwegian with Sámi has a lot of collisions. With the regular Norwegian layout, the only collision should be µ (M + AltGr).

wisew7• 11 years ago

0.116.0? That's an ancient version (or a typo). You should probably upgrade to 1.0.

Steph0r• 11 years ago

I agree, that should really be fixed in the core.

In the meantime however I recommend using this package https://atom.io/packages/keyboard-localization which has worked really well for me (german keyboard).

Mahn2• 11 years ago

I really want to like Atom but it's such a pity that they went for CoffeeScript instead of plain ES5/ES6.

kbd• 11 years ago

That's something I like about it.

tlrobinson• 11 years ago

Do you really care that much which dialect of JavaScript your text editor is written in?

timr• 11 years ago

It's a bit like worrying about the brand of gruel you're eating.

geoffharcourt• 11 years ago

That's really only a problem if you're contributing to the core, right? You can write your own packages in JS, and if you're just a user of the editor I don't see how that matters.

Mahn2• 11 years ago

Sure, but it's not the same, on one side I'd like to read the core and hack it on my own terms, on the other I'd feel more comfortable writing packages if I could just read the core and see how things work under the hood. I'd like it to be a "hackable editor" as it touts itself, but as it stands right now it's a "hackable editor if you are comfortable with CoffeeScript".

shadowmint3• 11 years ago

The UI library is in coffee script; if you want use a UI for your plugin, youre pretty much stuck using it.

(..and yes, its technically possible to do with plain js, but I challenge any of the 'but just use js' folk to link to a popular plugin, with a UI, that does)

lojack• 11 years ago

Sure, you can write your own packages in vanilla JS. Unfortunately though all of the documentation (and most packages themselves) are all written in coffeescript. Basically, the only way you can write a plugin in Javascript is if you already know Coffeescript (at least enough to read it).

It's just one extra barrier of entry for non-coffeescript developers. I personally thought about writing a simple plugin, went to the documentation and realized it was all in coffeescript with no JS option, and gave up. I simply don't have the mental capacity to learn another language that probably won't be around in 10 years.

abritishguy• 11 years ago

Nothing stops you using javascript in your own packages

TheLoneWolfling2• 11 years ago

And by "nothing" you mean the entire UI library

I quote:

The UI library is in coffee script; if you want use a UI for your plugin, youre pretty much stuck using it.
(..and yes, its technically possible to do with plain js, but I challenge any of the 'but just use js' folk to link to a popular plugin, with a UI, that does)

rattray2• 11 years ago

I was a big supporter of their choice of CoffeeScript... until @jashkenas et al decided not to adapt to ES6. Now the language is dead and users are better off migrating to Babel and just dealing with the curly braces and commas.

I agree it's a pity.

EDIT: the blog post mentions support for Babel! http://blog.atom.io/2015/02/04/built-in-6to5.html

benatkin• 11 years ago

When did @jashkenas decide not to adapt to ES6? I searched and found this, which indicates they're open to it. Someone just needs to implement it.

https://github.com/jashkenas/coffeescript/issues/3162#issuec...

baby• 11 years ago

CoffeeScript is actually pretty cool, from a few minutes spent with it it was just syntaxic sugar for js. Why don't you like it?

lolhackernews2• 11 years ago

Did you miss that you can't create local variables?

thedaniel• 11 years ago

We've been working on Atom for a long time. I think that CS was a great choice when it was made some years ago, and I can say that the core team quite likes ES6 (which directly addresses a lot of the same JS warts that CS was designed to avoid). That said even if we decided to move to ES6 today, it's a big ship and it takes a long time to turn :)

wodenokoto• 11 years ago

A lot of people complain about the slowness of the Dom/JavaScript backend, but I see a lot of potential for some really cool things, like integrated juPyter notebooks, semi wysiwyg rendering of latex and markdown and maybe drawing rendering trees or other creative things.

cnp6• 11 years ago

Honestly, its not slow anymore between their React integration and this: http://blog.atom.io/2015/06/16/optimizing-an-important-atom-.... Feels ~95% native.

VeejayRampay• 11 years ago

Until you search and replace with regex that is. Jest aside, it's a great editor, thanks to everyone involved.

spleeder• 11 years ago

They dropped React a while ago.

d0m• 11 years ago

Is it possible to use atom right in the browser, rather than in a separate app? I know facebook engineers have an in-browser editor.. is this atom or something else?

nulltype• 11 years ago

Are you talking about http://nuclide.io/ or some other editor?

joshburgess3• 11 years ago

I've gotta say, honestly, I'm preferring Visual Studio Code over Atom simply due to the fact that it seems MUCH more stable and lightweight. Atom is very visually appealing, and I'm a fan of the project, in general, but it constantly freezes up and crashes on me. I think I'll be sticking with VS Code & Sublime.

yulaow• 11 years ago

I have the same problem but VS code. I was using it for my node projects because it was very easy to use the debugger tool but it practically crashed (freezing the whole editor) 1/2 of the times so I reverted back to atom (that for me never crashed)...

Can it be that we are both using old version of the editors (atom for you and vsCode for me)? Else it seems strange this difference of behaviors

joshburgess3• 11 years ago

In the case of Atom, I don't think so, as I just updated to the recent version TODAY and had it freeze literally 3-4 times and fully crash once. I hear many people complain about similar issues with Atom. VSCode is in a much earlier development state (nowhere near Version 1.0 yet), but I've used it on Windows 8, Linux Mint, and Elementary OS without any issues whatsoever. shrug

euroclydon• 11 years ago

Visual Studio code needs to let me make CoreCLR executables on OSX and Linux, yesterday.

bad_user3• 11 years ago

Funny, as VS Code is based on Atom.

wisew7• 11 years ago

VS Code is not based on Atom - it's built on Electron, the app framework Atom is also built on, and uses some of the same Node packages Atom developed.

Touche• 11 years ago

No it's not.

wisew7• 11 years ago

In part, this is because VS Code is currently not extensible at all – there is no package ecosystem, and therefore no vector for users to possibly introduce instability / performance issues.

cageface• 11 years ago

FWIW I use Atom for hours every day to edit Ruby & JS code and it has never frozen up on me once. Earlier versions used to spin the CPU pretty hard at times but I haven't seen that for a while now either.

shadowmint3• 11 years ago

woo! awesome work. I use atom for everything now.

    ...but realizing the full potential of Atom is about more
    than polish. We're considering questions such as: What 
    does super deep git integration look like? What does 
    "social coding" mean in a text editor? How do we enable 
    package authors to build IDE-level features for their
    favorite language?

O_o you what?

Things I'm interested in ---> A hackable, fast, extensible editor.

Things I have no interest in at all ---> 'Super Deep' github integration, 'social' coding in my text editor.

Dont get me wrong, atoms a great piece of work, and making it extensible for building custom tooling is really great, but what on earth are you talking about?

I hope this is just 'and now we're going to make some plugins' talking...

cnp6• 11 years ago

I made the switch yesterday not knowing 1.0 would be released today, and I am seriously psyched. Their Vim bindings are now good enough, and there are tons of tweaks you can do to make them better (which will inspire more people to contribute). I found a few bugs here and there related to installing / removing packages (just checked and 1.0 fixes them), but nothing major, and was able to migrate my mammoth .vimrc configuration file over over the course of an afternoon, with everything I need having already been developed by the community. Super fast, too.

Also! I was able to create the colorscheme of my dreams in about 15 minutes, thanks to to the dev tools integration.

jonahx• 11 years ago

What are the main advantages that atom gives you over native vim?

cnp6• 11 years ago

From the perspective of a web app developer it's just so modern. The language of the interface takes all of the (admittedly subjective) best-practice lessons that the web has taught us over the years and embeds them directly in, and then lets you hack them apart however you wish -- simply. Code editing works without a thousand inconsistencies, and then you have things like embedding your terminal directly with ease (its trivial to create a tmux like environment), etc.

The limitations feel very few, and as someone who spent a LOT of time getting my Vim environment exactly as I wanted it, switching over to Atom was a breeze as I went through my .vimrc trying to match functionality; most of it was already there.

One thing I wish they would implement (and I'm sure it will come with time) is the ability to fully navigate the file tree with the keyboard, similar to NERDTree. All you can do right now is arrow up and down, after toggling over.

I've heard its like Emacs -- and now I know what people are talking about!

bluepill3• 11 years ago

None.

Atom's installer is a huge download, and the editor is much slower ... It also consumes much more memory and written in coffeescript. Takes a long time to start up ... just a few things on the top of my head.

It's a great initiative though so that's already a good point.

grayrest2• 11 years ago

Background processes don't block the main thread, the extension points are better thought out and the development experience in working on extensions is a LOT better, js/coffee are better languages than vimL, and display is not limited to a fixed grid of text cells.

The downsides are that it's comparatively slow. The vim keybinding emulation isn't great but I can now use it without getting frustrated using ^[ to get back to normal mode.

I still use Vim for most things but I do Clojure/Clojurescript in Emacs evil-mode, and Typescript in Atom.

jjawssd6• 11 years ago

It offers a point and click interface for people that can't be fucked to learn how to set up a .vimrc

franciscop• 11 years ago

I am a paying customer of Sublime Text, but I will give Atom a try. They both seem really similar feature-wise, but Atom is open source, something I care about. Also is based on web technologies, which is really cool (although I've heard it's not so fast).

serve_yay2• 11 years ago

I would concur with all of that. It's very similar to sublime, to the point that I can't really justify switching. If you care about open source that is a compelling aspect, though.

It pains me to say this as a JS dev, but I think basing it on web tech was a mistake. It makes the app slightly, but noticeably, less responsive. Just recently they posted a big long thing about getting scrolling to be fast. I dunno, I feel like if such things are an issue in 2015 you may have made a mistake.

WaxProlix• 11 years ago

What did they get out of that decision anyway? There was a moment in the blurb film where the narrator says, "Atom is based on JavaScript - so it's easy to use!"

What? I don't get the value proposition.

stared• 11 years ago

Just recently started switching for ST2 -> Atom. Key things were:

- either I am getting slower or Atom is getting much faster, - some things with linting for ES6 don't work in ST2.

However, for some tasks I need to open bigger files, and for them I still use ST. It's just sad it didn't go open source... (now it is too late).

niuzeta2• 11 years ago

I remember when Atom beta came out I was turned off because it (presumably) didn't run on Windows(my workstation at the time).

Then I remember trying to give it a try once again a few months ago but gave up because I've heard so many horror story about performance issues.

Now I'm willing to give it yet another try because of vim-bindings and performance issue improvements. Is it at workable state?

BinaryIdiot• 11 years ago

Is it at workable state?

I would say so. I've used it as my primary code editor for several months now and really enjoy it. Yeah occasionally you can tell it's a web app running on the desktop but only because opening projects or large files is kinda slow (also an occasional JavaScript error but I haven't seen those in a least two months) but beyond that it works very well. Very speeding on my MacBook and my HP Spectre.

The plugins are the best part and the primary reason I use it.

niuzeta2• 11 years ago

I see. Thanks for the input; I'll give it a try.

cgcardona• 11 years ago

Is it in a workable state?

Yes, I've used atom every single day since it came out to write my daily notes in markdown and then see them rendered as markup in the markdown previewer.

However after finding out about the vim bindings I've been using it as my primary text editor for the last month and I really like it.

It's got 95% of the `vim` goodness that I use combined w/ the thriving package scene and being able to extend it w/ JS.

FWIW here is a list of the packages which I'm currently using:

https://gist.github.com/cgcardona/79fa3a6dcd329c60c290

* atom-fuzzy-grep * atom-jshint * color-picker * git-plus * highlight-selected * minimap * minimap-autohide * minimap-bookmarks * minimap-find-and-replace * minimap-git-diff * minimap-highlight-selected * minimap-pigments * minimap-selection * pigments * vim-mode

crucialfelix5• 11 years ago

this really enhances writing in markdown:

https://atom.io/packages/markdown-writer

I now write up tasks there (ctrl-t) and even switched from using org mode in spacemacs

Yhippa• 11 years ago

I have this way of picking technologies where I will try a bunch of them at the same time and naturally gravitate to the one that works best for me. After using Notepad++, ST2, and Atom I feel that Atom works best for me. I rarely have to use Google to find out how to use some features and it's reasonably snappy.

I do need to give Visual Studio Code a fair shot. Heard a lot of good things about it.

mparramon• 11 years ago

I wrote a small guide to set up Atom for web development:

www.developingandstuff.com/2015/04/setting-up-atom-for-rails-development.html

jokoon• 11 years ago

Have they fixed the sluggishness ?

The installer is almost 10x times as large as the sublime text installer.

Please leave "web technologies" where they belong.

amoney• 11 years ago

So where do I get that nifty terminal they were using in the video?

ChrisArchitect• 11 years ago

yeah wow, they put some work into building that 'prop' heh. Jetsons? Needed an octocat 'Rosie'

jssjr• 11 years ago

It's here at CodeConf!

https://gist.github.com/jssjr/018717ddcb81b76e1829#file-img_...

discreditable• 11 years ago

I find it to be a bit depressing that software bloat has advanced to the point that we have text editors plagued with performance issues.

lispm2• 11 years ago

Thirty years ago people complained that GNU Emacs needed 8 megabytes of RAM.

peatmoss• 11 years ago

"Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping"--Seems quaint now, doesn't it?

georgemcbay• 11 years ago

This is true, but if you gave emacs the 8 megabytes it wanted it ran great even at scale (lots of buffers into lots of giant open files) in my experience.

OTOH (also in my experience), Atom is somewhat Eclipse-esque (though admittedly not nearly as bad as Eclipse) in that the performance problems it has at scale cannot really be solved by throwing more hardware at it... whether you are on a relatively low-end laptop or a high end pro workstation with a 3ghz CPU and dozens of gigabytes of memory, if you open just a few big (>2 megabyte) files in Atom you're pretty hosed.

tbolt• 11 years ago

Thirty years ago 1MB of RAM was $800+ ...I would have complained too.

rplnt3• 11 years ago

There are still editors out there that work. Just don't use those that suck, and they will go away. Or at least I wish they would.

smaili• 11 years ago

Just downloaded and opened Atom for the first time, and I have to admit the look and feel is amazing! Fantastic job to all those involved!

However, one thing that stands out to me, the file size of Atom.app is 203MB!! How in the world can a text editor be that large? Compare that with MacVim, which is about 27MB.

guywithabike• 11 years ago

What problem does the extra 176MB present to you when you likely have 256+GB of disk storage?

Karunamon• 11 years ago

Who said it was a problem?

I wonder this too - it's a freakin text editor. A very cool text editor, but hundreds of megabytes?

harperlee3• 11 years ago

I only hace 64 in my tablet. Half of which the OS already ate.

More to the point it is suspicious that such a basic functionality as a text editor has so much weight without reusing things with other programs. If every program measures itself by the same standards of size, we will all run out of disk...

paracyst• 11 years ago

This kind of reasoning is exactly why we have even more bloated, crap software these days

jjawssd6• 11 years ago

Do not write software ever

zerr• 11 years ago

That's why you shouldn't let javascript developers produce desktop apps... The whole Chromium is bundled with Atom.

wisew7• 11 years ago

No, a subset of Chromium is bundled with Atom: https://github.com/atom/libchromiumcontent

xbryanx2• 11 years ago

It's possibly more fair to compare it with an IDE, not simply a text editor. WebStorm as a download is 131 MB. Not as big, but in a similar class.

edit: And the full WebStorm app is 293.5 MB

nacs• 11 years ago

If you want a better comparison, Sublime Text's installed size is 1/10th of the size of Atom at 23 MB.

mcao• 11 years ago

It's because the shell (http://electron.atom.io/) is based on Chromium, which can be quite large if you include everything. But in the future, the size should get smaller. NWJS, which is also based on Chromium, is already making efforts to significantly shrink the binary size.

swasheck• 11 years ago

I so desperately want to like Atom (and Code), but I have a window refresh issue with it (https://discuss.atom.io/t/display-does-not-refresh-when-focu...).

This issue is still present in the current release. It seems like a minor annoyance but when it happens it really kills my productivity.

solveforall• 11 years ago

I was lucky enough to get a key to use Atom when it first came out. I was not very impressed at the time, with its limited capabilities, so I ended up switching to Brackets for a while.

Later in my search for an editor that handles EJS, I rediscovered Atom. It really has improved since it first started. AFAIK, Atom and Sublime are the only editors that handle EJS. I also use Atom to edit JS, JSX, gradle, and FTL which work well as well. Still I stick to IntelliJ for most programming languages since I haven't found a way to get code completion, reference jumping, etc to work on Atom.

Very impressive work from the Atom team and the contributors!

yummybear• 11 years ago

Just tried to install Nuclide and Atom complained about atom.io being unavailable. Guess I know why now.

Globz• 11 years ago

I am really tempted to give it a try but I am already all setup with Brackets and I am having a hard time understanding what are the benefits if I make the switch over Atom. I will surely give it a try a some point!

anantzoid• 11 years ago

https://atom.io/ is down, btw.

isuraed2• 11 years ago

Broke the default font, ugh! Anyone know how to get the old font back?

wisew7• 11 years ago

Just add Inconsolata to your Font Family in Settings. If you want the old font size and line height too, set those to 16px and 1.3, respectively.

isuraed2• 11 years ago

thank you!

intrasight• 11 years ago

I had assumed this was browser-based, but upon visiting the site I see there is an installer. Can this editor run in a browser? If not, what's the point?

xbryanx2• 11 years ago

It does run in a browser of sorts (http://electron.atom.io/), just not the browser, you're using to read this.

harperlee3• 11 years ago

Wow... just downloaded the windows installer version and it autoinstalled itself wherever it chose fit, without questioning, it installed shortcuts on the start menu, placed itself on an already bloated contextual menu on several file extensions as an Open option, instead on "Open with...", etc.

I usually install software on my user folder on the work laptop, as I don't have enough priviledges. This time the installer worked, but why override the questions to the user, like install location, etc.? There's a standard for Windows installers, why did they ignore it? Not cool.

16bytes• 11 years ago

To be fair Chrome doesn't ask you either, at least on the storage location. It looks like Atom puts itself in APPDATA, which is the easiest place to install because you have known permissions and update strategies. I actually like this method.

I agree that I didn't like the default shortcut and context menu entries, however.

chii• 11 years ago

i also hate that part of chrome - i don't have a fast disk on my default C drive, and i want to move my apps to a separate disk. But chrome doesn't let you do that easily...why do product teams think they can make the best choice for the user, without giving a way out? For a normal user, they can just use a default, and it should be fine. But let me choose if i want to, god damn it!

Cthulhu_• 11 years ago

It's optimizing the onboarding and install process to its bare minimum. I'm sure they go "Well you don't get a choice for OSX or mobile apps either, so why should you for windows"?

Actually they have a point. But Windows and PCs are not as straightforward as that.

Zarel• 11 years ago

You get a choice for OS X. You can put most apps wherever you want; just drag the .app "file" anywhere.

steve-howard• 11 years ago

I don't know if this has changed, but when I tried Atom and didn't like it, I discovered that there was no uninstaller. Hooray for deleting context menu entries by hand in the registry.

wnevets• 11 years ago

One of the first things I've noticed after trying out the new release, very annoying.

Jare• 11 years ago

I was able to uninstall it from the Programs list and context menu entries are gone.

webwanderings• 11 years ago

I clicked the download button and noticed 70+ MB file. I thought to myself, why in the world a text editor needs to be so huge. And then I see your comment. I clicked on the Pause button on my download.

outworlder5• 11 years ago

Did you intend to run it in a potato? Even a raspberry pi would have no difficulty with that file size.

It's also packing a full browser, don't forget that. And likely all sorts of assets.

I particularly don't care. I'm more interested in how it performs during use.

By the way, task manager indicates it's using less then half that of RAM, with a few tabs open.

z3t43• 11 years ago

It comes with Chromium, that is basically a browser.

They have their own version of Chromium called Electron. But I recommend nwjs instead, witch is also built on Chromium and nodejs. And lets you make packages that only include your source code, so that you don't have to download the "browser" for every app.

rwallace• 11 years ago

Personally I think there is something to be said for skipping irrelevant questions. I don't care where a program installs to, I just want it to work. I want the developers to deal with that kind of detail so I don't have to worry about it.

keehun• 11 years ago

See, for many, that is not an irrelevant question. Could be very important if you have multiple partitions/network drives specific for different purposes.

kcbanner• 11 years ago

The question isn't irrelevant.

bitmapbrother3• 11 years ago

This frustrates me to no end. I prefer to install my software in a certain location. Having it selected for me is not okay. Nor is giving me the option to override it.

tragic• 11 years ago

Nor is giving me the option to override it.

Oh, come now. Even make install makes assumptions about default directories etc. The right to override is the correct level of control over target directories - people who care can make that call, and indeed will be looking for the opportunity. The rest of us would merely like to find our new piece of software in the start menu/spotlight/PATH.

deevus• 11 years ago

I have just pushed version 1.0 of Atom to the scoop-extras repository

If you use Scoop, add the extras bucket using:

    scoop bucket add extras

Then install atom

    scoop install atom

It will install it into your user folder. No privileges required.

romanovcode2• 11 years ago

The context menu is the most annoying thing. I can delete the shortcuts no problem, however to delete the context menu it requires some registry fiddling.

lucaspottersky• 11 years ago

can it handle files larger than 2MB yet? :P

Incredible promo video though!!!

dbbolton• 11 years ago

It's nice that they provide a .deb, but a signed repository/PPA would be really great.

tomc19853• 11 years ago

I always liked the Winamp approach: ship a core system with a base set of plugins, and implement new functionality via new plugins. The base system almost never changes, and version updates are simply a new payload of plugins.

Why do the best plugins need to be added back to base? Why not just keep them separate. Believe it or not Firefox was originally written in this fashion, but right around the time they added built-in spellcheck, new functionality started appearing as additions to the base system as opposed to browser extensions. Why?

misiti3780• 11 years ago

Off topic Does anyone here use Light Table? If so - what do you think of it compared to atom?

drvortex2• 11 years ago

I am loathe to install something like Atom with a 4MB limit on file size and 80 MB install size when Sublime Text does the same or better in a 8 MB install package with no limits.

zevyoura• 11 years ago

Do you really do your work on a computer where an 80MB install is a problem? No argument on the file size limit.

drvortex2• 11 years ago

Yes, I program on a netbook. I find the resource limitations useful in writing programs that are very efficient. I do mostly scientific programming, so if it runs on my netbook, it flies on my cluster.

Walkman2• 11 years ago

Atom is the ONLY editor which cannot handle my keyboard layout properly so I can't write brackets :D ([]) I reported it on the first day when the alpha came out, still no fix for this. Let me put it this way: I CAN'T WRITE BRACKETS IN A TEXT EDITOR. LOL

imdsm• 11 years ago

Link the GH issue please.

Walkman2• 11 years ago

https://github.com/atom/atom-keymap/issues/35

omegote• 11 years ago

I can't use half the keybindings in my spanish keyboard lol.

harperlee3• 11 years ago

I'm on a spanish keyboard and it works for me {çñ¬#%|ª}, etc. so there might be something that you can do!

mattdeboard• 11 years ago

For anyone wondering, Python indentation of new lines inside lists, tuples, etc. is still broken (https://github.com/atom/language-python/issues/22). However, it looks like hitting tab at least allows you to manually indent the line, which is a passable bridge until it works properly. Auto-indent will completely remove any manual indentation, however, which seems like something that should be fixed.

sagarun• 11 years ago

How do anyone run tox from atom editor?

usaphp2• 11 years ago

I tried atom, the only thing I liked about it was design and color scheme, the rest are superior in sublime text, so I just went ahead and created a theme/color scheme for sublime which matches atom (1). Atom is laggy, even basic file navigation using arrows can be slow sometimes (and I have a latest retine macbook pro).

But the biggest issue for me is a battery usage, it reduces my battery usage on RMBP15 by 2 hours compared to sublime text, I am mostly working from remote places and having a good battery usage is vital for me.

[1] https://www.evernote.com/shard/s21/sh/cc73487c-08c9-4937-ac6...

jewbacca• 11 years ago

https://goo.gl/tF6M4C – this goo.gl shortlink has been disabled. It was found to be violating our Terms of Service.

----

For what an isolated anecdote is worth, I originally switched from Textmate to Sublime because I preferred Sublime's default colour scheme. Not for any trivial reason like features or "being in active development".

usaphp2• 11 years ago

First time I tried to use google shortening service and it let me down :) Not sure what kind of violation they've found in a code snipped to showcase a color scheme

theone• 11 years ago

even this evernote is not working.

therealmarv2• 11 years ago

They should do a LOST remake of that Atom Youtube Video ;)

therealmarv2• 11 years ago

I still cannot search for whole word expressions in directories without using RegEx, bummer.

merrua• 11 years ago

I think Atom could still have better performance. It wouldn't hurt to have performance tips for package developers too (maybe it has, and I missed them).

typedweb• 11 years ago

Both emacs keybinding emulation packages are sub-optimal. One misses C-p, the other misses C-e, both basic editor movement commands. Not impressed.

a1b2c32• 11 years ago

What is this? I can't even tell. A text editor?

TranquilMarmot• 11 years ago

Uhh... go to the main page (https://atom.io/) and it says right there "A hackable text editor"

It's github's text editor. It runs on "electron" which is a framework for making desktop apps. It uses node.js and Chromium.

reledi• 11 years ago

Congratulations GitHub and Atom team!

Atom is my favourite editor for coding in, and it just keeps getting better.

I introduced my team to it today (pre 1.0 release, this is a nice surprise) and they were surprised by how pleasant the experience was - just a few minor hiccups. We've tried a bunch of editors and usually stick with Sublime because it's easiest to use while pairing, but I think that will change now.

Sorry for the tough HN crowd, you can never please them.

Here's to Atom 2.0 <3

techpeace• 11 years ago

Hear, hear! Well done, GitHub! This will be an invaluable resource for the software development community for years to come. Congrats on 1.0.

BenjiSujang2• 11 years ago

Great job from the Atom team for such an outstanding editor. Our whole company switched over from IntelliJ and never looked back. Everyone is totally thrilled.

sytse• 11 years ago

I'm surprised that in their vision for Atom GitHub doesn't mention integrating Atom as the webeditor for GitHub.com. I always assumed it used web technology so it could form the foundation of a online IDE integrated closely with GitHub.com It will be interesting to see if this happens and what Koding, Nitrous.io, Cloud9, CodeAnywhere, Codio and CodeEnvy will do. At GitLab we currently have no plans in this direction.

jmtucu• 11 years ago

I don't know why, but is very slow on my computer and I have 8Gb of RAM / i3 This message appears everytime http://i.imgur.com/hTZixD8.png

mrcwinn• 11 years ago

Slow on mine too, even scrolling. Sublime, on the other hand, is super fast.

However great the community might be, this is a flawed concept. Native apps are better for certain things today. This is one of them.

bdcravens5• 11 years ago

Congrats to the team for reaching this important milestone.

I'm a Sublime license holder, but I use Atom as much as I can, because the more open source can win, the better.

However, yesterday I was doing some complex regex's (porting a random sql dump file into a seeds.rb), and Atom kept dying, whereas Sublime was pretty much instantaneous.

I'm not doing the usual "Atom is slow" drum beating, but saying some undertones of the announcement make me worry a bit. I hear discussion of things like Electron and "social coding" as the future, and I'm hoping that means that no one considers 1.0 to equate to the core editing experience being finished. It's not, and I hope the Atom team continues to iterate before moving on to new features.

Being able to open files larger than 2MB isn't sexy, but it's necessary. Having to hard-kill my editor because the save dialog is trapped on my other full screen session that it won't let me get to deserves more than a "but it's open source" response.

tl;dr congrats team and your core users want the best editor possible over bells and whistles

arikrak• 11 years ago

I know it's off-topic, but is regex the best way to convert SQL into seeds.rb? I'm thinking of doing the same thing, but I figured I'd use Ruby or a gem. https://github.com/rroblak/seed_dump

bdcravens5• 11 years ago

This was a data dump from a previous development effort, and the Rails app was no longer connected to that database. Moreover, it was MySQL, not Postgresql, the new target. I probably could have stood up MySQL and used that gem to achieve the same result, but honestly, while the regex is at times a bit complex, it's straight-forward, since an insert's parenthetical list of values is very close to what you pass to Model.create. Thanks for the gem recommendation though, and hopefully it'll be a better solution the next time I encounter a similar situation.

elinchrome• 11 years ago

"...now you have two problems"

Seems off base to me too.

3pt14159• 11 years ago

lol, 2MB? I use emacs and hardly played with Atom. To me this sounds like you are complaining about a 20MB mp3 interfering with your audio player.

bdcravens5• 11 years ago

Yeah, it's a bit nuts. Sublime handles those files without batting an eye, and opens files that are hundreds of MB (and even multi-gig files) easily (it handles files that in the past I'd never open in a windowed text editor)

I'm pretty sure it's a limitation of the underlying webkit, as loading a file that big in the browser is typically a bad use case.

Demiurge2• 11 years ago

I don't remember Winamp not able to play 20MB mp3, such a rip of entire album, since I started using it in 98.

chc• 11 years ago

I just tried it on a 14MB file to confirm, and Atom can open files larger than 2MB. (I also scrolled through the whole file just to make sure Atom wasn't cheating somehow, and it seemed to be working fine.)

dstaley• 11 years ago

I can open a 15MB log file, but my CPU usage skyrockets.

hamburglar• 11 years ago

I just tried it on a 35MB log file and it gave me an alert that said it was gonna be sluggish, then took about 20s to actually open the file I requested (I could navigate to other tabs in the meantime but there was no indication that anything was happening), and then once the file appeared, it took another 20s to become responsive. Searching for a string which appeared in the second line of the file took over 30s, probably because it was searching the entire file to highlight all matches, and all the while, it was completely unresponsive. Then when I tried to close the file, the entire editor hung and eventually gave me a "this tab is not responding" dialog. I clicked "wait" and it took another 10s and the window finally closed.

All in all I'd say the experience editing large files still completely sucks compared to every other editor I use.

Don't get me wrong, I still love and use Atom, but they really need to come up with a solution to this problem, because it's just ridiculous. The fact that I have to occasionally leave my text editor to edit certain text files is a huge black eye that many people won't put up with, and which I will eventually get tired of putting up with if they don't do something about it soon.

One thing I think they could do is take advantage of the fact that when you are editing a file that large, you don't expect to have a particularly good experience with the scrollbar. I don't open a file with 10 million lines and grab the scrollbar to get to the spot I'm looking for; it's just not practical. Over a certain size, they really don't need to have the entire buffer in memory at once, and maybe they don't even need a usable scrollbar so much as they need good relative navigation and search. It would be perfectly reasonable in my opinion to have a "large file mode" for the editor window that has subtly different behavior that makes it not so ridiculously heavy.

bdcravens5• 11 years ago

Thanks - that must be new, as the last beta I can remember (within the last week or so) didn't crash, but tossed up a dialog saying it had a hard-limit. Now it just gives the the warning that it'll be unresponsive.

Opening up a decent sized development.log did cause it to throw random errors however.

pudquick3• 11 years ago

Sorry for side-jacking this comment - but which version of Sublime, may I ask, and what OS?

I'm using Sublime 2 on OS X and large files + regular expressions are generally a cause for pain.

Do you have any default settings changed like disabled document preview or similar?

The only thing I generally feel is a champ at regular expressions + insanely large files on OS X is TextWrangler/BBEdit. In fact, I keep TextWrangler around specifically for the large file excellence experience which I (currently) don't receive on Sublime Text 2.

brianpgordon• 11 years ago

Upgrading to Sublime 3 can't hurt...

I don't have issues with large files on OS X.

billrobertson42• 11 years ago

I had found that Sublime did pretty terribly with large files (not source), so I was back in in Emacs.

uptown• 11 years ago

Any update on this long-past inquiry of the future status of Sublime Text?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7565213

espadrine• 11 years ago

I agree wholeheartedly with the sentiment.

However, as I understand it, the issue is not so much with raw size (although it does not help) as it is with long lines.

For instance, the following 161K file freezes completely Atom, to the point that you just have to close it: https://github.com/espadrine/aulx/blob/master/html/tokenizer...

The reason is that the core syntax highlighter (https://atom.io/packages/language-javascript) is heavily unoptimized, and tries precomputing data for the whole line without considering that only the first 0.5k characters will probably be seen.

It is too bad, as this was already fixed globally in existing web text editors such as CodeMirror. Given that it is used in Chrome and Firefox' DevTools, and that JS minification happens on the Web, it had to.

crucialfelix5• 11 years ago

For instance, the following 161K file freezes completely Atom, to the point that you just have to close it:

I just downloaded it and you are correct, it locks up. Its the really long line here: https://github.com/espadrine/aulx/blob/master/html/tokenizer...

If I open it in Sublime 3 I see that they don't bother to syntax highlight long lines. They just skip it.

Issue filed:

https://github.com/atom/atom/issues/7444

e12e• 11 years ago

I was doing some complex regex's (porting a random sql dump file into a seeds.rb)

As a vim/cli/linux user -- I'm trying to understand -- you were doing search-and-replace? As in what one (some would say a masochist) could do with sed/awk? And/or 's' in vim?

(Sed is in some ways more relevant as it works on streams, and so as long as you have the diskspace to store the edited copy, size shouldn't really matter. I suppose it might be possible to have long enough lines that sed chokes, but I've never had to deal with something like that...)

sergiosgc• 11 years ago

I concur. Congratulations to the team. The project seems to be going in the right direction. It's not up to 1.0 standards for me, though. I'm on Linux, on a last year's X1 Carbon. HiDPI display, at slightly over 200dpi. I'm greeted with this:

http://i.imgur.com/McaVhKJ.png?1

The menu has no margins and no padding but, worse of all, everything is tiny. Note that the main text font is smaller than the i3 top bar (which is at the barely readable size).

HiDPI support is not something esoteric nowadays. Lots of hardware requires it, and Linux toolkits support it rather well (not perfect, but ok anyhow).

I fiddled with Atom's CSS enough to test drive it. It is ok for common tasks, albeit a bit sluggish (I come from vim...). I could live with that. What I can't live with is all manners of breakage my custom CSS introduced, so I can't yet do a one month run with the editor to kick the tires.

bitmapbrother3• 11 years ago

The absolute disregard for any thanks for the Chromium team in the announcement is disgusting and a slap in the face to the foundation this editor is based on.

logn• 11 years ago

With the following Atom community packages, I basically have a Rust IDE: linter, linter-rust, build, language-rust, racer

z3t43• 11 years ago

Cool video and great copy-writing.

The editor still seems crude though. The new install used some old packages from a previews install that I though was uninstalled!? It also called home to report a bug without asking for permission. Then it froze after I had uninstalled the old package.

ajryan• 11 years ago

Is there anyone with a BGR subpixel-order monitor who has been able to configure Atom (or VS code for that matter) to do the right kind of antialiasing?

Dingler• 11 years ago

Pretty cool intro vid. A breath of fresh air from the typical startup/product videos I encounter everywhere. I'm excited to see how this progresses. The development appears to be extremely active, with frequent + quality updates. Spotted the new-ish Office Code Pro[1] font in use too...

[1]https://github.com/nathco/Office-Code-Pro

thomasrossi• 11 years ago

Congrats to the Atom team:) what happened to rAtom?

bobbles3• 11 years ago

Maybe something worth pointing out..

I wanted to download this but after clicking every link I still hadn't seen a way to do it anywhere...

Obviously if I go to the homepage now the first thing I see is a big download link, which is great.

I think a 'download' link on the site though would be good since if anyone links ANYWHERE else it's hard to find.

bobbles3• 11 years ago

Also.. installing on windows, it just says 'installation failed, contact the author'.

No idea where I'm supposed to look to find the installation logs, doesn't tell you where they are...

bobbles3• 11 years ago

...defaults to install to AppData??

How do I get rid of this crap now?

No entries in the Windows Programs listing. IMO They really need to think if this is a 1.0 ready release for windows...

sagarjauhari• 11 years ago

Huge milestone! Congrats.

And in case you're wondering about the video, well, its this 50 year old documentary "The Home Of The Future: Year 1999 A.D.": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RRxqg4G-G4

tomkin• 11 years ago

I'm sure there's a few problems with this software, just like others. After reading some of these FWP, and the whining...I dunno, man. There are people throwing acid in the face of girls on the other side of the world, and you're all complaining about having to go into the registry and manually remove context menus.

I don't know anything about Atom, but I'm willing to bet there's really nothing this software is doing that prevents you from sleeping at night.

zippy786• 11 years ago

Seriously, creators of Atom, what feature did you not find in any of the current text editors that you had to built one. Let's have a editor in every language!!!

gaoshan• 11 years ago

Downloaded it and added Facebook's Nuclide plugin suite but many things seem to not work. the mercurial plugin doesn't appear to function at all and frequently the config section where you list installed plugins just seems to hang, without loading anything. I'll stick with Webstorm (favorite) and Brackets (favorite "Atom like" editor) and vim (favorite command line). Atom seems too buggy to me.

BenjiSujang2• 11 years ago

It's only fashion. There're no hard facts why someone should prefer it to vim, notepad++ or sublime or even a proper IDE like a Jetbrains product or Visual Studio.

jjawssd6• 11 years ago

Correct

norman784• 11 years ago

I like Atom, was using for few days and I'm quite happy, also seems much like Sublime Text experience when first launch after Textmate "dies"

JoshMnem• 11 years ago

I'd rather write vimscript than coffeescript.

naryad• 11 years ago

Go To Matching Bracket taking almost 2 seconds in atom, happens instantaneously on vim/sublime.

roelvanhintum• 11 years ago

Nice, this is the first thing i start in the morning, use all day and close at the end of the day. I'm using Atom with monokai and linter and love it.

That mid century video is hilarious.

gabeio2• 11 years ago

I have to say amazing job to the team. My reason: last time I looked/was regularly using Atom the generic memory size was around 100mB if I remember correctly. I just checked with 1.0 and the memory size has now dropped below Sublime Text 3.0 (~70mB) to ~60mB. (OS X.10)

tehbeard2• 11 years ago

Seems to still be north of 100mb on Windows machines perhaps?

Same project and files open in ST3, 30mb.

I may be reading it wrong though; task manager is reporting ~30mb for atom , but there's ~100mb of background processes for atom shown as well.

gabeio2• 11 years ago

Interesting, maybe they made the tabs more chrome like breaking each into separate processes.

tehbeard2• 11 years ago

Ok I gotta ask.

Is there no recent files menu? Or am I just missing where they placed it?

I do like the find/replace UI compared to ST3, but the lack of a recents menu and it choking if I accidentally click a large file just aren't making me feel the need to swap to this.

Betelgeuse90• 11 years ago

Can anyone explain to me why startup speed is such an important factor for them?

I really can't get my head around it. It's such a non-issue for me.

I care so much more about general performance post-startup. I wouldn't even bring startup speed up as an issue as long as it's in the few-seconds range, which it always was for me using Atom.

Atom 1.0

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