15 ms·

Atom text editor 1.4 released

183 points by seanwilson 11y ago

seivan 11y ago
Still can't use it for reviewing a commit (git commit -va) kills my MBPr. But glad things are moving forward. Still haven't decided between Atom and Sublime though..
- greyman 11y ago
  Me too, but I think I will settle with Atom eventually. Price of the sublime itself is acceptable, but then also sftp plugin is another $30... Or is there some other worthwhile alternative?
  - bloke_zero 11y ago
    Vim? Takes some setting up/learning but everything I ever wanted is 'out there'. Amazing plugins for git, linting, code completion, whatever you can think of some one has done/is doing. I used to use Textmate a lot, tried sublime, Atom etc. I'll never go back. (Sorry, but someone had to be 'that guy'.)
    - sarkron 11y ago
      I've been a happy vim user for 10+ years. I took Atom for a spin last week and I absolutely love it. There's a vim mode package for Atom that implements some vim features (not all, obviously) here https://github.com/atom/vim-mode https://github.com/atom/vim-mode
  - rplnt 11y ago
    Sublime is also closed source (I could live with that alone) and somewhat secretly developed. Releases seem random. ST3 is, in my opinion, worse than ST2. It's acceptable for beta, but I don't know what happens with ST2 now. Am I stuck without updates? What was the point of major version change in the first place?
    - jhasse 11y ago
      Python was updated from 2 to 3 among other things
- Drakim 11y ago
  I really like the idea behind Atom, it's what I "want" to like. But Sublime is just so superior in terms of speed and feel that I keep going back. Working in Atom has that feel as if I was sitting in a remote desktop view while coding.
  - 746F7475 11y ago
    Well, ST has been around little longer, so there is still time for Atom to catch up.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
      - 746F7475 11y ago
        I don't know. I haven't really paid attention. For me Atom is just free ST. It gets the job done for me.
    - TickleSteve 11y ago
      It has fundamentally hugely more overhead than ST so really doesn't have a chance in the speed stakes.
    - PlzSnow 11y ago
      It's not technically possible for Atom to catchup with SublimeText in terms of speed, unless their is a big leap in quantum computing.
- Klathmon 11y ago
  I think the line between "IDE" and "Editor" is starting to blur, and Atom is toward the IDE side of that scale. I personally still use Notepad++ as my "editor". Quick things like a git commit, just looking over a single log file or something, etc... Basically when i don't plan to be using it for more than a few minutes. Atom comes out when i do development. It's more-or-less my IDE at this point. And when viewed through that lense, it starts faster than jetbrains does!
  - seanp2k2 11y ago
    This. I was using WebStorm for a while, but with all the inline jshint support and es6 support, atom has been really nice. I have a strange issue where [esc] doesn't close my search box, but other than that and the CPU usage it's been great. I wanted rainbow brackets for a long time, and it finally looks like someone's done it: https://atom.io/packages/swackets https://atom.io/packages/swackets
    - Klathmon 11y ago
      Just a heads up, i really liked swackets, but it ended up wreaking havoc with atom. It was slow, it messed with tern-js a bit, and the brackets would "pop" into the viewport whenever i scrolled. That was about a month ago so it may be better now.
    - seivan 11y ago
      I have the same issue. I think it's because of changes on the autocomplete settings, but I can't pinpoint it. Have you had any lock? It's annoying as hell as there is no close button either.
mparramon 11y ago
If you're thinking on taking the plunge from Sublime Text, here are some setup notes aimed at web developers: http://www.developingandstuff.com/2015/04/setting-up-atom-for-rails-development.html http://www.developingandstuff.com/2015/04/setting-up-atom-fo...
- tobr 11y ago
  Haven't tried Atom for about one and half years; at that time it was a performance trainwreck. Is it better?
  - mparramon 11y ago
    I've been using it as my main editor for a couple years now, and yes, it's getting better with every release.
  - jimcsharp 11y ago
    My only frame of reference is visual studio... Atom is darn fast.
    - rplnt 11y ago
      To start maybe?
  - biehl 11y ago
    Yes, it is quite a lot better. I just restarted using after two years pause. Now I find that I open half my sessions in Atom, half in sublime.
  - desuvader 11y ago
    Atom still sometimes freezes for me (on computer with high-end specs). Opening large text files also makes Atom freeze. The built in spotlight thing is slow for bigger projects (expected). The overall performance has definitely improved though. I personally use Atom for lighter development and enjoy how easily accessible plugins are. Very easy to install support for lint tools/editorconfig/snippets/&tc.
rplnt 11y ago
Haven't tried it since launch, and while it's still insanely HUGE for a "text editor", I find it much faster. It was unusable back then, now it seems to work. Startup time used to be longer than the OS itself (well, not really, but you get the point), now it's somewhat reasonable. Do you use "in production"? Is it OK? By the way, Find seems to be only working on three or more characters? How do I find two-letter substring? :) edit: Regexp find is a bit slow overall (one 5-line file). Like it is waiting for a while before commiting to updating the UI. And that's on an i7 desktop, can't imagine it working on my Celeron laptop (but will give it a try later).
- glenndebacker 11y ago
  The install size doesn't bother me personally (although my colleague's with newer Macbook Pro and smaller SSD may have an other opinion) but the speed of the editor is important for me. It is fine for smaller simple files but I have had occasions that with some text files it can be really slow to a point that it is unworkable. Last I was working on a HTML5 game and I copied the base64 encoded version of a font into my file that handled the assets and boy was that a bad idea. The preload.js was just 49KB but one big base64 encoded line made atom choke... Textwrangler or sublime didn't crimp on the same file and opened it in an instant. Granted my Macbook Pro is old but a i7 with 8Gb RAM should be able to deal with these kind of situations.
  - Klathmon 11y ago
    Yeah atom has always had issues with files over a few kb that are all on the same line. If the file doesn't have any crazy long lines, i've had it handle 5mb+ files with no issues.
    - PlzSnow 11y ago
      "i've had it handle 5mb+ files with no issues." Wow! It's so exciting living in the 1990s!
      - Klathmon 11y ago
catshirt 11y ago
not calling anyone a liar, consider it an anecdote, but i've used Atom exclusively for over a year and it performs great.
- k__ 11y ago
  Well, I'm coming from WebStorm and in contrast to that it works just great ;)
  - xiaoma 11y ago
    With the notable lack of "click through to definition"!
    - 13years 11y ago
      Brackets can do this. Ctrl/Cmd E will open definition inline.
zump 11y ago
The runtime architecture is a bit bloated IMHO.
josteink 11y ago
I find the momentum which Atom has gathered to be impressive. It seems to be building up an ecosystem at quite a rapid speed. Myself, I prefer Emacs, because I like it's base philosophy (everything is a text-buffer, everything is hackable LISP) and the endless possibilities that provides in form of customization, extensions (and extension on extensions, and customization of those, etc etc). I don't think Atom is quite there, or ever will be. It will be interesting to see if if has the staying power of Emacs, or if it will yet another TextMate, Sublime Text or whatever hip text-editor of the month there has been the last decade.
- k__ 11y ago
  Yes, many nice features are missing. I mean, you have to code your themes, therefore you have to know much stuff about the editor. In many IDEs you can just load a them and get a config UI that lets you fine-tune it.
  - 746F7475 11y ago
    Depends what kind of things you need/want to make. I've modified few themes and it's pretty simple stuff after little experimentation.
  - yAnonymous 11y ago
    You can style it using CSS. How much easier could it be?
    - josteink 11y ago
      I've heard that Atom doesn't really reuse CSS or (SASS/LESS sheet variables) in any meaningful way, meaning having consistent theming is hard, at least if you want to use extra modules and plugins. He may be thinking about that?
  - josteink 11y ago
    > I mean, you have to code your themes Are you talking about themes in Emacs? Because if so, that statement is definitely not correct. You can code your themes (and sometimes I do!), but it's definitely not the standard or only way of doing it. If you're talking about Atom... Thanks for the info :)
matiasb 11y ago
Happy to see highlighted JSCAD [0] Does anyone find JSCAD modeling inside Atom useful? Tips/suggestions? I've been working on this project [1] [0] https://github.com/github/linguist/pull/2712 https://github.com/github/linguist/pull/2712 [1] https://atom.io/packages/atom-scad-preview https://atom.io/packages/atom-scad-preview
unsignedint 11y ago
One thing I noticed about Atom is that it doesn't handle (or preserve) Byte-Order-Mark and that wrecked havok on one of Unity project I was editing before. I liked the design of Atom, but for this reason, I guess it's not the time for me to give up Emacs yet
konart 11y ago
Still eats lots of RAM and hangs on large files.
- knotty66 11y ago
  I like it, but there was that joke doing the rounds that Atom was an acronym for 'A Terabyte Of Memory'.
  - tyingq 11y ago
    More funny with the context that EMACS was known as "Eight Megs And Constantly Swapping".
bhaak 11y ago
When I tried it last time, maybe a year ago, I was quickly turned off by how uncustomisable it was, despite the claims. All I wanted was a non-blinking block cursor ... Now I just found this https://github.com/olmokramer/atom-block-cursor https://github.com/olmokramer/atom-block-cursor But more than 200 commits to support non-blinking block cursors? I think Atom is not for me.
- pvdebbe 11y ago
  :) I get you perfectly, but every exensible system usually has a couple of corners that are not that easily extended as indented. Design choices, tradeoffs or laziness usually involved.
- tokenizerrr 11y ago
  So many of those commits are "updated readme", "updated changelog" and stuff like that. Scrolling through the log it's not uncomming to find 5 or 6 "updated readme" commits right after each other in that repository. It's not a good metric. Instead look at the 278 lines of code necessary to achieve it.
- akerro 11y ago
  That's what happens when someone tries to write desktop application in JS :)
- krisdol 11y ago
  You really can't please some people.
manojlds 11y ago
Best thing about some of the modern tools like Atom is that, by the time you know about the release, you are already updated!
edent 11y ago
> The Linux version does not currently automatically update so you will need to repeat these steps to upgrade to future releases. Bit of a shame, I wouldn't have known about this update if I hadn't seen it here. While I appreciate auto-updating isn't for everyone, an in-app notification would have been useful.
michaelwww 11y ago
I'm really enjoying the innovation that is happening in text editing. I prefer Visual Studio Code for light weight editing. Both Atom and VS Code are built on the Electron [1] engine but "VSCode uses Monaco for the user interface, not Atom. It is the web editor which Microsoft developed for Visual Studio Online. Electron is just the common core between the two applications. You can think of it like different programs using the same .NET framework, or two games built on top of the same engine." [2] Both are fine editors and I use both [Ubuntu versions] in different contexts. It's fantastic that both are open source. That's were Sublime Text 3 loses me, because it is proprietary. I agree with some of the concerns raised in this thread, but realize some see closed source with one benevolent dictator for life as a benefit [3]. Other editors I'm keeping and eye on are Adobe Brackets and Facebook's Nuclide. LightTable is interesting. I have given vim and emacs a spin, but I am not a keyboard jockey. Aint we got fun! [1] https://discuss.atom.io/t/visual-studio-code-and-atom/16479/12 https://discuss.atom.io/t/visual-studio-code-and-atom/16479/... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_(software_framework) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_(software_framework) [3] https://forum.sublimetext.com/t/sublimes-future-and-open-source/7424 https://forum.sublimetext.com/t/sublimes-future-and-open-sou...
- jarcane 11y ago
  Brackets was quite nice for what it can do out of the box, but I found the community support very poor, so there's really not much more than that it can do. LightTable was a clever idea that never quite fit my workflow, and which as far as I can tell is basically dead. The creators have abandoned it, and the surviving maintainer support is of the "pull requests welcome" variety. There are glaring bugs in basic features like inline eval, and maintainer response was a combination of "eh, we're cutting that feature anyway" and "fix it yourself." Sure as hell doesn't give me any hope that this "Eve" thing their hyping is anything but smoke and mirrors.
  - 13years 11y ago
    I'm still using and prefer Brackets. Starting using it because it's performance was better than any other prior to VS Code. However, Brackets new instant search is awesome and no other editor has it. For large projects I find it a great feature to be able to search all files in realtime as you type.
osdf 11y ago
If you like vim and spacemacs, give proton-mode a shot: https://atom.io/packages/proton-mode https://atom.io/packages/proton-mode
cageface 11y ago
The decision to base Atom on web technologies remains controversial and it's still not as snappy as Sublime, for example, for similar tasks. But I think that decision has been vindicated by the speed of development it's made possible. Since the bar to entry for contributors is so low the ecosystem that's developed around Atom is second to none. You can find a package for just about anything and the UI polish of a lot of these packages is much higher than I've seen for any other editor, thanks to the ability to leverage modern HTML, CSS & JS. Atom may never be as fast as a truly native client but it's perfectly usable now and is increasingly leaving the competition in the dust when it comes to features.
- chris-at 11y ago
  > Since the bar to entry for contributors is so low Have they switched from Coffeescript to JavaScript?
  - moretti 11y ago
    Yeah https://twitter.com/sindresorhus/status/669958889941639168 https://twitter.com/sindresorhus/status/669958889941639168
    - chris-at 11y ago
      Cool. Got to resurrect my plugins :)
    - matthewbauer 11y ago
      I think it's still a work in progress. I still see .coffee files in atom/src.
      - ihsw 11y ago
        All new code is in ES6+ rather than CoffeeScript, which is significant.
    - wesleytodd 11y ago
codygman 11y ago
Atom seems pretty nice these days, but why would a competent emacs user switch to atom? Why would a spacemacs user switch to atom? Does it have any advantages?
- nhunzaker 11y ago
  As a front-end web developer that has used Emacs for several years, I often feel the pull to Atom. It draws very clear, direct inspiration from Emacs. Spacemacs is an improvement, however I think it the biggest advantage it (and any other modern text editor) has over Emacs is the on-boarding process and general beginner friendliness. Beyond that, Atom's modes for front-end web development are pretty top notch. We have js2-mode, and web-mode in Emacs, but the overall experience in Atom is often superior. For example, it's extremely easy to quickly install a color-picker, pull open a CSS file, and use a color wheel to make a hex value slightly darker. More, the color-picker UI feels tightly integrated into the editor. On the surface, this feels trite, however the slow build-up of user friendly developer conveniences adds up. The general command over the entire environment continues to draw me back to Emacs. Still, I continue to watch for when Atom can achieve this.
Atom4966 11y ago
Please note: https://github.com/atom/atom/issues/4966 https://github.com/atom/atom/issues/4966 remains open and packages `metrics` and `exception-reporting` are still enabled by default. * metrics: sends personal data to Google Analytics * exception-reporting: sends personal data to bugsnag.com
- AlexeyBrin 11y ago
  The good part about using an open source editor is that you can disable (and know about them) these packages if you don't want to be tracked.
  - PhilipA 11y ago
    Yes, but you first have to know about it.
- mrspeaker 11y ago
  Thank you for the heads up - I've been using Atom for 6 months and did not know they had these enabled.
renke1 11y ago
Does anybody know if it's now possible to use Atom as a sane $GIT_EDITOR (or $SUDO_EDITOR...) such that a new tab is opened in an existing window and the invoking process (git, sudo,...) is notified when the tab is closed (similar to Sublime Text)?
- adbachman 11y ago
  I use the 'atom --wait' command line option to do this and it's worked fine as an EDITOR so far, though I don't use atom much otherwise, so I never have a lot of tabs open.
- jhasse 11y ago
  http://blog.atom.io/2014/03/13/git-integration.html http://blog.atom.io/2014/03/13/git-integration.html
  - renke1 11y ago
    I can't test it right now, but I am pretty sure I tried that before and it opened a new Atom window instead of opening a new tab.
    - jhasse 11y ago
      Ah I see. You're right: It opens a new Window :(
okdtsk 11y ago
Atom 1.3 was hang up when opening same file name. 1.4 seems to fix this issue. https://github.com/atom/atom/issues/10060 https://github.com/atom/atom/issues/10060
vdnkh 11y ago
I love Atom and I've been using it for a long time now, but have they fixed the horrible stability issues in Windows yet? I run it on 3 distinct Windows machines and they all experience the same issues (most notably, I cannot have two editors open without the most recent crashing).
jmsdnns 11y ago
I submitted a PR for homebrew's cask once I read about the update. https://github.com/caskroom/homebrew-cask/pull/17022 https://github.com/caskroom/homebrew-cask/pull/17022
- jmsdnns 11y ago
  Tight. They merged it in already. Homebrew is ready to go!
  - seanp2k2 11y ago
    Just curious, what's the advantage to installing this with homebrew? Does apm still work from the terminal?
    - jmsdnns 11y ago
      Just makes it super easy. No difference other than how you do it. And yep, apm works
qwertyuiop924 11y ago
Atom: Now one step closer to being emacs. Now all you need is a proper text buffer model, instead of the clumsy hack you've got now, and lisp as an extlang. Wait, you already have that because clojurescript. So now you just need better APIs, and a proper buffer model. While I am a diehard emacs user, I considered using atom for light editing (short enough that I'd want proper highlighting/indent support, but not long enough to get emacs out), but the lack of uniform buffer treatment was a dealbreaker for me. If you can't switch between settings and terminal screens using the same mechanism you switch between text screens with, and it all of the above don't have the same underlying mechanism, than you're doing it wrong.
- SpaceCadetJones 11y ago
  Do you know of any examples out there on how to write plugins using ClojureScript? I got into Emacs a few months ago, but have been considering switching over to Atom so I can write plugins in CLJS
  - qwertyuiop924 11y ago
    https://github.com/MarcoPolo/atom-paredit https://github.com/MarcoPolo/atom-paredit I'd also recommend looking at the atom api docs, if you really want to switch.
    - SpaceCadetJones 11y ago
      Thank you, this looks like a great minimal yet complete plugin. I'll have to try and hack my own together this weekend.
      - qwertyuiop924 11y ago
        You're welcome :-D. I'd recommend sticking with emacs though. CLJS is a better lisp than elisp, but emacs is a better platform than atom.
caio1982 11y ago
Does anyone know of a good Python completion plugin for Atom similar to what PyCharm has (i.e. can complete models stuff etc)?
- madspindel 11y ago
  I use this: https://atom.io/packages/autocomplete-python https://atom.io/packages/autocomplete-python
cdnsteve 11y ago
Been using sublime, code and atom. Atom seems to freak out in unexpected ways and has the downside of spewing tose node.js errors. Code and sublime just seem more solid. I don't need explosions in my editor when I'm focused.
traspler 11y ago
I try it again every few versions and would really like to try Atom for longer but it really bothers me that I can't really configure hot exit the way I want it to work. It seems like I'm a minority in that I don't want Atom to open the whole folder in the tree view when I open a file. What annoys me even more is that I want hot exit completely disabled, so that when I open Atom, no previous files/tabs or folders are open. I could never get this to work. The previously opened folder will always be present in the tree view when I open Atom again and when I open a file it will always open the folder in the tree view. Does someone know if there is a workaround to this?
leejoramo 11y ago
I continue to want to like Atom, and I try it out several times a year. Just updated, and see that it still has big performance problems on my system. I currently have BBEdit and SublimeText open for real work, and these are apps the have been running for days. Here 100% would represent full usage of a CPU core: BBEdit: 15 files open (various types/sizes) 76MB RAM < 2% CPU 1 process 25MB app disk space SublimeText: 10 files open (various types/sizes) 169 RAM < 2% CPU 1 process 27MB app disk space Atom 1 small Markdown file open > 1.2GB RAM !!!!!! > 85% CPU 7 processes 205MB app disk space Just sitting in the background I am seeing Atom's CPU and RAM usages fluctuate wildly. The numbers above are the LOWEST I observed. I will spend a little time looking into why this is happening. I certainly could be related to some add-on package that I have installed, but I don't every recall seeing BBEdit or SublimeText behave so poorly with all of the customizations I have thrown at them. Update: added disk space for base app. Even with a 500GB SSD, Atom would make me think about its value vs space usage. Update 2: the system specs. 2011 MacBook Pro 13-inch, 2.3GHz i5, 500GB SSD, 16GB RAM, OS X 10.11.2 Update 3: performed a clean reinstall of Atom, removed all third party packages, removed preference files, disabled Markdown preview. Atom is still using over 80% cpu and greater than 1GB RAM with one short markdown file open
- forgotmypassw 11y ago
  I'm on the same boat, as much as I'd love to love Atom, I keep installing it anew with every release only to get disappointed by the performance. Shame because it's an otherwise great editor.
  - leejoramo 11y ago
    See my solution elsewhere in this thread. You might have a ~/.git directory like I did.
- sdegutis 11y ago
  This is the exact reason I don't use Atom. It makes sense within the context of the Atom dream: to make a completely customizable editor, down to the pixel. But Emacs has almost the exact same dream: to make a completely customizable editor, down to the character-grid cell. This one small difference gives it way more performance, without much loss in my opinion. Atom is extremely bloated in every sense of the term. It's bloated in CPU, in memory usage, in files, in libraries, in dependencies, in overall performance, in everything. All because it wants to be customizable on the pixel level, rather than the character level. I wish a new editor would arise to actually complete with Emacs. I hate this piece of junk editor, but it works, and it gets the job done.
kup0 11y ago
The features do not outweigh the performance loss in my experience.
cryptos 11y ago
The development of Atom shows a common anti pattern of software development: choosing the technology first. The goal was to develop an editor with web technologies, and not to develop the best editor in the world. The result is as sad as foreseeable: a buggy and slow memory hog named Atom. When I tried it last time, a couple of days ago, it was impossible to enter an @ sign into the text area.
- JesseAldridge 11y ago
  I assume their goal is to someday integrate Atom into GitHub proper (running in a normal web browser) in order to have developers living in a 100% GitHub ecosystem. The chosen stack makes a lot of sense given this objective.
- vmateixeira 11y ago
  I can only agree.
- vonklaus 11y ago
  Yeah. I don't want to rail against it top much because it is a free tool, but it crashes regularly, hangs, and regularly lags opening small files. I love the drag/drop sidebar but If this update doesn't inprove the editor significantly, i will delete it.
- jonpaul 11y ago
  > not to develop the best editor in the world. The problem is that "best" is subjective. I think one could more accurately say that they're trying to develop an editor that is easily extensible with technologies familiar to many developers. i.e. your perception of what they want Atom to be and the reality of what they want Atom to be are probably not the same. My take? Revisit this in five years. I bet it'll be one of the richest ecosystems in software development. As one who has written Atom plugins (live unit testing w/ real-time feedback), I've never encountered such a developer experience until Atom.
- happyhowler 11y ago
  > choosing the technology first Lets say if one of the main goals was to build a very easily extensible editor, one might still choose to build it on web technologies. While I don't use atom, I can see the reasoning. Since I'm comfortable with webdev, the barrier to entry for extending atom is much lower compared to other newish editors.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
rosstex 11y ago
But it's still so slow.
wyager 11y ago
I've been using atom for a few weeks. On my low-power 12" MacBook, it is only slightly slower than sublime text. The only two tasks that are annoyingly slow are opening the editor or a new editor window. The barely noticeable lack of snappiness during editing is more than compensated for by the quality of the editor and its plugin ecosystem. I've also started using a ligature font for programming, which sublime doesn't support.
YngwieMalware 11y ago
Posting to say I love Atom and I am excited for its future. I've added Facebook's Nuclide package and it has some really great features. Would love to continue to see Atom as a full featured IDE
kapv89 11y ago
Disappointed to see so much FUD over here. I switched to atom from sublime 2 months back, mainly because its tooling for ES7(emmet, babel, eslint etc) just works. And the editor is much more accessible to me than sublime. Btw, I develop on an 14'' i3 3rd gen, 8gig, no-ssd laptop, and I am able to do react-native dev, with the emulator running just fine
- michaelmrose 11y ago
  Are you sure its not just other peoples experience that doesn't match yours rather than FUD?
  - kapv89 11y ago
    Are you sure its not FUD? I setup the dev team of a startup(in Delhi, India) I was consulting with with Atom for react and node dev few months back. These guys were provided pretty shitty, and pretty old, 4 gig ram laptops. And they used to screw up things which could've easily been resolved with in-text-editor linting. I got them running atom with emmet, babel and ESlint, and they are still using it without any issues. I have seen atom run reasonably well on really shitty machines. Its very hard for me to accept that all this complaining about its performance is not FUD.
    - ino 11y ago
      It runs badly on my 8gb 2013 MacBook Air, on a medium sized php+javascript project. I've been trying Atom every 3 months since it came out. Just a few plugins and Linting and is still very slow and I hate lag while typing. I don't have this problem with Sublime, for example, where typing is instant. Even eclipse and Android studio are more responsive when typing.
    - pikzen 11y ago
      It runs badly on my 16GB, i5 2500k desktop. Windows & Debian. 1GB RAM usage and a full CPU core is not acceptable for a text editor.
    - uncreative24 11y ago
stefanix 11y ago
With all the people complaining about Atom performance, I cannot confirm this. Switched from Sublime Text about two years ago and never had speed/snappiness issues. If anything Atom does quite well with gigantic files.
- ino 11y ago
  On a 500 line file when I start adding multiple cursors, after the 5th or so It starts taking multiple seconds just to select the next. This was in December, so a recent version. I can't work like this.
gisely 11y ago
I've stopped using atom due to horrendous latency issues. Pretty disappointed. Would really love a modern open source text editor, but noticeable lag between pressing a key and having it appear on the screen is a no go.
nikolay 11y ago
I love Atom, but it along with Chrome it eats all my memory with just a few open files/tabs! Why would an editor and a thin (!) client use gigabytes of RAM?! Remember when computers had just 48KB of RAM and did great things?

183 points by seanwilson 11y ago

Still can't use it for reviewing a commit (git commit -va) kills my MBPr. But glad things are moving forward. Still haven't decided between Atom and Sublime though..

greyman 11y ago
Me too, but I think I will settle with Atom eventually. Price of the sublime itself is acceptable, but then also sftp plugin is another $30... Or is there some other worthwhile alternative?
- bloke_zero 11y ago
  Vim? Takes some setting up/learning but everything I ever wanted is 'out there'. Amazing plugins for git, linting, code completion, whatever you can think of some one has done/is doing. I used to use Textmate a lot, tried sublime, Atom etc. I'll never go back. (Sorry, but someone had to be 'that guy'.)
  - sarkron 11y ago
    I've been a happy vim user for 10+ years. I took Atom for a spin last week and I absolutely love it. There's a vim mode package for Atom that implements some vim features (not all, obviously) here https://github.com/atom/vim-mode https://github.com/atom/vim-mode
- rplnt 11y ago
  Sublime is also closed source (I could live with that alone) and somewhat secretly developed. Releases seem random. ST3 is, in my opinion, worse than ST2. It's acceptable for beta, but I don't know what happens with ST2 now. Am I stuck without updates? What was the point of major version change in the first place?
  - jhasse 11y ago
    Python was updated from 2 to 3 among other things
Drakim 11y ago
I really like the idea behind Atom, it's what I "want" to like. But Sublime is just so superior in terms of speed and feel that I keep going back. Working in Atom has that feel as if I was sitting in a remote desktop view while coding.
- 746F7475 11y ago
  Well, ST has been around little longer, so there is still time for Atom to catch up.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
    - 746F7475 11y ago
      I don't know. I haven't really paid attention. For me Atom is just free ST. It gets the job done for me.
  - TickleSteve 11y ago
    It has fundamentally hugely more overhead than ST so really doesn't have a chance in the speed stakes.
  - PlzSnow 11y ago
    It's not technically possible for Atom to catchup with SublimeText in terms of speed, unless their is a big leap in quantum computing.
Klathmon 11y ago
I think the line between "IDE" and "Editor" is starting to blur, and Atom is toward the IDE side of that scale. I personally still use Notepad++ as my "editor". Quick things like a git commit, just looking over a single log file or something, etc... Basically when i don't plan to be using it for more than a few minutes. Atom comes out when i do development. It's more-or-less my IDE at this point. And when viewed through that lense, it starts faster than jetbrains does!
- seanp2k2 11y ago
  This. I was using WebStorm for a while, but with all the inline jshint support and es6 support, atom has been really nice. I have a strange issue where [esc] doesn't close my search box, but other than that and the CPU usage it's been great. I wanted rainbow brackets for a long time, and it finally looks like someone's done it: https://atom.io/packages/swackets https://atom.io/packages/swackets
  - Klathmon 11y ago
    Just a heads up, i really liked swackets, but it ended up wreaking havoc with atom. It was slow, it messed with tern-js a bit, and the brackets would "pop" into the viewport whenever i scrolled. That was about a month ago so it may be better now.
  - seivan 11y ago
    I have the same issue. I think it's because of changes on the autocomplete settings, but I can't pinpoint it. Have you had any lock? It's annoying as hell as there is no close button either.

mparramon 11y ago

If you're thinking on taking the plunge from Sublime Text, here are some setup notes aimed at web developers: http://www.developingandstuff.com/2015/04/setting-up-atom-for-rails-development.html http://www.developingandstuff.com/2015/04/setting-up-atom-fo...

tobr 11y ago
Haven't tried Atom for about one and half years; at that time it was a performance trainwreck. Is it better?
- mparramon 11y ago
  I've been using it as my main editor for a couple years now, and yes, it's getting better with every release.
- jimcsharp 11y ago
  My only frame of reference is visual studio... Atom is darn fast.
  - rplnt 11y ago
    To start maybe?
- biehl 11y ago
  Yes, it is quite a lot better. I just restarted using after two years pause. Now I find that I open half my sessions in Atom, half in sublime.
- desuvader 11y ago
  Atom still sometimes freezes for me (on computer with high-end specs). Opening large text files also makes Atom freeze. The built in spotlight thing is slow for bigger projects (expected). The overall performance has definitely improved though. I personally use Atom for lighter development and enjoy how easily accessible plugins are. Very easy to install support for lint tools/editorconfig/snippets/&tc.

rplnt 11y ago

Haven't tried it since launch, and while it's still insanely HUGE for a "text editor", I find it much faster. It was unusable back then, now it seems to work. Startup time used to be longer than the OS itself (well, not really, but you get the point), now it's somewhat reasonable. Do you use "in production"? Is it OK? By the way, Find seems to be only working on three or more characters? How do I find two-letter substring? :) edit: Regexp find is a bit slow overall (one 5-line file). Like it is waiting for a while before commiting to updating the UI. And that's on an i7 desktop, can't imagine it working on my Celeron laptop (but will give it a try later).

glenndebacker 11y ago
The install size doesn't bother me personally (although my colleague's with newer Macbook Pro and smaller SSD may have an other opinion) but the speed of the editor is important for me. It is fine for smaller simple files but I have had occasions that with some text files it can be really slow to a point that it is unworkable. Last I was working on a HTML5 game and I copied the base64 encoded version of a font into my file that handled the assets and boy was that a bad idea. The preload.js was just 49KB but one big base64 encoded line made atom choke... Textwrangler or sublime didn't crimp on the same file and opened it in an instant. Granted my Macbook Pro is old but a i7 with 8Gb RAM should be able to deal with these kind of situations.
- Klathmon 11y ago
  Yeah atom has always had issues with files over a few kb that are all on the same line. If the file doesn't have any crazy long lines, i've had it handle 5mb+ files with no issues.
  - PlzSnow 11y ago
    "i've had it handle 5mb+ files with no issues." Wow! It's so exciting living in the 1990s!
    - Klathmon 11y ago

catshirt 11y ago

not calling anyone a liar, consider it an anecdote, but i've used Atom exclusively for over a year and it performs great.

k__ 11y ago
Well, I'm coming from WebStorm and in contrast to that it works just great ;)
- xiaoma 11y ago
  With the notable lack of "click through to definition"!
  - 13years 11y ago
    Brackets can do this. Ctrl/Cmd E will open definition inline.

zump 11y ago

The runtime architecture is a bit bloated IMHO.

josteink 11y ago

I find the momentum which Atom has gathered to be impressive. It seems to be building up an ecosystem at quite a rapid speed. Myself, I prefer Emacs, because I like it's base philosophy (everything is a text-buffer, everything is hackable LISP) and the endless possibilities that provides in form of customization, extensions (and extension on extensions, and customization of those, etc etc). I don't think Atom is quite there, or ever will be. It will be interesting to see if if has the staying power of Emacs, or if it will yet another TextMate, Sublime Text or whatever hip text-editor of the month there has been the last decade.

k__ 11y ago
Yes, many nice features are missing. I mean, you have to code your themes, therefore you have to know much stuff about the editor. In many IDEs you can just load a them and get a config UI that lets you fine-tune it.
- 746F7475 11y ago
  Depends what kind of things you need/want to make. I've modified few themes and it's pretty simple stuff after little experimentation.
- yAnonymous 11y ago
  You can style it using CSS. How much easier could it be?
  - josteink 11y ago
    I've heard that Atom doesn't really reuse CSS or (SASS/LESS sheet variables) in any meaningful way, meaning having consistent theming is hard, at least if you want to use extra modules and plugins. He may be thinking about that?
- josteink 11y ago
  > I mean, you have to code your themes Are you talking about themes in Emacs? Because if so, that statement is definitely not correct. You can code your themes (and sometimes I do!), but it's definitely not the standard or only way of doing it. If you're talking about Atom... Thanks for the info :)

matiasb 11y ago

Happy to see highlighted JSCAD [0] Does anyone find JSCAD modeling inside Atom useful? Tips/suggestions? I've been working on this project [1] [0] https://github.com/github/linguist/pull/2712 https://github.com/github/linguist/pull/2712 [1] https://atom.io/packages/atom-scad-preview https://atom.io/packages/atom-scad-preview

unsignedint 11y ago

One thing I noticed about Atom is that it doesn't handle (or preserve) Byte-Order-Mark and that wrecked havok on one of Unity project I was editing before. I liked the design of Atom, but for this reason, I guess it's not the time for me to give up Emacs yet

konart 11y ago

Still eats lots of RAM and hangs on large files.

knotty66 11y ago
I like it, but there was that joke doing the rounds that Atom was an acronym for 'A Terabyte Of Memory'.
- tyingq 11y ago
  More funny with the context that EMACS was known as "Eight Megs And Constantly Swapping".

bhaak 11y ago

When I tried it last time, maybe a year ago, I was quickly turned off by how uncustomisable it was, despite the claims. All I wanted was a non-blinking block cursor ... Now I just found this https://github.com/olmokramer/atom-block-cursor https://github.com/olmokramer/atom-block-cursor But more than 200 commits to support non-blinking block cursors? I think Atom is not for me.

pvdebbe 11y ago
:) I get you perfectly, but every exensible system usually has a couple of corners that are not that easily extended as indented. Design choices, tradeoffs or laziness usually involved.
tokenizerrr 11y ago
So many of those commits are "updated readme", "updated changelog" and stuff like that. Scrolling through the log it's not uncomming to find 5 or 6 "updated readme" commits right after each other in that repository. It's not a good metric. Instead look at the 278 lines of code necessary to achieve it.
akerro 11y ago
That's what happens when someone tries to write desktop application in JS :)
krisdol 11y ago
You really can't please some people.

manojlds 11y ago

Best thing about some of the modern tools like Atom is that, by the time you know about the release, you are already updated!

edent 11y ago

> The Linux version does not currently automatically update so you will need to repeat these steps to upgrade to future releases. Bit of a shame, I wouldn't have known about this update if I hadn't seen it here. While I appreciate auto-updating isn't for everyone, an in-app notification would have been useful.

michaelwww 11y ago

I'm really enjoying the innovation that is happening in text editing. I prefer Visual Studio Code for light weight editing. Both Atom and VS Code are built on the Electron [1] engine but "VSCode uses Monaco for the user interface, not Atom. It is the web editor which Microsoft developed for Visual Studio Online. Electron is just the common core between the two applications. You can think of it like different programs using the same .NET framework, or two games built on top of the same engine." [2] Both are fine editors and I use both [Ubuntu versions] in different contexts. It's fantastic that both are open source. That's were Sublime Text 3 loses me, because it is proprietary. I agree with some of the concerns raised in this thread, but realize some see closed source with one benevolent dictator for life as a benefit [3]. Other editors I'm keeping and eye on are Adobe Brackets and Facebook's Nuclide. LightTable is interesting. I have given vim and emacs a spin, but I am not a keyboard jockey. Aint we got fun! [1] https://discuss.atom.io/t/visual-studio-code-and-atom/16479/12 https://discuss.atom.io/t/visual-studio-code-and-atom/16479/... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_(software_framework) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_(software_framework) [3] https://forum.sublimetext.com/t/sublimes-future-and-open-source/7424 https://forum.sublimetext.com/t/sublimes-future-and-open-sou...

jarcane 11y ago
Brackets was quite nice for what it can do out of the box, but I found the community support very poor, so there's really not much more than that it can do. LightTable was a clever idea that never quite fit my workflow, and which as far as I can tell is basically dead. The creators have abandoned it, and the surviving maintainer support is of the "pull requests welcome" variety. There are glaring bugs in basic features like inline eval, and maintainer response was a combination of "eh, we're cutting that feature anyway" and "fix it yourself." Sure as hell doesn't give me any hope that this "Eve" thing their hyping is anything but smoke and mirrors.
- 13years 11y ago
  I'm still using and prefer Brackets. Starting using it because it's performance was better than any other prior to VS Code. However, Brackets new instant search is awesome and no other editor has it. For large projects I find it a great feature to be able to search all files in realtime as you type.

osdf 11y ago

If you like vim and spacemacs, give proton-mode a shot: https://atom.io/packages/proton-mode https://atom.io/packages/proton-mode

cageface 11y ago

The decision to base Atom on web technologies remains controversial and it's still not as snappy as Sublime, for example, for similar tasks. But I think that decision has been vindicated by the speed of development it's made possible. Since the bar to entry for contributors is so low the ecosystem that's developed around Atom is second to none. You can find a package for just about anything and the UI polish of a lot of these packages is much higher than I've seen for any other editor, thanks to the ability to leverage modern HTML, CSS & JS. Atom may never be as fast as a truly native client but it's perfectly usable now and is increasingly leaving the competition in the dust when it comes to features.

chris-at 11y ago
> Since the bar to entry for contributors is so low Have they switched from Coffeescript to JavaScript?
- moretti 11y ago
  Yeah https://twitter.com/sindresorhus/status/669958889941639168 https://twitter.com/sindresorhus/status/669958889941639168
  - chris-at 11y ago
    Cool. Got to resurrect my plugins :)
  - matthewbauer 11y ago
    I think it's still a work in progress. I still see .coffee files in atom/src.
    - ihsw 11y ago
      All new code is in ES6+ rather than CoffeeScript, which is significant.
  - wesleytodd 11y ago

codygman 11y ago

Atom seems pretty nice these days, but why would a competent emacs user switch to atom? Why would a spacemacs user switch to atom? Does it have any advantages?

nhunzaker 11y ago
As a front-end web developer that has used Emacs for several years, I often feel the pull to Atom. It draws very clear, direct inspiration from Emacs. Spacemacs is an improvement, however I think it the biggest advantage it (and any other modern text editor) has over Emacs is the on-boarding process and general beginner friendliness. Beyond that, Atom's modes for front-end web development are pretty top notch. We have js2-mode, and web-mode in Emacs, but the overall experience in Atom is often superior. For example, it's extremely easy to quickly install a color-picker, pull open a CSS file, and use a color wheel to make a hex value slightly darker. More, the color-picker UI feels tightly integrated into the editor. On the surface, this feels trite, however the slow build-up of user friendly developer conveniences adds up. The general command over the entire environment continues to draw me back to Emacs. Still, I continue to watch for when Atom can achieve this.

Atom4966 11y ago

Please note: https://github.com/atom/atom/issues/4966 https://github.com/atom/atom/issues/4966 remains open and packages `metrics` and `exception-reporting` are still enabled by default. * metrics: sends personal data to Google Analytics * exception-reporting: sends personal data to bugsnag.com

AlexeyBrin 11y ago
The good part about using an open source editor is that you can disable (and know about them) these packages if you don't want to be tracked.
- PhilipA 11y ago
  Yes, but you first have to know about it.
mrspeaker 11y ago
Thank you for the heads up - I've been using Atom for 6 months and did not know they had these enabled.

renke1 11y ago

Does anybody know if it's now possible to use Atom as a sane $GIT_EDITOR (or $SUDO_EDITOR...) such that a new tab is opened in an existing window and the invoking process (git, sudo,...) is notified when the tab is closed (similar to Sublime Text)?

adbachman 11y ago
I use the 'atom --wait' command line option to do this and it's worked fine as an EDITOR so far, though I don't use atom much otherwise, so I never have a lot of tabs open.
jhasse 11y ago
http://blog.atom.io/2014/03/13/git-integration.html http://blog.atom.io/2014/03/13/git-integration.html
- renke1 11y ago
  I can't test it right now, but I am pretty sure I tried that before and it opened a new Atom window instead of opening a new tab.
  - jhasse 11y ago
    Ah I see. You're right: It opens a new Window :(

okdtsk 11y ago

Atom 1.3 was hang up when opening same file name. 1.4 seems to fix this issue. https://github.com/atom/atom/issues/10060 https://github.com/atom/atom/issues/10060

vdnkh 11y ago

I love Atom and I've been using it for a long time now, but have they fixed the horrible stability issues in Windows yet? I run it on 3 distinct Windows machines and they all experience the same issues (most notably, I cannot have two editors open without the most recent crashing).

jmsdnns 11y ago

I submitted a PR for homebrew's cask once I read about the update. https://github.com/caskroom/homebrew-cask/pull/17022 https://github.com/caskroom/homebrew-cask/pull/17022

jmsdnns 11y ago
Tight. They merged it in already. Homebrew is ready to go!
- seanp2k2 11y ago
  Just curious, what's the advantage to installing this with homebrew? Does apm still work from the terminal?
  - jmsdnns 11y ago
    Just makes it super easy. No difference other than how you do it. And yep, apm works

qwertyuiop924 11y ago

Atom: Now one step closer to being emacs. Now all you need is a proper text buffer model, instead of the clumsy hack you've got now, and lisp as an extlang. Wait, you already have that because clojurescript. So now you just need better APIs, and a proper buffer model. While I am a diehard emacs user, I considered using atom for light editing (short enough that I'd want proper highlighting/indent support, but not long enough to get emacs out), but the lack of uniform buffer treatment was a dealbreaker for me. If you can't switch between settings and terminal screens using the same mechanism you switch between text screens with, and it all of the above don't have the same underlying mechanism, than you're doing it wrong.

SpaceCadetJones 11y ago
Do you know of any examples out there on how to write plugins using ClojureScript? I got into Emacs a few months ago, but have been considering switching over to Atom so I can write plugins in CLJS
- qwertyuiop924 11y ago
  https://github.com/MarcoPolo/atom-paredit https://github.com/MarcoPolo/atom-paredit I'd also recommend looking at the atom api docs, if you really want to switch.
  - SpaceCadetJones 11y ago
    Thank you, this looks like a great minimal yet complete plugin. I'll have to try and hack my own together this weekend.
    - qwertyuiop924 11y ago
      You're welcome :-D. I'd recommend sticking with emacs though. CLJS is a better lisp than elisp, but emacs is a better platform than atom.

caio1982 11y ago

Does anyone know of a good Python completion plugin for Atom similar to what PyCharm has (i.e. can complete models stuff etc)?

madspindel 11y ago
I use this: https://atom.io/packages/autocomplete-python https://atom.io/packages/autocomplete-python

cdnsteve 11y ago

Been using sublime, code and atom. Atom seems to freak out in unexpected ways and has the downside of spewing tose node.js errors. Code and sublime just seem more solid. I don't need explosions in my editor when I'm focused.

traspler 11y ago

I try it again every few versions and would really like to try Atom for longer but it really bothers me that I can't really configure hot exit the way I want it to work. It seems like I'm a minority in that I don't want Atom to open the whole folder in the tree view when I open a file. What annoys me even more is that I want hot exit completely disabled, so that when I open Atom, no previous files/tabs or folders are open. I could never get this to work. The previously opened folder will always be present in the tree view when I open Atom again and when I open a file it will always open the folder in the tree view. Does someone know if there is a workaround to this?

leejoramo 11y ago

I continue to want to like Atom, and I try it out several times a year. Just updated, and see that it still has big performance problems on my system. I currently have BBEdit and SublimeText open for real work, and these are apps the have been running for days. Here 100% would represent full usage of a CPU core: BBEdit: 15 files open (various types/sizes) 76MB RAM < 2% CPU 1 process 25MB app disk space SublimeText: 10 files open (various types/sizes) 169 RAM < 2% CPU 1 process 27MB app disk space Atom 1 small Markdown file open > 1.2GB RAM !!!!!! > 85% CPU 7 processes 205MB app disk space Just sitting in the background I am seeing Atom's CPU and RAM usages fluctuate wildly. The numbers above are the LOWEST I observed. I will spend a little time looking into why this is happening. I certainly could be related to some add-on package that I have installed, but I don't every recall seeing BBEdit or SublimeText behave so poorly with all of the customizations I have thrown at them. Update: added disk space for base app. Even with a 500GB SSD, Atom would make me think about its value vs space usage. Update 2: the system specs. 2011 MacBook Pro 13-inch, 2.3GHz i5, 500GB SSD, 16GB RAM, OS X 10.11.2 Update 3: performed a clean reinstall of Atom, removed all third party packages, removed preference files, disabled Markdown preview. Atom is still using over 80% cpu and greater than 1GB RAM with one short markdown file open

forgotmypassw 11y ago
I'm on the same boat, as much as I'd love to love Atom, I keep installing it anew with every release only to get disappointed by the performance. Shame because it's an otherwise great editor.
- leejoramo 11y ago
  See my solution elsewhere in this thread. You might have a ~/.git directory like I did.
sdegutis 11y ago
This is the exact reason I don't use Atom. It makes sense within the context of the Atom dream: to make a completely customizable editor, down to the pixel. But Emacs has almost the exact same dream: to make a completely customizable editor, down to the character-grid cell. This one small difference gives it way more performance, without much loss in my opinion. Atom is extremely bloated in every sense of the term. It's bloated in CPU, in memory usage, in files, in libraries, in dependencies, in overall performance, in everything. All because it wants to be customizable on the pixel level, rather than the character level. I wish a new editor would arise to actually complete with Emacs. I hate this piece of junk editor, but it works, and it gets the job done.

kup0 11y ago

The features do not outweigh the performance loss in my experience.

cryptos 11y ago

The development of Atom shows a common anti pattern of software development: choosing the technology first. The goal was to develop an editor with web technologies, and not to develop the best editor in the world. The result is as sad as foreseeable: a buggy and slow memory hog named Atom. When I tried it last time, a couple of days ago, it was impossible to enter an @ sign into the text area.

JesseAldridge 11y ago
I assume their goal is to someday integrate Atom into GitHub proper (running in a normal web browser) in order to have developers living in a 100% GitHub ecosystem. The chosen stack makes a lot of sense given this objective.
vmateixeira 11y ago
I can only agree.
vonklaus 11y ago
Yeah. I don't want to rail against it top much because it is a free tool, but it crashes regularly, hangs, and regularly lags opening small files. I love the drag/drop sidebar but If this update doesn't inprove the editor significantly, i will delete it.
jonpaul 11y ago
> not to develop the best editor in the world. The problem is that "best" is subjective. I think one could more accurately say that they're trying to develop an editor that is easily extensible with technologies familiar to many developers. i.e. your perception of what they want Atom to be and the reality of what they want Atom to be are probably not the same. My take? Revisit this in five years. I bet it'll be one of the richest ecosystems in software development. As one who has written Atom plugins (live unit testing w/ real-time feedback), I've never encountered such a developer experience until Atom.
happyhowler 11y ago
> choosing the technology first Lets say if one of the main goals was to build a very easily extensible editor, one might still choose to build it on web technologies. While I don't use atom, I can see the reasoning. Since I'm comfortable with webdev, the barrier to entry for extending atom is much lower compared to other newish editors.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

rosstex 11y ago

But it's still so slow.

wyager 11y ago

I've been using atom for a few weeks. On my low-power 12" MacBook, it is only slightly slower than sublime text. The only two tasks that are annoyingly slow are opening the editor or a new editor window. The barely noticeable lack of snappiness during editing is more than compensated for by the quality of the editor and its plugin ecosystem. I've also started using a ligature font for programming, which sublime doesn't support.

YngwieMalware 11y ago

Posting to say I love Atom and I am excited for its future. I've added Facebook's Nuclide package and it has some really great features. Would love to continue to see Atom as a full featured IDE

kapv89 11y ago

Disappointed to see so much FUD over here. I switched to atom from sublime 2 months back, mainly because its tooling for ES7(emmet, babel, eslint etc) just works. And the editor is much more accessible to me than sublime. Btw, I develop on an 14'' i3 3rd gen, 8gig, no-ssd laptop, and I am able to do react-native dev, with the emulator running just fine

michaelmrose 11y ago
Are you sure its not just other peoples experience that doesn't match yours rather than FUD?
- kapv89 11y ago
  Are you sure its not FUD? I setup the dev team of a startup(in Delhi, India) I was consulting with with Atom for react and node dev few months back. These guys were provided pretty shitty, and pretty old, 4 gig ram laptops. And they used to screw up things which could've easily been resolved with in-text-editor linting. I got them running atom with emmet, babel and ESlint, and they are still using it without any issues. I have seen atom run reasonably well on really shitty machines. Its very hard for me to accept that all this complaining about its performance is not FUD.
  - ino 11y ago
    It runs badly on my 8gb 2013 MacBook Air, on a medium sized php+javascript project. I've been trying Atom every 3 months since it came out. Just a few plugins and Linting and is still very slow and I hate lag while typing. I don't have this problem with Sublime, for example, where typing is instant. Even eclipse and Android studio are more responsive when typing.
  - pikzen 11y ago
    It runs badly on my 16GB, i5 2500k desktop. Windows & Debian. 1GB RAM usage and a full CPU core is not acceptable for a text editor.
  - uncreative24 11y ago

stefanix 11y ago

With all the people complaining about Atom performance, I cannot confirm this. Switched from Sublime Text about two years ago and never had speed/snappiness issues. If anything Atom does quite well with gigantic files.

ino 11y ago
On a 500 line file when I start adding multiple cursors, after the 5th or so It starts taking multiple seconds just to select the next. This was in December, so a recent version. I can't work like this.

gisely 11y ago

I've stopped using atom due to horrendous latency issues. Pretty disappointed. Would really love a modern open source text editor, but noticeable lag between pressing a key and having it appear on the screen is a no go.

nikolay 11y ago

I love Atom, but it along with Chrome it eats all my memory with just a few open files/tabs! Why would an editor and a thin (!) client use gigabytes of RAM?! Remember when computers had just 48KB of RAM and did great things?