6 ms·

Atom Reaches One Million Active Users

40 points by SiVal 11y ago

casperc 11y ago
I would really like to use it too, but the latency while typing is killing me whenever I try.
- diminish 11y ago
  I have tried to use it in my projects, but it's so slow that I couldn't go on. The last thing I want is feeling as if I am in a slow motion movie. Maybe I need a very speedy processor.
- scriptproof 11y ago
  Atom is in competition with Brackets (Ace), Visual Studio Code (CodeMirror), Advanced Editor (Ace), to cite only the free software. All the others are quicker. I wonder how they get all these users.
  - Already__Taken 11y ago
    Brackets was first but has gotten inconsistent attention being under adobe's wing. I'm hoping it being taken to use as the code editor in dreamweaver will see even more performance work done on it. But I've not seen any releases since then. Atom, from github has no "we also make" worries the developers might wedge in there. VS Code was last to the party. I still use brackets but I installed Atom last week to have a go with. I was pleased with what comes out of the box. (context): I used to use sublime since (roughly) just before 3.0 builds were announced then used brackets from around 1.0. sublime and brackets used to really crawl until I excluded things like .git and node_modules form their search tools. Perhaps Atom is similar for people?
  - chii 11y ago
    The worst is better mantra might have some grains of truth to it.
  - chr1 11y ago
    Small correction: Brackets uses Codemirror, Visual Studio Code uses its own editor called monaco, Advanced Editor (if you mean the wordpress plugin) uses Codemirror as well, Ace is used by c9.io and RStudio for example. I'd expect some part of their users are people who have it installed, and check from time to time if it became faster or not, but the main thing making it popular is the promise of being easily extensible.
    - scriptproof 11y ago
      You are right, Adobe Brackets is in the list of CodeMirror users. But I mean Advanced Editor based on Node.js and Ace (https://github.com/Scriptol/Advanced-Editor https://github.com/Scriptol/Advanced-Editor). VSC uses Electron, hence the confusion, but not Atom and Codemirror.
- Cyph0n 11y ago
  What latency? I've been using it for months and I've never noticed any lag. Yes, it's bloated compared to Sublime, but it works damn well in my experience.
  - notalaser 11y ago
    The very noticeable latency that can be observed between the moment when you press a key and the moment when, far too many milliseconds later, the letter appears on the screen. I suppose it's subjective/a matter of habit. I have a colleague who uses Atom and I tried it on his workstation, because I desperately wanted to like Atom so that I can finally put Emacs away and leave the 1980s behind. He swears it's fine, but the lag is driving me mad. I'm not a super fast typist (110-120 wpm on a good keyboard, and I certainly don't type that fast when I'm coding because I don't think that fast). But I don't look at the keyboard when I'm typing and the lag is very triggering.
    - dragandj 11y ago
      Ah, that old girlfriend Emacs. You are tired of her and want to leave her for some young one, but she is still the best by a large margin :)
- hellofunk 11y ago
  I agree, it's a neat app, but it's got to be the slowest text editor I have seen in two decades. I have started using Brackets more and more for HTML and CSS editing, however.
- Rapzid 11y ago
  Wow, I kinda thought this was me today. I was doing some Elixir at work; Atom seems to have the best Elixir support currently. I think I was chalking it up to running in a VM, but I run VS Code in the same VM with no lag issues. Hopefully the Elixir plugins will be brought across to VS Code soon-ish.
  - melling 11y ago
    With a million active users, why wouldn't you hope that the large number of active developers could fix the latency? "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow." - Linus Torvalds At any rate, I downloaded it to try it out for a few days. I didn't notice any initial latency. My current editors are Sublime and Xcode but I still use Emacs and vim on occasion.
- thewhitetulip 11y ago
  Yes, that is why I switched to VSCode
- yAnonymous 11y ago
  I'm the type of person who needs 60 FPS in games and don't notice any latency while typing in Atom. The characters appear instantly on keydown. Are you using the latest version? Performance did increase quite a lot since 1.0.
swang 11y ago
I stopped using Atom after I ran into this issue:[0] Basically it's possible to accidentally do a mass replace of a word you did not intend to. In sublime, if you do a mass find/replace, it doesn't save the file. However by default atom saves all the files you make a find/replace in. So you could lose a lot of time undoing an accidental replace. Given my habits (listed in the issue) while in a text editor, this was unacceptable risk for using atom, so of course I filed a ticket which promptly died out. I would like to continue using atom, even with the latency startup issue, but there's too much risk for me in accidentally wasting a lot of time getting bit by this issue. [0]https://github.com/atom/find-and-replace/issues/550 https://github.com/atom/find-and-replace/issues/550
- adrianN 11y ago
  I agree that this is an annoying issue, but doesn't your version control take care about undoing things like that?
  - swang 11y ago
    Generally yes. Basically there are a lot of ways to mitigate the problem this causes, but atom could just do what every other editor does and not add this risk into my workflow.
  - notalaser 11y ago
    Well, I mean technically, your version control could take care of it even after the editor would save the file after every keystroke. "Ooops, I didn't mean to do that" is one of the primary reasons why "Undo" was invented. It's something that should be fixed in the editor, not offloaded to the version control system, especially since there's no reason to assume that every single plain text file you'll ever edit is under version control.
  - dragandj 11y ago
    Only if you stash every single keystroke.
  - Matt3o12_ 11y ago
    I don't really use version control for text because it is often pointless (how helpful are one or two commits when I will never touch the text again after getting graded). And yet I still use More tradition text ediots for that (WYSIWYG editors can get really annoying). Though i personal vim over atom but that is not the point. The point is that undoing things is really important. I've also often been in a position where I do big commits that contain about 200 lines of code and messed up by using replace/etc in the wrong way
FooBarWidget 11y ago
Them being able to tell how many active users they have means that they track this in the Atom app. Atom never told me about this during startup. I'm personally not bothered by this, but I know that a lot of techies are against phoning-home practices. Is there anybody here who IS bothered by this?
- bottled_poe 11y ago
  It's pretty much expected at this point. I gave up online privacy last decade.
  - vetinari 11y ago
    I didn't give up my online privacy yet. Apps have no business to phone home. Little Snitch FTW ;)
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- _jomo 11y ago
  AFAIK they use Google Analytics. I've only used Atom once when it was introduced, but I think it told me that on startup. There was also an option to disable it.
- jbergstroem 11y ago
  It's a package called 'metrics' you can disable through Preferences -> Packages. Been in there from the get-go. Edit: Not saying I like this "freedom advancement" much either; even databases like InfluxDB defaults to phoning home nowadays -- but this one is pretty simple to both find and disable.
- timlod 11y ago
  Perhaps it's the package update checker? I have it turned on by default and couldn't find an option to turn it off (assuming it's different from the Atom update checker, which updates the editor).
- JupiterMoon 11y ago
arvinsim 11y ago
The one thing putting me off Atom is that it is a battery hog on laptops.
nickysielicki 11y ago
Serious question: why don't Atom users use other products? If you just need a free text editor that works well with source code, why not Vim or Emacs? With the right plugin (or a terminal) it probably integrates better with what you're doing than Atom-- excepting React Native with their Atom plugin. If you're willing to pay, why not JetBrains or Sublime? I just don't understand the middle ground that Atom seems to exist in. What is it best at?
- arvinsim 11y ago
  > Vim or Emacs -- UI is too foreign > JetBrains or Sublime - not free Some people just want a free Sublime clone.
  - BigJono 11y ago
    Sublime isn't free?
    - oblio 11y ago
      It's annoy-o-ware.
    - dagw 11y ago
      Nope. Commercial software that cost $70. However they don't disable or cripple the software after your 30 day trial is up, they just pop up regular reminders.
- freekh 11y ago
  Maybe worse is better also applies to editors :)
- ericdykstra 11y ago
  It's free, it has all the features I want from a text editor (not very many), and it doesn't get in the way of my programming at all, so no reason to switch.
- dagw 11y ago
hit8run 11y ago
Yet I need to find one area where Atom is best of breed in. HTML + JS + CSS => Brackets because of the preview function or Webstorm; Golang => SublimeText or vscode; Java => IntelliJ or Netbeans or Eclipse; Atom UI is nice and I can imagine Atom becoming a superpower editor within the next years but it just isn't there yet.
- yAnonymous 11y ago
  >I need to find one area where Atom is best of breed in. It has the best collection of packages for web development.
SiVal 11y ago
Atom is a madhouse. It's what you might expect from Github, a company with no experience in deep, complex IDE tools but lots of experience bringing together a small army of amateurs to contribute to a stone soup, open source project. It's wide with wonderful, useful conveniences, and not very deep in the kind of tools that take CS PhDs years to get right at places like Microsoft. It's a perfect reflection of the madness that is front-end web dev: a crazy quilt of evolving technologies on which a significant portion of its functionality is built by stacking up extensions like Jenga blocks, and each day some of those blocks are upgraded, the ones causing the latest 100% CPU issue are identified and deactivated for the next version or two, another stab is made at resolving conflicts between independent autocompleters with undefined priority, a wonderful new extension is discovered, it gradually gets slower and slower until you restart it, then it's nice and quick doing whatever it can do today.... Then there's Visual Studio Code from Microsoft, which is also what you might expect given their background. These people know how to build a deep, powerful IDE, and it's an amazing statement about their technical depth that they managed to build such a snappy, solid-feeling editor (that never needs to be restarted and opens multiMB files with aplomb) on top of the same Electron base Atom is built on, and doubly amazing when you consider that Electron itself was built by Github. But in contrast to their technical depth, MS seems out of their depth when dealing with an open community of developers. In contrast to Atom's chaotic, buzzing discussion forum, Visual Studio Code's forum is...well, actually it doesn't even exist. The closest they have is an "issues" list hosted by, yes, Github, and a list of feature requests you can vote on which can accommodate comments, but which the MS team warns candidly that they never look at. (They only look at the vote count and even then, there's little evidence they look beyond the top 5% or so of requests.) Neither of these is a discussion forum where users get together and help each other, and MS doesn't seem to have the resources to both do what they want with VS Code and find out what users want, so they stick to the former. VS Code lacks so many common editing conveniences available in Atom (a minimap, drag and drop text editing, a project switcher, indentation lines, a way to make the faint bracket matching highlight visible....) and adds these so slowly if at all that, for these fairly shallow but very useful features, you seem to have some poor guy volunteering his 20% time at MS vs. a small army of volunteer developers contributing to Atom. And yet, the MS people are talking about deep, ambitious, full-blown IDE features planned for VS Code--and these people understand how to build such things--while Github can't seem to get past the challenge of how to open a big file and say they aren't interested in ever becoming a powerful IDE. So, will Atom's furious beehive of JavaScript-style chaos eventually evolve deep tools and a fast, solid base? Or will Microsoft's old school, tiny team of experts figure out a way to get the conveniences done by others without undermining the foundation while they build a serious, deep dev tool? I hope it won't take too long for at least one of them to be solid, wide, and deep.

40 points by SiVal 11y ago

casperc 11y ago

I would really like to use it too, but the latency while typing is killing me whenever I try.

diminish 11y ago
I have tried to use it in my projects, but it's so slow that I couldn't go on. The last thing I want is feeling as if I am in a slow motion movie. Maybe I need a very speedy processor.
scriptproof 11y ago
Atom is in competition with Brackets (Ace), Visual Studio Code (CodeMirror), Advanced Editor (Ace), to cite only the free software. All the others are quicker. I wonder how they get all these users.
- Already__Taken 11y ago
  Brackets was first but has gotten inconsistent attention being under adobe's wing. I'm hoping it being taken to use as the code editor in dreamweaver will see even more performance work done on it. But I've not seen any releases since then. Atom, from github has no "we also make" worries the developers might wedge in there. VS Code was last to the party. I still use brackets but I installed Atom last week to have a go with. I was pleased with what comes out of the box. (context): I used to use sublime since (roughly) just before 3.0 builds were announced then used brackets from around 1.0. sublime and brackets used to really crawl until I excluded things like .git and node_modules form their search tools. Perhaps Atom is similar for people?
- chii 11y ago
  The worst is better mantra might have some grains of truth to it.
- chr1 11y ago
  Small correction: Brackets uses Codemirror, Visual Studio Code uses its own editor called monaco, Advanced Editor (if you mean the wordpress plugin) uses Codemirror as well, Ace is used by c9.io and RStudio for example. I'd expect some part of their users are people who have it installed, and check from time to time if it became faster or not, but the main thing making it popular is the promise of being easily extensible.
  - scriptproof 11y ago
    You are right, Adobe Brackets is in the list of CodeMirror users. But I mean Advanced Editor based on Node.js and Ace (https://github.com/Scriptol/Advanced-Editor https://github.com/Scriptol/Advanced-Editor). VSC uses Electron, hence the confusion, but not Atom and Codemirror.
Cyph0n 11y ago
What latency? I've been using it for months and I've never noticed any lag. Yes, it's bloated compared to Sublime, but it works damn well in my experience.
- notalaser 11y ago
  The very noticeable latency that can be observed between the moment when you press a key and the moment when, far too many milliseconds later, the letter appears on the screen. I suppose it's subjective/a matter of habit. I have a colleague who uses Atom and I tried it on his workstation, because I desperately wanted to like Atom so that I can finally put Emacs away and leave the 1980s behind. He swears it's fine, but the lag is driving me mad. I'm not a super fast typist (110-120 wpm on a good keyboard, and I certainly don't type that fast when I'm coding because I don't think that fast). But I don't look at the keyboard when I'm typing and the lag is very triggering.
  - dragandj 11y ago
    Ah, that old girlfriend Emacs. You are tired of her and want to leave her for some young one, but she is still the best by a large margin :)
hellofunk 11y ago
I agree, it's a neat app, but it's got to be the slowest text editor I have seen in two decades. I have started using Brackets more and more for HTML and CSS editing, however.
Rapzid 11y ago
Wow, I kinda thought this was me today. I was doing some Elixir at work; Atom seems to have the best Elixir support currently. I think I was chalking it up to running in a VM, but I run VS Code in the same VM with no lag issues. Hopefully the Elixir plugins will be brought across to VS Code soon-ish.
- melling 11y ago
  With a million active users, why wouldn't you hope that the large number of active developers could fix the latency? "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow." - Linus Torvalds At any rate, I downloaded it to try it out for a few days. I didn't notice any initial latency. My current editors are Sublime and Xcode but I still use Emacs and vim on occasion.
thewhitetulip 11y ago
Yes, that is why I switched to VSCode
yAnonymous 11y ago
I'm the type of person who needs 60 FPS in games and don't notice any latency while typing in Atom. The characters appear instantly on keydown. Are you using the latest version? Performance did increase quite a lot since 1.0.

swang 11y ago

I stopped using Atom after I ran into this issue:[0] Basically it's possible to accidentally do a mass replace of a word you did not intend to. In sublime, if you do a mass find/replace, it doesn't save the file. However by default atom saves all the files you make a find/replace in. So you could lose a lot of time undoing an accidental replace. Given my habits (listed in the issue) while in a text editor, this was unacceptable risk for using atom, so of course I filed a ticket which promptly died out. I would like to continue using atom, even with the latency startup issue, but there's too much risk for me in accidentally wasting a lot of time getting bit by this issue. [0]https://github.com/atom/find-and-replace/issues/550 https://github.com/atom/find-and-replace/issues/550

adrianN 11y ago
I agree that this is an annoying issue, but doesn't your version control take care about undoing things like that?
- swang 11y ago
  Generally yes. Basically there are a lot of ways to mitigate the problem this causes, but atom could just do what every other editor does and not add this risk into my workflow.
- notalaser 11y ago
  Well, I mean technically, your version control could take care of it even after the editor would save the file after every keystroke. "Ooops, I didn't mean to do that" is one of the primary reasons why "Undo" was invented. It's something that should be fixed in the editor, not offloaded to the version control system, especially since there's no reason to assume that every single plain text file you'll ever edit is under version control.
- dragandj 11y ago
  Only if you stash every single keystroke.
- Matt3o12_ 11y ago
  I don't really use version control for text because it is often pointless (how helpful are one or two commits when I will never touch the text again after getting graded). And yet I still use More tradition text ediots for that (WYSIWYG editors can get really annoying). Though i personal vim over atom but that is not the point. The point is that undoing things is really important. I've also often been in a position where I do big commits that contain about 200 lines of code and messed up by using replace/etc in the wrong way

FooBarWidget 11y ago

Them being able to tell how many active users they have means that they track this in the Atom app. Atom never told me about this during startup. I'm personally not bothered by this, but I know that a lot of techies are against phoning-home practices. Is there anybody here who IS bothered by this?

bottled_poe 11y ago
It's pretty much expected at this point. I gave up online privacy last decade.
- vetinari 11y ago
  I didn't give up my online privacy yet. Apps have no business to phone home. Little Snitch FTW ;)
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
_jomo 11y ago
AFAIK they use Google Analytics. I've only used Atom once when it was introduced, but I think it told me that on startup. There was also an option to disable it.
jbergstroem 11y ago
It's a package called 'metrics' you can disable through Preferences -> Packages. Been in there from the get-go. Edit: Not saying I like this "freedom advancement" much either; even databases like InfluxDB defaults to phoning home nowadays -- but this one is pretty simple to both find and disable.
timlod 11y ago
Perhaps it's the package update checker? I have it turned on by default and couldn't find an option to turn it off (assuming it's different from the Atom update checker, which updates the editor).
JupiterMoon 11y ago

arvinsim 11y ago

The one thing putting me off Atom is that it is a battery hog on laptops.

nickysielicki 11y ago

Serious question: why don't Atom users use other products? If you just need a free text editor that works well with source code, why not Vim or Emacs? With the right plugin (or a terminal) it probably integrates better with what you're doing than Atom-- excepting React Native with their Atom plugin. If you're willing to pay, why not JetBrains or Sublime? I just don't understand the middle ground that Atom seems to exist in. What is it best at?

arvinsim 11y ago
> Vim or Emacs -- UI is too foreign > JetBrains or Sublime - not free Some people just want a free Sublime clone.
- BigJono 11y ago
  Sublime isn't free?
  - oblio 11y ago
    It's annoy-o-ware.
  - dagw 11y ago
    Nope. Commercial software that cost $70. However they don't disable or cripple the software after your 30 day trial is up, they just pop up regular reminders.
freekh 11y ago
Maybe worse is better also applies to editors :)
ericdykstra 11y ago
It's free, it has all the features I want from a text editor (not very many), and it doesn't get in the way of my programming at all, so no reason to switch.
dagw 11y ago

hit8run 11y ago

Yet I need to find one area where Atom is best of breed in. HTML + JS + CSS => Brackets because of the preview function or Webstorm; Golang => SublimeText or vscode; Java => IntelliJ or Netbeans or Eclipse; Atom UI is nice and I can imagine Atom becoming a superpower editor within the next years but it just isn't there yet.

yAnonymous 11y ago
>I need to find one area where Atom is best of breed in. It has the best collection of packages for web development.

SiVal 11y ago

Atom is a madhouse. It's what you might expect from Github, a company with no experience in deep, complex IDE tools but lots of experience bringing together a small army of amateurs to contribute to a stone soup, open source project. It's wide with wonderful, useful conveniences, and not very deep in the kind of tools that take CS PhDs years to get right at places like Microsoft. It's a perfect reflection of the madness that is front-end web dev: a crazy quilt of evolving technologies on which a significant portion of its functionality is built by stacking up extensions like Jenga blocks, and each day some of those blocks are upgraded, the ones causing the latest 100% CPU issue are identified and deactivated for the next version or two, another stab is made at resolving conflicts between independent autocompleters with undefined priority, a wonderful new extension is discovered, it gradually gets slower and slower until you restart it, then it's nice and quick doing whatever it can do today.... Then there's Visual Studio Code from Microsoft, which is also what you might expect given their background. These people know how to build a deep, powerful IDE, and it's an amazing statement about their technical depth that they managed to build such a snappy, solid-feeling editor (that never needs to be restarted and opens multiMB files with aplomb) on top of the same Electron base Atom is built on, and doubly amazing when you consider that Electron itself was built by Github. But in contrast to their technical depth, MS seems out of their depth when dealing with an open community of developers. In contrast to Atom's chaotic, buzzing discussion forum, Visual Studio Code's forum is...well, actually it doesn't even exist. The closest they have is an "issues" list hosted by, yes, Github, and a list of feature requests you can vote on which can accommodate comments, but which the MS team warns candidly that they never look at. (They only look at the vote count and even then, there's little evidence they look beyond the top 5% or so of requests.) Neither of these is a discussion forum where users get together and help each other, and MS doesn't seem to have the resources to both do what they want with VS Code and find out what users want, so they stick to the former. VS Code lacks so many common editing conveniences available in Atom (a minimap, drag and drop text editing, a project switcher, indentation lines, a way to make the faint bracket matching highlight visible....) and adds these so slowly if at all that, for these fairly shallow but very useful features, you seem to have some poor guy volunteering his 20% time at MS vs. a small army of volunteer developers contributing to Atom. And yet, the MS people are talking about deep, ambitious, full-blown IDE features planned for VS Code--and these people understand how to build such things--while Github can't seem to get past the challenge of how to open a big file and say they aren't interested in ever becoming a powerful IDE. So, will Atom's furious beehive of JavaScript-style chaos eventually evolve deep tools and a fast, solid base? Or will Microsoft's old school, tiny team of experts figure out a way to get the conveniences done by others without undermining the foundation while they build a serious, deep dev tool? I hope it won't take too long for at least one of them to be solid, wide, and deep.