10 ms·

Atom 1.9 and 1.10 beta

139 points by seanwilson 10y ago

janus24 10y ago
> Electron upgraded to v0.37.8 The official website of electron [1] says that the current version is 1.3.1 Can someone explain why atom uses a 3 months old version ? [2] [1] http://electron.atom.io http://electron.atom.io [2] https://github.com/electron/electron/releases/tag/v0.37.8 https://github.com/electron/electron/releases/tag/v0.37.8
- soupshield 10y ago
  Found some info on this: > 0.37.8 is actually a 1.0.1 version of Atom so it's not THAT old. The only difference between 0.37.8 and 1.0.0 release is the remove of deprecated API that were not flagged as such in 0.37.8 release. Reason why Atom only incrementally updates electron is to minimize application breakage due to Atom project's size. [0] > We decide to update to a new version of Electron when there is an enhancement or bug fix that version would enable that would benefit Atom users. Because updating to a new version of Electron is non-trivial, sometimes we skip versions until there is a clear benefit that justifies the cost. [1] [0] https://github.com/atom/atom/issues/11967#issuecomment-225507742 https://github.com/atom/atom/issues/11967#issuecomment-22550... [1] https://github.com/atom/design-decisions/blob/master/electron-update-procedure.md https://github.com/atom/design-decisions/blob/master/electro...
seanwilson 10y ago
Blog post about the release: http://blog.atom.io/2016/08/01/atom-1-9-and-1-10-beta.html http://blog.atom.io/2016/08/01/atom-1-9-and-1-10-beta.html "The following is a summary of improvements we have been testing on our beta channel and that are finally landing in Atom 1.9.0. :rocket: - Display Layers, which are going to bring speed improvements as well as new features like free-form folds (via the Fold Selection command) and an improved soft-wrapping algorithm. - Electron Upgrade (v0.37.8), which features many performance improvements and enables efficient ligatures rendering on all the platforms. - Drag and Drop Layout Management, that provides a very intuitive way for organizing the workspace. - Enhanced Reliability When Saving Files, which minimizes the risk of losing files when a hard crash occurs. - Shell Commands Compatibility On Windows, that makes the atom command compatible with both Cygwin and Msys."
- sctb 10y ago
  Thanks, we've updated the submission from https://github.com/atom/atom/releases/tag/v1.9.0 https://github.com/atom/atom/releases/tag/v1.9.0.
- ipedrazas 10y ago
  You see, people would have traded happily all those improvements for only this one: "It is super fast!"
ArmandGrillet 10y ago
Drag and drop layout management is really a nice addition, you can have the same result on any text editor but doing a drag and drop feels natural. Atom is still taking too much time to start compared to Sublime but I now use it for everything except large files, the overall UX is better and new features are added regularly.
tomatsu 10y ago
Each time there's an Atom release announcement, I check if they've finally fixed AltGr. They didn't. Most non-US keyboard layouts are still broken.
- Walkman 10y ago
  This! I don't even know how can they name something a text editor in which you CANNOT TYPE letters you know, the most important feature of a text editor to allow typing and Atom can't do that.
- pier25 10y ago
  They? Atom is a collaborative effort, you can fix that yourself.
  - PeCaN 10y ago
    While open-source is nice, if an editor doesn't support my keyboard I would just pick a different editor instead of patching core functionality in. It's not like there's a shortage of editors that let you use non-US keyboards.
  - tomatsu 10y ago
    > you can fix that yourself I can't and neither can you. You can't go back in time and tell them that they shouldn't use Alt+Ctrl for any of the built-in shortcuts. You also can't get rid of those shortcuts. You also can't finalize that UI Events spec and just land those features in Chromium. They could have gotten rid of those shortcuts, but they decided against it. Anyhow, Chrome 51+ (current stable is 52) does support the required part of the spec now. https://jsfiddle.net/1zhcpj8a/ https://jsfiddle.net/1zhcpj8a/ I do get: Alt AltLeft AltGraph AltRight Which means you can now easily and accurately tell if AltGr was pressed. This release of Atom could have fixed it.
  - coldtea 10y ago
    "Can" implies both ability (e.g. Javascript programming) and time to delve into the internals to find the issue, go through the procedure of submitting a patch etc, which is not a given the parent has, whether Atom is "collaborative" or not.
hartator 10y ago
I have participated a bit in the Atom.io open source repository, but now I am back to Sublime. It's so fast and reliable compared to Atom.io.
- gosukiwi 10y ago
  What about VSCode? It feels less laggy than Atom, at least for me.
  - jackmott 10y ago
    It is, but it is still ~40ms input latency compared to <1ms latency for good editors written in C++ or, serious efforts in Java (see Intellij Zero Latency Mode )
  - pier25 10y ago
    Yes it is, but automatic indentation is awful. I switched back to Atom just because of that.
- ythl 10y ago
  Yeah my PC is not fast enough to run atom without lag, but it runs sublime perfectly. Maybe when I get the latest i7 I will try out Atom again.
  - sotojuan 10y ago
    Is Atom the perfect example of "it's 2016 and my computer has multiple cores but stuff is still slow!"?
    - PSeitz 10y ago
      Well, JavaScript is single threaded...
  - jackhack 10y ago
    It should not take an i7 processor to run a text editor. I mean no disrespect, but either something is very wrong with your computer, or something is very wrong with this software.
ilaksh 10y ago
Atom would be way cooler if it was a projection editor like projectured.org. Or was available online.
sotojuan 10y ago
Well now it loads pretty fast for me! I use Atom for Elixir and Elm as their plugins are better than those for Sublime.
omginternets 10y ago
Does it still use A Terabyte Of Memory ?
- randomsofr 10y ago
  Unless they start using native code it will always be like that.
  - kaeluka 10y ago
    I went back to (non-native) emacs, partially due to this problem.
    - coldtea 10y ago
      Emacs has tons of C code. And the display (and core text manipulation stuff IIRC) is not written in elisp. In contrast, Atom just uses native code as the JIT, and then not only does (almost) everything in JS but also renders it with slow DOM.
      - moosingin3space 10y ago
        I'm looking forward to Guile Emacs, if it ever gets merged into mainline, because emacs will then have a JIT (and maybe we can then land things like real threads)
  - halokonrad 10y ago
    VSCode from Microsoft is also wrapped in electron and uses a fraction of what Atom is consuming. Not being native has nothing to do here.
    - PSeitz 10y ago
      The memory consumption is a magnitude larger in JavaScript than native. http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64/compare.php?lang=v8&lang2=gcc http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64/compare.php?lang...
diegofdominguez 10y ago
I switch to vscode, better support for debuggers, fast compared to atom, and extensions available are great
vonklaus 10y ago
I don't want to criticise it too much as it is completely free, so I will simply say that it would be hard to convince me to try it for a third time. Microsoft VSCode is my editor, and it took me a long time to adopt it. They lacked a lot of features, but in the end delivering a few features that worked extremely well and adding the important ones as they could (thanks for tab support) won me over. Shipping a broken kitchen sink just turned me off. It had critical flaws that made either me, or the editor and my sometimes unsaved code, rage quit. I have used it cumulatively about 6 months over thd last 2 years. Tl;dr at least as far as text editors go, 99% correct with a narrow feature set beats 75% stable witha wide one.
krisdol 10y ago
For once, on an atom release thread, can we have a discussion about atom and this release rather than endless threads about folks preferring vscode or sublime?
- _pmf_ 10y ago
  > For once, on an atom release thread, can we have a discussion about atom and this release rather than endless threads about folks preferring vscode or sublime? Sure, let's focus on Atom's speed issues. "Oh, I don't have a problem with my laptop's CPU fan spinning like a lawnmower. Surely deep architectural nonsense will be solved in the next minor update."
- nkg 10y ago
  Seems like no one is giving love! I enjoy Atom and I use it daily (I do website at some webagency). It is fast, even with Photoshop, Indesign, and multiple Chrome tabs opened. Pros: its handy and has so many addons. Not crippled with useless toolbars like Eclips-y editors. Cons: Sadly, it's still missing a "go-to-method-declaration" feature (did I miss something? ), and is awfuly buggy when editing over FTP.
  - vikrantvm 10y ago
    Absoltely agree. Love the UI, add-ons(love the terminal add on). I agree go-to decalaration needs to be fixed. There are a couple of packages that try to do it, but none of them do a good job. Atom needs to fix this on priority, it's a basic feature that must work out of the box. I have got this working by manually generating ctags(installed with brew) and then using the same go to declaration option. Works like a charm like it should have :)
    - gansai 10y ago
      which terminal addon do you use? As I am extremely interested to use terminal within Atom.The other day, I was using terminal-plus and it seems to have some issues.
Somasis 10y ago
They still don't have a way to build a release without a network connection. Which basically means any secure (builds in sandbox) source-based distro can't package it.
ascotan 10y ago
I moved to atom from sublime and really love it. However, it's s l o w . . . Not only the start up time, but on non trival projects it lags attempting to code color the file and periodically lags up to 5 seconds on save. Nevertheless, even with the warts it's pretty neat.
- krisdol 10y ago
  What plugins have you got installed? And what OS?
BilalBudhani 10y ago
I've been developing ReactNative since past few months and hence, I've been using Atom as my default IDE with Nuclide. I agree that Atom is slower than Sublime but once you tweak some settings and get a sanity hold on your plugins then you will get a significant improvement in performance.
fivesigma 10y ago
I love atom, I use it daily and it is my editor of choice for web stuff. But think of how many software abstractions/levels each line of atom code has to go through. I mean, each keypress probably produces in the order of 100 million CPU instructions in the metal (number pulled out of my behind but you get the idea) just to display a single character. Is this what progress looks like? I guess there's a balance between developer comfort and software efficiency.

139 points by seanwilson 10y ago

> Electron upgraded to v0.37.8 The official website of electron [1] says that the current version is 1.3.1 Can someone explain why atom uses a 3 months old version ? [2] [1] http://electron.atom.io http://electron.atom.io [2] https://github.com/electron/electron/releases/tag/v0.37.8 https://github.com/electron/electron/releases/tag/v0.37.8

soupshield 10y ago
Found some info on this: > 0.37.8 is actually a 1.0.1 version of Atom so it's not THAT old. The only difference between 0.37.8 and 1.0.0 release is the remove of deprecated API that were not flagged as such in 0.37.8 release. Reason why Atom only incrementally updates electron is to minimize application breakage due to Atom project's size. [0] > We decide to update to a new version of Electron when there is an enhancement or bug fix that version would enable that would benefit Atom users. Because updating to a new version of Electron is non-trivial, sometimes we skip versions until there is a clear benefit that justifies the cost. [1] [0] https://github.com/atom/atom/issues/11967#issuecomment-225507742 https://github.com/atom/atom/issues/11967#issuecomment-22550... [1] https://github.com/atom/design-decisions/blob/master/electron-update-procedure.md https://github.com/atom/design-decisions/blob/master/electro...

seanwilson 10y ago

Blog post about the release: http://blog.atom.io/2016/08/01/atom-1-9-and-1-10-beta.html http://blog.atom.io/2016/08/01/atom-1-9-and-1-10-beta.html "The following is a summary of improvements we have been testing on our beta channel and that are finally landing in Atom 1.9.0. :rocket: - Display Layers, which are going to bring speed improvements as well as new features like free-form folds (via the Fold Selection command) and an improved soft-wrapping algorithm. - Electron Upgrade (v0.37.8), which features many performance improvements and enables efficient ligatures rendering on all the platforms. - Drag and Drop Layout Management, that provides a very intuitive way for organizing the workspace. - Enhanced Reliability When Saving Files, which minimizes the risk of losing files when a hard crash occurs. - Shell Commands Compatibility On Windows, that makes the atom command compatible with both Cygwin and Msys."

sctb 10y ago
Thanks, we've updated the submission from https://github.com/atom/atom/releases/tag/v1.9.0 https://github.com/atom/atom/releases/tag/v1.9.0.
ipedrazas 10y ago
You see, people would have traded happily all those improvements for only this one: "It is super fast!"

ArmandGrillet 10y ago

Drag and drop layout management is really a nice addition, you can have the same result on any text editor but doing a drag and drop feels natural. Atom is still taking too much time to start compared to Sublime but I now use it for everything except large files, the overall UX is better and new features are added regularly.

tomatsu 10y ago

Each time there's an Atom release announcement, I check if they've finally fixed AltGr. They didn't. Most non-US keyboard layouts are still broken.

Walkman 10y ago
This! I don't even know how can they name something a text editor in which you CANNOT TYPE letters you know, the most important feature of a text editor to allow typing and Atom can't do that.
pier25 10y ago
They? Atom is a collaborative effort, you can fix that yourself.
- PeCaN 10y ago
  While open-source is nice, if an editor doesn't support my keyboard I would just pick a different editor instead of patching core functionality in. It's not like there's a shortage of editors that let you use non-US keyboards.
- tomatsu 10y ago
  > you can fix that yourself I can't and neither can you. You can't go back in time and tell them that they shouldn't use Alt+Ctrl for any of the built-in shortcuts. You also can't get rid of those shortcuts. You also can't finalize that UI Events spec and just land those features in Chromium. They could have gotten rid of those shortcuts, but they decided against it. Anyhow, Chrome 51+ (current stable is 52) does support the required part of the spec now. https://jsfiddle.net/1zhcpj8a/ https://jsfiddle.net/1zhcpj8a/ I do get: Alt AltLeft AltGraph AltRight Which means you can now easily and accurately tell if AltGr was pressed. This release of Atom could have fixed it.
- coldtea 10y ago
  "Can" implies both ability (e.g. Javascript programming) and time to delve into the internals to find the issue, go through the procedure of submitting a patch etc, which is not a given the parent has, whether Atom is "collaborative" or not.

hartator 10y ago

I have participated a bit in the Atom.io open source repository, but now I am back to Sublime. It's so fast and reliable compared to Atom.io.

gosukiwi 10y ago
What about VSCode? It feels less laggy than Atom, at least for me.
- jackmott 10y ago
  It is, but it is still ~40ms input latency compared to <1ms latency for good editors written in C++ or, serious efforts in Java (see Intellij Zero Latency Mode )
- pier25 10y ago
  Yes it is, but automatic indentation is awful. I switched back to Atom just because of that.
ythl 10y ago
Yeah my PC is not fast enough to run atom without lag, but it runs sublime perfectly. Maybe when I get the latest i7 I will try out Atom again.
- sotojuan 10y ago
  Is Atom the perfect example of "it's 2016 and my computer has multiple cores but stuff is still slow!"?
  - PSeitz 10y ago
    Well, JavaScript is single threaded...
- jackhack 10y ago
  It should not take an i7 processor to run a text editor. I mean no disrespect, but either something is very wrong with your computer, or something is very wrong with this software.

ilaksh 10y ago

Atom would be way cooler if it was a projection editor like projectured.org. Or was available online.

sotojuan 10y ago

Well now it loads pretty fast for me! I use Atom for Elixir and Elm as their plugins are better than those for Sublime.

omginternets 10y ago

Does it still use A Terabyte Of Memory ?

randomsofr 10y ago
Unless they start using native code it will always be like that.
- kaeluka 10y ago
  I went back to (non-native) emacs, partially due to this problem.
  - coldtea 10y ago
    Emacs has tons of C code. And the display (and core text manipulation stuff IIRC) is not written in elisp. In contrast, Atom just uses native code as the JIT, and then not only does (almost) everything in JS but also renders it with slow DOM.
    - moosingin3space 10y ago
      I'm looking forward to Guile Emacs, if it ever gets merged into mainline, because emacs will then have a JIT (and maybe we can then land things like real threads)
- halokonrad 10y ago
  VSCode from Microsoft is also wrapped in electron and uses a fraction of what Atom is consuming. Not being native has nothing to do here.
  - PSeitz 10y ago
    The memory consumption is a magnitude larger in JavaScript than native. http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64/compare.php?lang=v8&lang2=gcc http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64/compare.php?lang...

diegofdominguez 10y ago

I switch to vscode, better support for debuggers, fast compared to atom, and extensions available are great

vonklaus 10y ago

I don't want to criticise it too much as it is completely free, so I will simply say that it would be hard to convince me to try it for a third time. Microsoft VSCode is my editor, and it took me a long time to adopt it. They lacked a lot of features, but in the end delivering a few features that worked extremely well and adding the important ones as they could (thanks for tab support) won me over. Shipping a broken kitchen sink just turned me off. It had critical flaws that made either me, or the editor and my sometimes unsaved code, rage quit. I have used it cumulatively about 6 months over thd last 2 years. Tl;dr at least as far as text editors go, 99% correct with a narrow feature set beats 75% stable witha wide one.

krisdol 10y ago

For once, on an atom release thread, can we have a discussion about atom and this release rather than endless threads about folks preferring vscode or sublime?

_pmf_ 10y ago
> For once, on an atom release thread, can we have a discussion about atom and this release rather than endless threads about folks preferring vscode or sublime? Sure, let's focus on Atom's speed issues. "Oh, I don't have a problem with my laptop's CPU fan spinning like a lawnmower. Surely deep architectural nonsense will be solved in the next minor update."
nkg 10y ago
Seems like no one is giving love! I enjoy Atom and I use it daily (I do website at some webagency). It is fast, even with Photoshop, Indesign, and multiple Chrome tabs opened. Pros: its handy and has so many addons. Not crippled with useless toolbars like Eclips-y editors. Cons: Sadly, it's still missing a "go-to-method-declaration" feature (did I miss something? ), and is awfuly buggy when editing over FTP.
- vikrantvm 10y ago
  Absoltely agree. Love the UI, add-ons(love the terminal add on). I agree go-to decalaration needs to be fixed. There are a couple of packages that try to do it, but none of them do a good job. Atom needs to fix this on priority, it's a basic feature that must work out of the box. I have got this working by manually generating ctags(installed with brew) and then using the same go to declaration option. Works like a charm like it should have :)
  - gansai 10y ago
    which terminal addon do you use? As I am extremely interested to use terminal within Atom.The other day, I was using terminal-plus and it seems to have some issues.

Somasis 10y ago

They still don't have a way to build a release without a network connection. Which basically means any secure (builds in sandbox) source-based distro can't package it.

ascotan 10y ago

I moved to atom from sublime and really love it. However, it's s l o w . . . Not only the start up time, but on non trival projects it lags attempting to code color the file and periodically lags up to 5 seconds on save. Nevertheless, even with the warts it's pretty neat.

krisdol 10y ago
What plugins have you got installed? And what OS?

BilalBudhani 10y ago

I've been developing ReactNative since past few months and hence, I've been using Atom as my default IDE with Nuclide. I agree that Atom is slower than Sublime but once you tweak some settings and get a sanity hold on your plugins then you will get a significant improvement in performance.

fivesigma 10y ago

I love atom, I use it daily and it is my editor of choice for web stuff. But think of how many software abstractions/levels each line of atom code has to go through. I mean, each keypress probably produces in the order of 100 million CPU instructions in the metal (number pulled out of my behind but you get the idea) just to display a single character. Is this what progress looks like? I guess there's a balance between developer comfort and software efficiency.