5 ms·

My flaws: 1) Uses Chrome's font renderer - it looks terrible on Windows 2) Indent = Tab size 3) Themes can't properly customize some key on-screen assets 4)

by gcp 10y ago

My flaws: 1) Uses Chrome's font renderer - it looks terrible on Windows 2) Indent = Tab size 3) Themes can't properly customize some key on-screen assets 4) No macro recording/playback 5) Can't edit enormous files Other than that the add-on ecosystem can be a bit fiddly, and you won't find syntax highlighting for more oddball things that you'd 100% find for vim or Emacs. Oh, and sometimes it ends up using 100% of the CPU in the V8 GC. Might be add-on related.

tornadoboy55 10y ago
1b) Electron is horrible bloat. Sublime uses 70 (idle) to 250 (lots of tabs) mb. VS Code and Atom both use 200-300Mb even when idling.
- gcp 10y ago
  I don't really mind the static overhead as long as it stays fast and if it could deal with 'larger than memory' files sensibly. Alas, it does neither. I'm very hesitant to standardize on a non-OSS editor, though, so I think Sublime is out for me.
  - tornadoboy55 10y ago
    Ideally I'd like to use OSS for everything I can (and sometimes you can, see Transmission), but at times the non-OSS variant is simply the lesser of two evils. I'd rather use native Atom + native Gitkraken, but alas, that'd cost me nearly a gig of ram simply for idling. I won't stand by that kind of inefficiency.
    - mercurysmessage 10y ago
      Is this just because JS isn't good for desktop, or because Electron is not optimized or efficient?
      - gcp 10y ago
        I think it's mostly the latter, also Atom doesn't seem to be particularly written for efficiency. Firefox OS phones shipped with less RAM than Atom/VSCode use.
    - moon_priestess 10y ago
      Shouldn't you use the best tools for the job though? Unless you really need that last GB of RAM, it just seems like you're punishing yourself for the sake of an ideal, all to no greater consequence. A gig of RAM is probably less than a tenth of your total resources. If it makes your job easier, surely it's worth it, no?
      - tornadoboy55 10y ago
        The gig of RAM is not the only thing. It works worse on large files. It's not nearly as fluid. Multiselect sometimes craps out. Searches take longer. Battery life is less. I ideologically like the idea of OSS, but I'm past sacrificing usability for it. Hence I'm on a MacBook with macOS coding in Sublime with 12h battery life, instead of on a XPS13 with ElementaryOS coding in Atom with 7h battery life. Or a bulky, ugly Lenovo with great battery life but a horrible touchpad and a shitty screen. But on all of those situations I'd torrent with Transmission, because it looks beautiful, is consistent, and to top it all off is the lightest and smoothest torrent client there is.
        moon_priestess 10y ago
        > The gig of RAM is not the only thing. It works worse on large files. It's not nearly as fluid. Multiselect sometimes craps out. Searches take longer. Battery life is less. These things are true. I still use Atom on my MacBook Pro though because it has, at least in my corner of the world, a much better ecosystem than Sublime. I do keep Sublime around for the rare cases where Atom can't handle something, but if I didn't already have a Sublime license, I wouldn't feel the need to pick one up: Vim is more than capable of handling the large-file case for me. We all have different experiences though. > Or a bulky, ugly Lenovo with great battery life but a horrible touchpad and a shitty screen. The new X1 Carbon with the OLED panel is pretty good, I think. Color accuracy is something of an issue, but it does cover Adobe RGB and should be fantastic for anything other than professional-level color-critical work. That's neither here nor there though.
        tornadoboy55 10y ago
- antihero 10y ago
  My laptop has 16GB of RAM, I don't really give a fuck about a few hundred MB of RAM in all fairness.
  - tornadoboy55 10y ago
    It's a symptom of a larger problem though- inefficiency. It's why everything is nearly instantaneous in Sublime but always has that tiny delay in Atom - plus it chokes on large files. Hell, the Sublime dude even wrote a custom Regex engine just for highly performant searching.
    - gcp 10y ago
      Hell, the Sublime dude even wrote a custom Regex engine just for highly performant searching. Presumably everything Electron based is using Irregexp under the hood, so I doubt that's a real competitive advantage. The performance difference between Atom and Visual Studio Code is interesting, given that they're built on the same framework.
    - moon_priestess 10y ago
      It may be inefficient in terms of memory and CPU resources, but it was very efficient in terms of dev time and allows for easy modification by third parties. I'm not sure Atom would be where it is now if they went the native route. When I'm doing development, I spend most of my time interacting with Atom. If I had to buy another pair of 16 GB DIMMs just for the sake of running it, I would. This is what I do professionally and I'm happy to throw a little RAM at something that makes my job more enjoyable and myself more productive.
      - potatosoup 10y ago
        > It may be inefficient in terms of memory and CPU resources, but it was very efficient in terms of dev time and allows for easy modification by third parties I appreciate easy customization as much as any dev, but, in this case, I don't know if that's an advantage when as a result Atom doesn't do its primary task terribly well: stay open all day, let me type code.
- potatosoup 10y ago
  I gave Atom an honest chance for a couple of months and went back to Sublime. Don't understand how people have the energy to put up with an editor that randomly gets sluggish when typing, hogs RAM, crashes spontaneously (requiring a restart), and chokes on large files.
- mattkevan 10y ago
  I was horrified as to what Electron apps do to my laptop's batteries. Just writing a bit of code in Atom shouldn't rinse a fairly new MacBook Pro in under three hours. Sublime, on the other hand, lasts all day.
antihero 10y ago
1) All fonts look like ass on windows. 2) What exactly do you mean by this? 3) This is true, the scheme is great, but themes aren't really there yet. The default is nice enough, though. 4) Also true, perhaps a plugin could work? I have no idea where I'd use macros though. What do you use macros for? 5) Also true, I use vim for those but it's a rare case. The CPU issue seems weird, I certainly don't get 100% CPU.
- gcp 10y ago
  1) Arguable. In any case Chrome and everything based on it (i.e. Electron) render fonts too light compared to native apps on Windows, and don't properly respect ClearType settings. I've been told the underlying issue is a design mistake in gamma handling between Chrome and Skia, but I have no idea whether that's true. The fact that more and more apps are Electron based makes this very sad :( 2) You can't set tab = 8 and indent = 2. This isn't common, but sometimes one deals with foreign sources where that's an issue. 4) Repetitive editing tasks where just doing them once is much faster than coming up with a shell/sed/awk/perl/python on-liner. I switch to vi for those right now.
  - antihero 10y ago
    1) Fair enough, I guess that's a Chrome bug which maybe will be fixed in time. 2) Also fair enough, I don't find that I have to deal with this too much. Can you switch editor for those files? It's only a Cmd+Tab away :) 4) I use multiple cursors for stuff like this.

by gcp 10y ago

tornadoboy55 10y ago

1b) Electron is horrible bloat. Sublime uses 70 (idle) to 250 (lots of tabs) mb. VS Code and Atom both use 200-300Mb even when idling.

gcp 10y ago
I don't really mind the static overhead as long as it stays fast and if it could deal with 'larger than memory' files sensibly. Alas, it does neither. I'm very hesitant to standardize on a non-OSS editor, though, so I think Sublime is out for me.
- tornadoboy55 10y ago
  Ideally I'd like to use OSS for everything I can (and sometimes you can, see Transmission), but at times the non-OSS variant is simply the lesser of two evils. I'd rather use native Atom + native Gitkraken, but alas, that'd cost me nearly a gig of ram simply for idling. I won't stand by that kind of inefficiency.
  - mercurysmessage 10y ago
    Is this just because JS isn't good for desktop, or because Electron is not optimized or efficient?
    - gcp 10y ago
      I think it's mostly the latter, also Atom doesn't seem to be particularly written for efficiency. Firefox OS phones shipped with less RAM than Atom/VSCode use.
  - moon_priestess 10y ago
    Shouldn't you use the best tools for the job though? Unless you really need that last GB of RAM, it just seems like you're punishing yourself for the sake of an ideal, all to no greater consequence. A gig of RAM is probably less than a tenth of your total resources. If it makes your job easier, surely it's worth it, no?
    - tornadoboy55 10y ago
      The gig of RAM is not the only thing. It works worse on large files. It's not nearly as fluid. Multiselect sometimes craps out. Searches take longer. Battery life is less. I ideologically like the idea of OSS, but I'm past sacrificing usability for it. Hence I'm on a MacBook with macOS coding in Sublime with 12h battery life, instead of on a XPS13 with ElementaryOS coding in Atom with 7h battery life. Or a bulky, ugly Lenovo with great battery life but a horrible touchpad and a shitty screen. But on all of those situations I'd torrent with Transmission, because it looks beautiful, is consistent, and to top it all off is the lightest and smoothest torrent client there is.
      - moon_priestess 10y ago
        > The gig of RAM is not the only thing. It works worse on large files. It's not nearly as fluid. Multiselect sometimes craps out. Searches take longer. Battery life is less. These things are true. I still use Atom on my MacBook Pro though because it has, at least in my corner of the world, a much better ecosystem than Sublime. I do keep Sublime around for the rare cases where Atom can't handle something, but if I didn't already have a Sublime license, I wouldn't feel the need to pick one up: Vim is more than capable of handling the large-file case for me. We all have different experiences though. > Or a bulky, ugly Lenovo with great battery life but a horrible touchpad and a shitty screen. The new X1 Carbon with the OLED panel is pretty good, I think. Color accuracy is something of an issue, but it does cover Adobe RGB and should be fantastic for anything other than professional-level color-critical work. That's neither here nor there though.
        tornadoboy55 10y ago
antihero 10y ago
My laptop has 16GB of RAM, I don't really give a fuck about a few hundred MB of RAM in all fairness.
- tornadoboy55 10y ago
  It's a symptom of a larger problem though- inefficiency. It's why everything is nearly instantaneous in Sublime but always has that tiny delay in Atom - plus it chokes on large files. Hell, the Sublime dude even wrote a custom Regex engine just for highly performant searching.
  - gcp 10y ago
    Hell, the Sublime dude even wrote a custom Regex engine just for highly performant searching. Presumably everything Electron based is using Irregexp under the hood, so I doubt that's a real competitive advantage. The performance difference between Atom and Visual Studio Code is interesting, given that they're built on the same framework.
  - moon_priestess 10y ago
    It may be inefficient in terms of memory and CPU resources, but it was very efficient in terms of dev time and allows for easy modification by third parties. I'm not sure Atom would be where it is now if they went the native route. When I'm doing development, I spend most of my time interacting with Atom. If I had to buy another pair of 16 GB DIMMs just for the sake of running it, I would. This is what I do professionally and I'm happy to throw a little RAM at something that makes my job more enjoyable and myself more productive.
    - potatosoup 10y ago
      > It may be inefficient in terms of memory and CPU resources, but it was very efficient in terms of dev time and allows for easy modification by third parties I appreciate easy customization as much as any dev, but, in this case, I don't know if that's an advantage when as a result Atom doesn't do its primary task terribly well: stay open all day, let me type code.
potatosoup 10y ago
I gave Atom an honest chance for a couple of months and went back to Sublime. Don't understand how people have the energy to put up with an editor that randomly gets sluggish when typing, hogs RAM, crashes spontaneously (requiring a restart), and chokes on large files.
mattkevan 10y ago
I was horrified as to what Electron apps do to my laptop's batteries. Just writing a bit of code in Atom shouldn't rinse a fairly new MacBook Pro in under three hours. Sublime, on the other hand, lasts all day.

antihero 10y ago

1) All fonts look like ass on windows. 2) What exactly do you mean by this? 3) This is true, the scheme is great, but themes aren't really there yet. The default is nice enough, though. 4) Also true, perhaps a plugin could work? I have no idea where I'd use macros though. What do you use macros for? 5) Also true, I use vim for those but it's a rare case. The CPU issue seems weird, I certainly don't get 100% CPU.

gcp 10y ago
1) Arguable. In any case Chrome and everything based on it (i.e. Electron) render fonts too light compared to native apps on Windows, and don't properly respect ClearType settings. I've been told the underlying issue is a design mistake in gamma handling between Chrome and Skia, but I have no idea whether that's true. The fact that more and more apps are Electron based makes this very sad :( 2) You can't set tab = 8 and indent = 2. This isn't common, but sometimes one deals with foreign sources where that's an issue. 4) Repetitive editing tasks where just doing them once is much faster than coming up with a shell/sed/awk/perl/python on-liner. I switch to vi for those right now.
- antihero 10y ago
  1) Fair enough, I guess that's a Chrome bug which maybe will be fixed in time. 2) Also fair enough, I don't find that I have to deal with this too much. Can you switch editor for those files? It's only a Cmd+Tab away :) 4) I use multiple cursors for stuff like this.