3 ms·

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
        What is it that you have in the Atom ecosystem that's (or a substitute) not installable through Sublime's package control? > 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. Just Googled it. Just from the Google images: * Why is there 'Thinkpad' sprayed on lower-right corner? Ugly and useless. * Touchpad mouse buttons, circa 1990 * Red-black color scheme * Mouse nipple (I know this is Lenovo thing and people actually buy them for it) I realize style is subjective, but very few people are going to pick the X1 over either the Macbook or the XPS13 in terms of design. And design matters. Not only in a 'oh this looks nice way', people are actually measurably more productive on attractive gear.
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.

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
        What is it that you have in the Atom ecosystem that's (or a substitute) not installable through Sublime's package control? > 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. Just Googled it. Just from the Google images: * Why is there 'Thinkpad' sprayed on lower-right corner? Ugly and useless. * Touchpad mouse buttons, circa 1990 * Red-black color scheme * Mouse nipple (I know this is Lenovo thing and people actually buy them for it) I realize style is subjective, but very few people are going to pick the X1 over either the Macbook or the XPS13 in terms of design. And design matters. Not only in a 'oh this looks nice way', people are actually measurably more productive on attractive gear.

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.