4 ms·

I recall the Turbo Pascal text-mode IDE that left enough space to actually run the programs you were developing. The machines had 640KB RAM, and I think the ID

I recall the Turbo Pascal text-mode IDE that left enough space to actually run the programs you were developing. The machines had 640KB RAM, and I think the IDE was using perhaps as much as 100KB. I recall using fully-featured GUI IDEs like VB, VC++ etc on machines with whopping 64MB RAM, and having enough space left to actually run the programs you were developing. I have a laptop now with 16GB RAM. The other day I tried to edit a large text log file in Atom and it ran out of memory. That was the first - and last - time I tried to use Atom. I went back to my fav editor, jEdit, which currently says in its tray that its using a whopping 28MB RAM. No idea what it can be doing to fill that up, as I have barely anything open. But still...

bigato 9y ago
Great comment for historical perspective. But just out of curiosity, why did you need to edit a log file?
- willvarfar 9y ago
  just going to do fancy find replace. Sometimes when you have to actually read log files its easier in a text editor than on the command line.
  - bigato 9y ago
    Were you on windows? Because I can't imagine fancier find and replace than grep, awk, sed, cut and friends. Or maybe 'less' if you want to page and do simple searches. But maybe that's just because I'm used to these tools.
    - willvarfar 9y ago
      OSX and linux. I use the command line a lot. And often write scripts in python to chew through and transform logs. Still sometimes want to open big text files in GUI editors though...
jmilloy 9y ago
This is a strange story. Why did you download and install Atom and decide to test it for the first time on a large log file? Did you think that was what Atom would be good at?
- willvarfar 9y ago
  It happened that I installed Atom to give it a try, and one of the first things I wanted to do was look at a log file that was several MB big. I have 16GB of RAM. I was not expecting any problems.

bigato 9y ago

Great comment for historical perspective. But just out of curiosity, why did you need to edit a log file?

willvarfar 9y ago
just going to do fancy find replace. Sometimes when you have to actually read log files its easier in a text editor than on the command line.
- bigato 9y ago
  Were you on windows? Because I can't imagine fancier find and replace than grep, awk, sed, cut and friends. Or maybe 'less' if you want to page and do simple searches. But maybe that's just because I'm used to these tools.
  - willvarfar 9y ago
    OSX and linux. I use the command line a lot. And often write scripts in python to chew through and transform logs. Still sometimes want to open big text files in GUI editors though...

jmilloy 9y ago

This is a strange story. Why did you download and install Atom and decide to test it for the first time on a large log file? Did you think that was what Atom would be good at?

willvarfar 9y ago
It happened that I installed Atom to give it a try, and one of the first things I wanted to do was look at a log file that was several MB big. I have 16GB of RAM. I was not expecting any problems.