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Honestly can't see why I'd use this - I have all the professional grade IDEs I need, why do I need one that is written in JS, is slower and consumes 5x more mem
by hacker_9 9y ago
Honestly can't see why I'd use this - I have all the professional grade IDEs I need, why do I need one that is written in JS, is slower and consumes 5x more memory? Not to mention IDEs already have their own extension stores too. This seems like an 'IDE-lite', which doesn't make much sense in a world where professional grade IDEs are free.
- Tenobrus 9y agoThe same reason thousands of programmers use Vim or Emacs with various extensions as their development environment. It allows the same editing experience across multiple languages. A consistent interface, lack of need for learning many (often very different) IDEs, less proprietary annoyance, many many more options for customization, much easier to port your setup to various platforms, etc. Admittedly I don't think Atom is a very worthwhile text editor, but using an augmented text editor as an IDE is a very common practice.
- hacker_9 9y agoBut that's what I mean - we already have Emacs/Vim, with their million of extensions, which are always going to be faster. Outside of that we have Visual Studio, IntelliJ, PyCharm, the list goes on. All downloadable for free.
- simlevesque 9y ago> going to be faster Fast is not the end goal.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- oneeyedpigeon 9y agoEmacs/Vim are far from being transparent. They have a very steep initial learning curve, and put off a lot of potential users as a result.
- yorwba 9y agoIt's been years since I last used an IDE, but in my experience, they come with huge toolbars stuffed full of menus to open wizards with tons of options. The learning curve is just as steep. Their advantage is that they provide lots of automatic features like spellcheck and autocomplete out-of-the-box, whereas you have to set these up yourself for Emacs/Vim.
- oneeyedpigeon 9y agoI think that's why people are talking up what they see as an alternative to the monolithic IDE: the lightweight text editor with support for extensions. I know Atom isn't particularly lightweight in terms of memory usage, but it is in terms of functionality.
- bitwize 9y ago> I think that's why people are talking up what they see as an alternative to the monolithic IDE: the lightweight text editor with support for extensions. Which is what vim and emacs, relative to IntelliJ, VS, VSCode, and Atom, are.
- oneeyedpigeon 9y agoLightweight text editor that doesn't drive you crazy the first time you try to quit it? ;-) As I said in another comment, I'm a daily vi user, but that's almost always when it's my only option. And that's been the case for well over a decade now. I just happen to feel more comfortable using sublime text; I always know how to do what I need to do, it's obvious, it's a pleasant experience. But I totally get some people have the same experience with vi/Emacs, and that's cool.
- 9y ago
- yodsanklai 9y ago> we already have Emacs/Vim, with their million of extensions My experience is that Vim is hard to use when you start to add too many extensions. There are just too many shortcuts to remember, plugins may interact in unexpected ways, and things like contextual information don't look as nice as they could. It just feels very 'hacky' to try to use it as an IDE. I prefer to use more recent editors (first Sublime, but I'm sold to VSCode now) that are better suited to modern display and usages. I still use vim mode but I'm not even sure I'm really more productive with it. Sometimes I wonder if I shouldn't focus on just using mac os default binding.
- tomelders 9y agoI've never gotten into Vim, but a friend said something that piqued my interest. Editing text is boring. Programming is fun. Vim makes text editing like programming.
- howlgram 9y agoI'm learning vim and I agree, even if there's no productivity gain (duh I'm new to it) it makes my work way more fun (I do have a contrived concept of fun though).
- slaymaker1907 9y agoI find Atom to be the best editor for Markdown, though not much else. In particular, it has superb support for Pandoc as well as a good spell corrector built in.
- eivarv 9y agoHave you tried Typora[0]? It features inline rendering (i.e. images, formatting...) I have barely used my standard editor (Sublime) for Markdown since I discovered it. [0]: https://typora.io/ https://typora.io/
- tootie 9y agoI think that's less relevant than it used to be. JetBrains is now the de facto best IDE for Java, JavaScript, Python and PHP. It has Android Studio and even support for C#. Visual Studio also supports a wide array of languages. I'm in IntelliJ pretty much all the time, no matter the project.
- carlmr 9y agoI program a lot in C, F# and Python. I mostly use visual studio code (electron app similar to Atom, but better). It's great if you're using languages which don't come in one IDE, or where you need to pay for the IDE (F#).
- aquaticor 9y agoTake a look at full Visual Studio, it's a much better IDE for F#, the free version beats vscode for F# dev hands down. Though I like VS code for its portability.
- kllrnohj 9y agoIntelliJ is expensive if you want languages not covered by the free edition (like JavaScript), though, and even if you pay for it some things are frustratingly distinct such as if you have a Java/C++ app you need two different "IDEs" (CLion + IntelliJ), and you need to then juggle between those windows. Android Studio is able to work with both even though IntelliJ Ultimate isn't (why, Jetbrains, why!?), but getting Android Studio to work on non-Android things isn't the nicest of experiences. I'd be more willing to pay for the quality if a nice, unified experience was the result, but it annoyingly isn't. To say nothing of the lack of support for things like Rust. That's what this new generation of IDEs is exciting to me - the unified language server standards. Let the compilers handle understanding the code which is what they are best at. Especially if it helps make IDEs less tied to the build system in general (no, CLion, I don't want to use CMake)
- noir_lord 9y agoIntellij Ultimate costs me £14 a month, with the plugins (which makes it equivalent to Phpstorm, PyCharm, Rubymine and Webstorm) thats less than I spend on coffee in two weeks, it's insane value however you look at it. That said I still spend a chunk of time (maybe 30%) in vscode because for somethings I prefer it (it's git support with git lens is incredible) and for TypeScript it's comparable to Intellij with the advantage you can start it, do an edit and close before Intellij has finished re-indexing.
- dkersten 9y ago> The same reason thousands of programmers use Vim or Emacs Vim/emacs give a better experience though: they work in a terminal/over ssh and they are FAST and lightweight (memory use). Atom has neither of these properties.
- kornish 9y agoThat's not false – but it ignores the point the grandparent was making, which is that minimizing switch cost is valuable to some.
- dkersten 9y agoSwitch-cost between what? Vim has worked pretty well for me for all programming languages I've used and on all platforms I've used. I reread grandparents comment and I'm a bit unsure what you are referring to exactly.
- kornish 9y agoI'm just saying that you're hijacking the point (that using a single editor, rather than switching between IDEs, is useful) and replacing it with a competition for size and speed. Yes, vim and emacs are lighter. Does that devalue Atom's consistency? No. I say this as an avid Emacs user.
- dkersten 9y agoAh, I understand now. I guess my point was that since vim/emacs already exist and have advantages, that use case for atom seems a bit unnecessary, but of course in reality many people don't use vim/emacs due to the learning curve, so I suppose the point is irrelevant.
- komali2 9y agoI've been wondering if there's a way to use a more graphical editor over SSH, such as vscode or sublime. I get that I could just "learn VIM" but I already know a shitload of hotkeys for vscode/sublime (they're easily transferred), so I'd rather just use them.
- on_and_off 9y agoExcept that we already have Jetbrains for this.
- mastazi 9y ago> why do I need one that is written in JS, is slower and consumes 5x more memory > The same reason thousands of programmers use Vim or Emacs Uhm nope.
- crudbug 9y agoI agree. A better approach would have been to take something like IntelliJ platform as a base.
- fortythirteen 9y agoI wish they'd put this sort of manpower towards fixing Electron.
- Lramseyer 9y agoOr you know, move away from it entirely. But in all seriousness, I actually really like Atom as a text editor, and wish it didn't consume so many resources to run.
- imtringued 9y agoMy primary complaint is that it can't handle large files at all. Why can't I use it to look at my logs without it completely freezing?
- qarioz 9y agoToo bad Mozilla is discontinuing Positron. With Servo coming up and Firefox nightly using Stylo it feels very fast compared to Chrome.
- Touche 9y agoBecause unlike the "profession grade IDEs", this one doesn't make me want to gouge my eyes out.
- discreteevent 9y agoAs a frivolous aside it's refreshing that the screenshot shows a light theme. Getting a bit tired of all the heavy black slabs.
- jsight 9y agoThere are times when just using a text editor is nice. An editor with better language awareness is even more useful. An experience like that has been possible for a long time, but this looks like a much easier way to get there.
- osteele 9y agoDedicated IDEs seem targeted at “I'm going to spend all day living in this one big project.” Text editors such as Atom and Visual Studio Code seem better at editing a single file, or bopping between a few projects (either within the same or across multiple windows). Either can technically handle the opposite extreme, but seems out of its element there. Also, I have yet to see an IDE that looks and feels like a native macOS application. (I'm looking forward to being corrected here.)
- dvorak365 9y agoXCode?
- osteele 9y agoD'oh! (I also have fond memories of Think C and then Metrowerks, back in the day. A lot of us used them at Apple, instead of the official MPW.) This brings up some other advantages of text editors versus IDEs, within my limited experience: * More rapid support for more languages and syntaxes * Many of the IDEs just feel sluggish. (Yes, Atom can get that way with large files, large numbers of files, or too many plugins.) * Xcode in particular kept crashing on me last time I used it for Swift.
- munificent 9y ago> fond memories of Think C and then Metrowerks Me too, especially the former. It's so weird the things our nostalgia anchors itself to. And don't get me started on ResEdit. My emotional palette has a color reserved specifically for the feeling I got poking around applications and creating icons and cursors using it.
- Matthias247 9y agoI'm preferring Visual Studio Code to normal Visual Studio whereever possible. Reasons for this is that I find editing (Ctrl-D) and navigating (Ctrl-P) there much more efficient, git integration is great, and I get more code on the screen (especially on a notebook). For languages were the language service is good (typescript, C#) I barely see a disadvantage to full visual studio. For languages with weaker support (C++) I tend to open the project in both environments and use Code for longer editing tasks and full VS for compilation and debugging.
- jbergens 9y agoTips: VS has a full screen mode. It also has a very configurable layout, much more so than VS Code or Atom. But if you like VS Code then you should use it.
- jetti 9y agoI don't use Atom but I do use Visual Studio Code (which is also Electron based). I use it because there are no real IDEs for Elixir and navigation is amazing. It is also lightweight (compared to JetBrains' IDEs). Another big plus is that it runs on Linux.
- dabockster 9y agoThe fact that it also has "in collaboration with Facebook" as its tagline tells me two things: 1. This is designed specifically for React since Facebook wants to control that ecosystem. and 2. Github is internally stuck in 2013 when FB was still "cool" and using the cloud (ooooohhhh, aaaaaahhhh) to power everything was the new trend. Don't get me wrong, Github is a fantastic product and community. But they really shouldn't be writing desktop software.
- geodel 9y agoIt is just a web software masquerading as desktop software.
- thomastjeffery 9y agoConfiguration. An IDE comes with its own text editor. Any Emacs user will tell you it is much more powerful to have an IDE come with your editor. The ability to have your editor configured exactly how you want it (keybindings, fonts, etc.), and consistently use that configuration for all of your text editing is definitely appealing. The same goes for having all the plugins you use with your editor available when doing "IDE" things (debugging, etc.). TL;DR It just all-around makes more sense to have IDE features built into an editor instead of the other way around.
- ruffrey 9y agoI switch between Atom and JetBrains IDEs all the time. Atom is definitely peppier and has been for over a year. It has a better feel to it and much more customization. The only thing that is better about JetBrains is the exceptional debugger. Nothing in the Atom platform comes close to the JetBrains debug (and test runner) experience.
- aerotheck 9y agoI concur. Although the thing that troubles me most about them is that for both Atom and VSCode, the binaries that are distributed by their parent companies are not a direct compile of the public source code. They use the MIT license to their advantage, clone the repo to make it private, make changes to that private repo and then distribute the binary compiled from it. In this sense, among the popular options only Vim and Emacs live up to my expectations. Also IntelliJ possibly.
- io 9y agoThis is demonstrably false. Atom's official distributions are built on public CI platforms (Circle, Travis, and AppVeyor) from 100% public repos.
- aerotheck 9y agoOh sorry, I suppose I misunderstood something. It indeed is made from public repos. But then again, I researched a bit and found the licenses to be a bit problematic, not that of Atom itself but the additional packages that are bundled in the binary. It includes some packages whose licenses are unknown and others such as Facebook's libraries(a lot of them) which have the non-free BSD+patents license. In totality the license of the binary doesn't seem to be a really good one.