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Atom 1.28
- plg 8y agoWhat’s the main argument for using Atom over say Sublime Text? (argument other than price—-I’m willing to pay $ for good software)
- everdev 8y agoTo me Atom feels slower and outright chokes on large files. However, the ecosystem is nice with some good tooling for Go (go-plus) and a nice GUI to install and configure plugins. If Sublime had the plugins I like to use I'd go back. The size, slowness and constant restarting to install updates is a pain.
- giancarlostoro 8y agoI own a Sublime Text 3 license but either VS Code or Atom have a much richer plugin ecosystem. Sublime Text 3 opens in the blink of an eye so I use it to save work notes since it opens and closes so fast.
- 628C6l0 8y agoFor me the biggest argument in favor of atom is that because it's based on chromium it displays emojis properly, in colors. As someone who makes use of emojis extensively as variable and function names, this is very important.
- elboru 8y agoWow, would you mind to share some code? I've never seen that approach
- ChrisRackauckas 8y agoAsk and you shall receive: https://twitter.com/ChrisRackauckas/status/1006401461226332160 https://twitter.com/ChrisRackauckas/status/10064014612263321...
- akshat_h 8y agoI am quite curious of the domain where you use emojis in function name? That sounds fun, and also from what I have seen of unicode support somewhat terrifying. I work mostly in enterprise backend so variable names are typically boring, but I have never heard of emojis being used in var names.
- __blockcipher__ 8y agoTo me, it seems clear that they were joking. I could be wrong there, but I don't think I am. That being said, the poop emoji would be great to use instead of "temp"
- giancarlostoro 8y agoI think you're being sarcastic but others seem to think you're serious. Care to clarify? I'm leaning towards you're being sarcastic. I'd flip a table if I opened up code full of emojis.
- engi_nerd 8y agoYou know what really boggles my mind? You are the only person so far who has had a sane reaction to this. All these other people saying "this sounds like fun" are making me cringe in revulsion.
- akshat_h 8y agoI can see it being 'fun' in something like Scratch. I expected op to reply with either some edutech or some domain I hadn't heard of. It does however seem that op is trolling, and I missed it.
- 628C6l0 8y agoEmojis make your code a little more like math formulas. In math formulas you use single letters. This makes the syntax easy to parse, but has the drawback that the letters are mostly meaningless and so not very suggestive. Names in programming language tend to be words. This makes it easier to remember what they are supposed to stand for but also make the syntax hard to parse and other occurrences hard to spot Emojis combine the best of both worlds. Like the letters used in math they are easy to parse and it's really easy to find other occurrences of the same var when the name is an apple . But like the more verbose names in programming languages they can carry meaning. Eg I use the dango emoji for arrays and the monitor emoji for window instances.
- jacobolus 8y agoAh yes, because nothing says “data structure consisting of a contiguous block of memory broken into uniformly sized chunks so elements can be cheaply accessed by index” like a little picture of rice dumplings on a stick. Much better than just using the accepted technical term “array”. Personally I prefer the abbreviation arrr, or sometimes yarr. Lets anyone reading the code feel like they just downed a pitcher of grog.
- jacobsenscott 8y agoSame. I also use this extensively https://github.com/sferik/active_emoji https://github.com/sferik/active_emoji.
- Reedx 8y agoHaha, this is Ken M quality.
- memco 8y agoJoking or not, Sublime renders emoji just fine as far as I can see. I am not using them for variables, but they are sometimes embedded in strings, and in this case it's nice that they render correctly. How does Atom improve emoji experience?
- mygo 8y agofor me, atom’s initial value proposition way back when was, (well, in addition to the customizability/programmability) the third party plug-in ecosystem. It was a pretty big deal for me at the time not to have to wait for my code editor to release an extension for that-one-thing-I-use. Atom is slow for larger files, but the vast amount of third party plugins is a great asset.
- collyw 8y agoIt became unusably slow for me when I got downgraded to a spinning disk machine. It was fine on the SSD machine I had before that.
- mygo 8y agoI’ve only used SSD’s since 2012.. and it’s not always the case but it’s noticeable on large files. For example sometimes I open a gigantic CSV file (at least tens of thousands of rows) or JSON file in Atom, and it really chokes. But at the same time other tools are probably better for handling such large data files so it’s not a deal breaker.
- noirbot 8y agoThe big reason I still use Atom is that it's both more visually customizable (VS Code is somewhat locked to its core layout) and that it BY FAR has the best ESlint support. VS Code is nice, and definitely faster, but it just has rougher support for addons at this point, and is just a worse UX for more complex integrations. In general I use Sublime when I need fast editing of a one-off script, or basic work on things. I use Atom for JS development, and VS Code for the rest. If Atom was faster for starting up and handling larger projects, I'd much prefer it, but for now, I make due with VS Code. Really, one of my biggest gripes with all of them, and VS Code especially, is that the addon ecosystem has a serious discoverability problem. If I want to find a new theme, or find a new addon for a specific language or whatever, it's much easier in Atom than almost anywhere else. When one of them fixes that, I'll be happily in on it.
- ggregoire 8y agoWhat’s the main argument for using Sublime Text over VSCode? I used Sublime for like 5 years but VSCode is better in my opinion. With updates every month and a good support team. For free.
- bdcravens 8y agoLarge files. (hundreds of MBs or in the GBs) For many this isn't a use case, but if you do a lot of data loading, troubleshooting CSVs is a common need.
- jakear 8y agoIs subl really that much faster at big CSV's for you? I made a quick 10 million line, ~1GB CSV in Python, opened it in both sublime text and code. code opened in 20seconds, subl took over a minute.
- bdcravens 8y agoHonestly, it's been a while since I tried. Perhaps I'll take another stab at it and see how VS Code has improved. Out of curiosity, how wide is the file? Some of the files I open are 250+ field invoices, so each line is easily 1k characters each.
- pier25 8y agoIt's easier to configure and extend.
- stuxnet79 8y agoBetween Sublime and VS Code I just don't see Atom's value proposition. I'd like to be proven wrong though.
- exelius 8y agoPretty sure Atom will just go away soon. VS Code is better at the same thing and now that they’re under the same roof it makes no sense to keep Atom around.
- jrs95 8y ago“Apache Atom”
- chiefalchemist 8y agoMaybe it makes sense for MS to use one to keep the other honest. Maybe the negative PR from shutting down Atom isn't worth it. Etc.
- BinaryIdiot 8y agoIt won't be going away. Microsoft and GitHub have both independently said they see a place for Atom and they're not getting rid of it. Let's also not forget that the deal isn't done yet. They still have 5-ish months to go before it's done. It'll probably still go through but until then they're separate companies (and even after then GitHub is becoming a subsidiary).
- wool_gather 8y agoPlus, it's open source, MIT licensed, so it would be difficult at best to make it just ¡poof! disappear.
- nijaru 8y agoI haven’t looked into it in about a month, but there are people on the atom team working on an experimental text editor engine written in rust rather than electron.
- ddon 8y agoTried VS Code several times, and failed to set it up correctly, so that I would be able to edit files over SSH and see a tree of files (without syncing, downloading entire projects, etc...). I just want to connect, browse to the needed file, double click on it, edit, save and close it. May be someone who has similar needs can point me to the right plugin/tutorial, I would try VS Code again? But for now, using Atom as my primary editor, and was able to set it up the way I described above. Plugin which I use to edit files over SSH is Remote FTP (https://github.com/icetee/remote-ftp https://github.com/icetee/remote-ftp), if someone is interested.
- mtrpcic 8y agoI tried to do something like this for a while, but ended up much preferring a local copy of the codebase with the changes rsynced across to the server. Without the files locally, the editor wasn't able to index them, so it was a little janky to jump to other files in the project, and a lot of the utility of plugins (like automatic code completion) just didn't work great since it couldn't find the relevant files to use.
- eat_veggies 8y agoWould something like sshfs work for you? https://github.com/libfuse/sshfs https://github.com/libfuse/sshfs
- giancarlostoro 8y agoWhat I've done is install VS Code on the remote system (usually a dev VM) and with X forwarding I open up VS Code, works perfectly, as others have suggested another approach is to just mount the VM or remote systems drive somewhere on your local machine but I've yet to try this.
- rckclmbr 8y agoYou should give the Atom plugin nuclide a try, it has really good remote code editing support (including indexing the files, which was someone elses criticism). You do need to install a server script, but it still just works over ssh. https://nuclide.io/docs/features/remote/ https://nuclide.io/docs/features/remote/
- nikolay 8y agoI was a loyal Atom user until I tried and fell in love with VS Code. Although there's a richer set of add-ons for Atom, some of the VS Code are of a much higher quality - especially the ones backed by Microsoft. Anyway, GitLens [0] is one of the non-Microsoft ones. [0]: https://gitlens.amod.io/ https://gitlens.amod.io/
- gjmveloso 8y agoThere is no reason for Microsoft keeping two Electron-based code editor. Would be nice to see how both communities from VSCode and Atom can work together and drive an even better coding experience with an unlimited extensions ecosystem. Both Atom and VSCode are great!
- sergiotapia 8y agoExpect Atom to be killed, or just have security updates very soon. Microsoft has teams right now looking at what they can bring in from Atom before shelving it. No sense in having two "electron" based editors.
- rhencke 8y agoThat is a substantial claim which runs counter to all public communication from Microsoft and GitHub on the matter so far. Can you provide anything to substantiate your claim?
- jakear 8y agoI am quite sure that if they had the information to substantiate that claim, they would not be publicly making the claim in the first place.
- sidorares 8y agoI'm surprised that no one asking this - but what's the future for Atom in VSCode in light that they are pretty much direct competitors AND developed by same company now. Any plans to merge teams / unify development? ( Or opposite, close one of the projects ? ) Competition was definitely beneficial to both of them, but is it common to have healthy "intra-company" competing products?
- PedroBatista 8y agoOver time there will be divestment on Atom and VSCode will be the "natural" alternative.
- benatkin 8y agoNat Friedman, who will be the new CEO of GitHub, answered this. He said that both would be maintained as long as there were dedicated users, and that he expected it to be for a very long time. I expect it could be used to promote Microsoft. Surprisingly, Atom doesn't even say GitHub above the fold on https://atom.io/ https://atom.io/ There's an octocat above the fold, but it doesn't mention GitHub until further down the page.
- breatheoften 8y agoI hope vscode copies the text search interface from atom - after using atom for awhile I switched to and love vscode but the more functional/information rich search result navigator is the buggest thing I miss from atom ...
- sebringj 8y agoI used atom for so long and at work we were kind of forced in a way to use vscode which opened my eyes that vscode really is better in terms of speed and auto formating etc, meaning you have plugins but it doesn't seem to add weight to it where atom just chugged. I have a 3 year old macbook pro, a spanking new macbook pro and a 2 year old mac pro. It was severely noticeable on the 3 year old one for sure and always noticeable although considerably less on the spanking new one.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- partiallypro 8y agoSince Microsoft has taken over, perhaps my take might hurt people's confidence in Github in light of that news...but they really should just kill off Atom and focus on VS Code. I'd rather they focus energy on building other tools.
- ojuara 8y agoI was a Atom user until I found BBedit. I like the hackable proposal around Atom, but being fast is the most important feature for me.
- chipotle_coyote 8y agoIt's nice to see some love for BBEdit. I confess that I use VS Code for programming more often, but I'm a technical writer, and I almost always use BBEdit for my work. The other day I had to do a task that boiled down to "recursively search for all files in this directory that do NOT contain the following text, then in the result set, run the following regex-based search and replace." In BBEdit, this is essentially a two-step operation (the first search, then a "text factory" with the regex search-and-replace that used the search result window as the input). I'm sure there are other editors that could do that same operation, but I have doubts how many could do it as easily. Really, if I could bring a couple of the more "IDE-esque" bits over from Code (most notably language-sensitive smart indent, something I'm boggled Bare Bones hasn't broken down and added yet), I'd probably just stick with BBEdit full time still.
- vorpalhex 8y agoI like Atom because I can keep it a relatively dumb editor. I hate autocomplete, I hate automated code formatting usually (I do occasionally use Prettier to get legacy code cleaner) and I don't want to see my linter until I go to make a commit. I do wish Atom was faster, especially on Windows. I do appreciate the support for ligatures in font though, and how easy it is to change editor behavior as I go.
- megaman22 8y agoWhy not use gedit or notepad++ or geany then? Those are all more performant.
- dontJudge 8y agoMany versions of notepad++ phone home, so be careful what you type.
- icegreentea2 8y agoGot a source on this? Or at least information on what versions?
- beart 8y agoI've never heard of this - can you provide more information?
- megaman22 8y agoI thought that was one fucked version that quickly got removed from the downloads page?
- vorpalhex 8y agoNotepad++ is windows only. gedit is a bit too dumb with no support for most syntax highlighters.
- ryanolsonx 8y agoWhy don’t you like to use autocomplete? Just curious.
- jimwalsh 8y agoI love Atom and use it as my default text editor. There are all these people talking about IDE wars in the comments. I feel like Atom is an enhanced text editor at best. But the comparisons to VSCode and then eventually IntelliJ...not even the same ballpark.
- bdcravens 8y ago> But the comparisons to VSCode and then eventually IntelliJ...not even the same ballpark. VSCode is pretty close to Atom in many ways (though some of its plugins and things like the integrated terminal get it closer to IDE territory) Are you sure you're not thinking of Visual Studio rather than Visual Studio Code? (2 entirely different projects; Code isn't a subset or a "lite" version)
- jimwalsh 8y agoI am talking about VSCode, but you make a good callout about the two products because many people may not realize the differences. I agree that VSCode and Atom are similar, but you are right, and I feel like many people, end up using plugins to the point that push VSCode to IDE levels.
- collyw 8y agoI must admit that I assumed it was a web version of Visual Studio until reading this thread.
- jakear 8y agoIntegrated debugger is a big step on the way to IDE-land as well. Having it interact with high quality language servers takes it another step (find all refs, jump to definition, etc). Throw in automated tasks and build rules and the line between enhanced editor and IDE starts to get really blurry.
- __alias 8y agoSounds like everyone has had similar experiences with trying VS code then falling in love with it
- kup0 8y agoI've been enjoying VS Code for a while after really trying to find a text-editor on Mac that fits my personal preferences (tab navigation, open new files in tabs in existing window, fast launch time, css syntax highlighting inside of an HTML file). I've tried so many and like very few of them. MS seems to have done some good work on performance. It's still faster than this new version of Atom for startup, especially cold starts (with it not open at all, going into FTP client > open file). Though, I revisited Sublime Text today, and I have to say, I know it's just a few seconds saved here and there, but the difference between Sublime and ANY other editor as far as launch/file ready time is a huge gap. While the measured time doesn't seem significant- the "feel" of using it does. It's hard to put into words how much better it feels to use, like the difference between using applications on a HDD vs an SSD. I'm still debating (as a hobbyist that doesn't make much money on what I use text editors for) whether the license is worth it for Sublime or if I should just stick to VS Code. $80 is reasonable for most use cases (developers, etc) but it's a bit steep for mine. It really feels like it might be worth it, even just for the speed difference.
- bdcravens 8y agoSublime has always been king of the hill for opening giant files (like CSVs if you need to troubleshoot data imports) but unix tools and software like head and vim can take you pretty far if budget is a concern.
- jakear 8y agoIs subl really that much faster at big CSV's for you? I made a quick 10 million line, ~1GB CSV in Python, opened it in both sublime text and code. code opened in 20seconds, subl took over a minute.
- bdcravens 8y ago(copying comment to your other reply for benefits of thread) Honestly, it's been a while since I tried. Perhaps I'll take another stab at it and see how VS Code has improved. Out of curiosity, how wide is the file? Some of the files I open are 250+ field invoices, so each line is easily 1k characters each.
- haolez 8y agoLong time Emacs user here. I’m enjoying Atom more and more on each new release. It’s not slow anymore and the UI is really minimalistic and clean. Highly recommend it.
- jakear 8y agoHow is Atom with a11y? I tried using VoiceOver with Atom but I couldn't quite get it to work. Is accessibility something the Atom team is committed to?
- petre 8y agoCool, 1.28 now fails to strat on OSX 10.10.5 Yosemite. Maybe this is a warning sign that I need to go back to Sublime?