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I know this is not a popular opinion but I feel that atom never had the right priorities for a project. A text editor’s primary goal is to be fast and responsi

by brad0 8y ago

I know this is not a popular opinion but I feel that atom never had the right priorities for a project. A text editor’s primary goal is to be fast and responsive. Atom uses a rendering layer that makes no sense in the context of a text editor. Using a DOM introduces all this cruft that takes away from actually editing text files.

scotty79 8y ago
It's very popular opinion and it's demonstrably wrong. Atom was carving out niche from all the fast and responsive text editors by being open source editor with plugins that are easy to write, inspect and fix when they are buggy. Only dangerous competition for atom is vs code because it does exactly the same only a bit faster. What you are saying is similar to that the Firefox never had priorities right because instead making itself faster and more responsive it made possibles all those script and DOM based extensions. Being able to extend your tools without messing with binaries or learning dialect of lisp and some weird gui toolkit is a huge feature that Atom brought to editor market.
- pjmlp 8y ago
  Nah, I remember being able to do all of that with Windows commercial editors like SlickEdit. So those Atom "innovations" are only relevant on a market where developers refuse to buy their tools.
  - scotty79 8y ago
    As I said: open source
    - pjmlp 8y ago
      As I said, relevant on a market where devs refuse to pay for their tools, unlike other professionals.
Klathmon 8y ago
But your wants and needs aren't universal. My perfect editor needs to be as configurable and customizable as possible, and I couldn't give a rats ass about startup performance or large file rendering performance. For me, an editor where I can't display inline images alongside text which is in multiple languages (including some RTL languages) while linting and providing IDE level features all while displaying inline test coverage results is worse than an editor that starts instantly. From that perspective, a browser is the perfect abstraction. It's okay if Atoms priorities aren't for you, but saying they are wrong is like saying trains are wrong because they can't do 0 to 60 in 4 seconds.
- zozbot123 8y ago
  > For me, an editor where I can't display inline images alongside text which is in multiple languages (including some RTL languages) while linting and providing IDE level features all while displaying inline test coverage results is worse than an editor that starts instantly. Emacs does provide these features, and it's not too slow at startup either. It's a really nice operating system "abstraction"... too bad that they haven't gotten around to making a good editor for it.
  - Klathmon 8y ago
    A big problem I have with emacs, and I fully acknowledge that it's shallow and superficial, is that it looks bad. I stare at this thing for hours a day, I like it to look nice. That combined with the fact that I'm in JavaScript all day long, so it's super easy to extend and modify Atom, means that it just wins out. Atom is also a LOT easier to pickup than emacs ever was for me, and I tried a few times.
    - m45t3r 8y ago
      Spacemacs looks beautiful tough, and has some pretty nice defaults (for example, it automatically adds a layer for each language you're using, so you have good IDE-like features without fuzzing with packages).
- pjmlp 8y ago

by brad0 8y ago

scotty79 8y ago

It's very popular opinion and it's demonstrably wrong. Atom was carving out niche from all the fast and responsive text editors by being open source editor with plugins that are easy to write, inspect and fix when they are buggy. Only dangerous competition for atom is vs code because it does exactly the same only a bit faster. What you are saying is similar to that the Firefox never had priorities right because instead making itself faster and more responsive it made possibles all those script and DOM based extensions. Being able to extend your tools without messing with binaries or learning dialect of lisp and some weird gui toolkit is a huge feature that Atom brought to editor market.

pjmlp 8y ago
Nah, I remember being able to do all of that with Windows commercial editors like SlickEdit. So those Atom "innovations" are only relevant on a market where developers refuse to buy their tools.
- scotty79 8y ago
  As I said: open source
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    As I said, relevant on a market where devs refuse to pay for their tools, unlike other professionals.

Klathmon 8y ago

But your wants and needs aren't universal. My perfect editor needs to be as configurable and customizable as possible, and I couldn't give a rats ass about startup performance or large file rendering performance. For me, an editor where I can't display inline images alongside text which is in multiple languages (including some RTL languages) while linting and providing IDE level features all while displaying inline test coverage results is worse than an editor that starts instantly. From that perspective, a browser is the perfect abstraction. It's okay if Atoms priorities aren't for you, but saying they are wrong is like saying trains are wrong because they can't do 0 to 60 in 4 seconds.

zozbot123 8y ago
> For me, an editor where I can't display inline images alongside text which is in multiple languages (including some RTL languages) while linting and providing IDE level features all while displaying inline test coverage results is worse than an editor that starts instantly. Emacs does provide these features, and it's not too slow at startup either. It's a really nice operating system "abstraction"... too bad that they haven't gotten around to making a good editor for it.
- Klathmon 8y ago
  A big problem I have with emacs, and I fully acknowledge that it's shallow and superficial, is that it looks bad. I stare at this thing for hours a day, I like it to look nice. That combined with the fact that I'm in JavaScript all day long, so it's super easy to extend and modify Atom, means that it just wins out. Atom is also a LOT easier to pickup than emacs ever was for me, and I tried a few times.
  - m45t3r 8y ago
    Spacemacs looks beautiful tough, and has some pretty nice defaults (for example, it automatically adds a layer for each language you're using, so you have good IDE-like features without fuzzing with packages).
pjmlp 8y ago