13 ms·

Atom 1.36

90 points by beardicus 7y ago

aashcan 7y ago
>The fuzzy finder’s project crawling performance has been improved dramatically by switching to a ripgrep-powered backend. This is most noticeable in projects with large numbers of files - for example, we measured a 14x speed boost in a project with 270K files. Another leaf out of VS Code's book?
wakeywakeywakey 7y ago
Prediction: I believe eventually MS will kill Atom or let development languish. People will complain that "MS is evil" and "look who they were in the past" and so on, but devs will go where the features are. VS Code is one of the finest examples of open source Done Right™, and while it owes something to Atom and Electron, this is pure open source darwinism.
- giancarlostoro 7y ago
  There's been previous discussion over this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18507817 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18507817 Take what you will from it. I'm not sure they will kill it, but I don't know why they need to maintain two editors either, then again they already maintain Visual Studio as well. I think it would be nice to see how both teams push their editors, but I feel like over the long haul it will be some VIM vs Neovim type of this. Additionally, VS Code will focus on strongly supporting Microsofts tech (via plugins), while Atom will focus on GitHub to some extent.
  - jsgo 7y ago
    My guess is that if anything, they'd turn Atom over to an external body to maintain and let it sink/swim on its own. Currently they seem to be fine with having both, which is cool. Maybe it is to have two separate teams work on different ideas and see which ones work and mainline it into Visual Studio Code? Not sure. I wish Visual Studio Code replaced Visual Studio, but unfortunately, it still holds value if working against Microsoft's stack. I like having them both and will occasionally use Code for .NET edits, but you definitely feel like it is missing some comforts at the very least when using it.
    - Devagamster 7y ago
      Until vscode and omnisharp support design time builds of msbuild projects, visual studio proper isn't going anywhere. Vscode cannot support anything beyond the happy path of csproj files which means I will always have to dip back into visual studio
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- paulcarroty 7y ago
  15-20 commits per week says they just support it and don't implement any major features. Hope I'm not right here.
  - denisw 7y ago
    Looking only at the commit numbers of the `atom/atom` repo is a bit misleading as the Atom source code as the core plugin packages (e.g., the language modes, but also fundamental features like the tree and the fuzzer) are each in their own repo. For instance, the fuzzy-finder repo alone had 15+ commits in the last three weeks.
- youeseh 7y ago
  And then we'll all go back to Vim and the cycle of life will once again complete itself.
- xrd 7y ago
  Can anyone who has stayed with Atom after evaluating VSCode comment on why to stay with Atom? I switched to VSCode and would never consider going back to Atom at this point. Since the GitHub acquisition, it makes no sense for MS to maintain both and I agree 100% with the parent comment that this will be killed soon.
  - bwha 7y ago
    I was with Atom for years, switched to VS Code and feel in love (save for the find and replace as cited above, I still felt/feel Atom's is better than VS Code's) and stuck with it (VS Code) for months. The thing that made me switch back was that there was some combination of plugins I was using in VS Code (I think it was the VIM plugin and something else maybe) started freezing periodically and the whole editor would become unresponsive and I'd have to restart. After that became normal I decided to switch back. In the end I preferred to spend my time coding rather than hunt down the problem. Also Atom's VIM plugin is strictly better for my use case. The highlighting effect to show you what you just `yw` for example is great!
    - lioeters 7y ago
      Funny, I had a similar (but somewhat opposite) experience: was a happy Atom user for some years until it started slowing down, freezing at increasing frequency; it was due to my having a massive tree of folders and files (top-level folder with all projects), with lots of symbolic and hard links. I had checked out VS Code a few times, but finally a couple months ago I was forced to make a switch - then pleasantly surprised how easy it was to migrate to it. VS Code is not as hackable of an editor, but it comes with great sensible defaults out of the box. I gave up trying to fully customize it, settled with a few tweaks, and have been very satisfied with it as a daily driver. At least for my use case, it's been more reliable and performant than Atom. The type hinting and "IntelliSense" is one of my favorite features (I'm sure Atom has a plugin for it). I think VS Code hits the sweet spot between an editor and a full-on IDE. EDIT: Oh, I didn't see this in the article, but it seems Atom is addressing the exact issue I was having: > The fuzzy finder’s project crawling performance has been improved dramatically by switching to a ripgrep-powered backend. This is most noticeable in projects with large numbers of files - for example, we measured a 14x speed boost in a project with 270K files.
- mdhughes 7y ago
  Strongly disagree. VS Code is a corporate tool IDE, which is dull and awkward to use as just an editor, and binary spyware in it "phones home" to its users' masters in Redmond. It's exactly what an MSDN subscriber would like, but dire for anyone else. Atom is fun. It's easy to configure in weird personal ways, get rid of parts you don't use, add your own plugins, change CSS as you like. There's an insane number of plugins and themes. It's like emacs but organized and nice. So far the statements from project owners in public and on Slack have been that Atom 1 & 2 development continues full speed. If it is "killed" we'll just fork it and run up a black flag.
  - equasar 7y ago
    I think you missed the /s in your comment.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - fartcannon 7y ago
      No need to insult whoever dislike your preferences.
  - paulcarroty 7y ago
    > and binary spyware in it "phones home" to its users' masters in Redmond Not a problem, https://vscodium.com/ https://vscodium.com/
- mythz 7y ago
  > VS Code is one of the finest examples of open source Done Right™ It's easy to do OSS right when your a major cloud OSS vendor who are able to use your billions of profits from hosting OSS to fund a 30+ strong dev team in creating a free "OSS" product. If that's the definition of doing OSS right, then the only sustainable "free" products that will be done right will come from multi-billion dollar cloud vendors. I do love VS Code tho, just not a fan of seeing most of the generated wealth from OSS being collected by the major cloud vendors, this trend is going to hurt the diversity of the OSS ecosystem as we know it. Irrespective of the funding model that made it possible, I will say the VS Code team is doing a fantastic work iteratively shipping new features with each release at a super high velocity. IMO it's a poster child for why most future Desktop Apps will be built using a Hybrid or WebView dev model like Electron where its productivity is unmatched.
Hamuko 7y ago
Does Atom still eat any resources your computer has to offer?
- olliepop 7y ago
  Yes, and it's worse than ever before.
taylorlapeyre 7y ago
Prediction: If VS Code is the general do-it-all editor, Atom will become the GitHub editor. Atom is quickly ramping up feature integration with GitHub — seen here with integrating review comments inline with the code and the deep GitHub PR integration in general. GitHub and Atom have a very linked future, with GitHub planning to become more involved with the actual code-writing process. Atom will be the conduit though which they achieve that.
- outside1234 7y ago
  I think you forgot who owns GitHub.
- arjun27 7y ago
  fyi, the GitHub PR extension[1] for VS Code has review comments in the editor. [1] https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/itemdetails?itemName=GitHub.vscode-pull-request-github https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/itemdetails?itemName=Gi...
- GordonS 7y ago
  VS Code has had excellent git integration for a long time, as well as GitHub-specific integrations through an extension. Atom may have started the move towards lightweight (relatively) IDEs, but VS Code is undoubtedly the more popular one. Honestly, when I saw this post on HN I was quite surprised to see that Atom is still actively developed - if there's anyone reading this that prefers Atom over VS Code, I'd really like to find out why?
  - galfarragem 7y ago
    VS Code, like Python, seems to be the second best tool on everything: it looks good but not as much as Atom, it's fast but not like Sublime or Vim, it's a lightweight IDE but not a full IDE.
    - lucidone 7y ago
      I agree except for TypeScript and JavaScript - vscode is the best code editor I've experienced for both.
elbrian 7y ago
While Atom was Mac-only, VSCode was eating their lunch. It's too little, too late now.
- guessmyname 7y ago
  > While Atom was Mac-only, VSCode was eating their lunch. It's too little, too late now. What do you mean? Atom has always been available for macOS, Windows, and Linux.
  - nnq 7y ago
    ...ever tried actually using it on Windows? Like a year ago it got to ok-ish usable. A bit before that even on most Linuxes it had crappy performance. Again, I like Atom's hackability, and mainly avoid it because the ecosystem of plugins is so full of halfly owkring abandonware
    - kraftman 7y ago
      First I've heard of this. I used Atom for a few years on windows and ubuntu without any issues except opening very large files.
graphememes 7y ago
Atom lost the HTML Editor race.
ksec 7y ago
To anyone who is following Atom closely, 1. What happened to Xray? The Next Generation of Atom that was suppose to fix all the performance problem of Atom. 2. Is Atom as fast as VS Code now?
- Klathmon 7y ago
  1. I haven't heard anything about it recently but that doesn't mean work isn't continuing on it. Xray wasn't supposed to "fix" anything really, it was a fairly extreme experiment to see if it would be worth going down that path. 2. No, and it's not trying to be, as "speed" isn't their top priority, extensibility is. That being said, the days of opening a 5mb file and the editor getting brought to its knees are largely over (unless you have poorly written extensions which can still take everything down, because again in Atom extensions are EVERYTHING and can do ANYTHING).
  - PurpleRamen 7y ago
    > in Atom extensions are EVERYTHING and can do ANYTHING). So Atom is the emacs of Webstack-World?
    - Klathmon 7y ago
      Pretty much! It's quite freeing if you enjoy working in an editor like that, and it's incredibly powerful! But obviously if you value "time to open" and if you don't want to customize things, neither of them is going to be a good choice for you!
  - ksec 7y ago
    Strange they are not focusing on Speed. The primary reason VS Code took over Atom was because of Speed. It shows what is possible with Electron. Not that it is anywhere near the speed of Sublime Text, but it was good enough for most and at least bearable to me. Compared to Atom, all the feedback ( on most Internet forum at least ) are performance related.
    - 7y ago
dbg31415 7y ago
I get that it's got a bit more going on, but Atom's startup time is still so much slower than Sublime Text. I open a file, there's still this "clunky" lag of 2-3 seconds to open. I hope they work on optimizing this at some point.
dmnd 7y ago
I do a lot of code review, so I'm excited to be able to do that from my editor where all of my other tooling is set up instead of in a web browser. Suggested code changes will be much easier if I write them in a context where I can compile/run them. And no more clicking that "expand" thing 20 times to see something earlier in the file. Thanks, Atom team!
JHonaker 7y ago
I don’t understand why Microsoft hasn’t pulled the GitHub integration into VS Code. It seems like it would be in their best interest given that they own both now.
outside1234 7y ago
Atom is still being developed?

90 points by beardicus 7y ago

>The fuzzy finder’s project crawling performance has been improved dramatically by switching to a ripgrep-powered backend. This is most noticeable in projects with large numbers of files - for example, we measured a 14x speed boost in a project with 270K files. Another leaf out of VS Code's book?

wakeywakeywakey 7y ago

Prediction: I believe eventually MS will kill Atom or let development languish. People will complain that "MS is evil" and "look who they were in the past" and so on, but devs will go where the features are. VS Code is one of the finest examples of open source Done Right™, and while it owes something to Atom and Electron, this is pure open source darwinism.

giancarlostoro 7y ago
There's been previous discussion over this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18507817 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18507817 Take what you will from it. I'm not sure they will kill it, but I don't know why they need to maintain two editors either, then again they already maintain Visual Studio as well. I think it would be nice to see how both teams push their editors, but I feel like over the long haul it will be some VIM vs Neovim type of this. Additionally, VS Code will focus on strongly supporting Microsofts tech (via plugins), while Atom will focus on GitHub to some extent.
- jsgo 7y ago
  My guess is that if anything, they'd turn Atom over to an external body to maintain and let it sink/swim on its own. Currently they seem to be fine with having both, which is cool. Maybe it is to have two separate teams work on different ideas and see which ones work and mainline it into Visual Studio Code? Not sure. I wish Visual Studio Code replaced Visual Studio, but unfortunately, it still holds value if working against Microsoft's stack. I like having them both and will occasionally use Code for .NET edits, but you definitely feel like it is missing some comforts at the very least when using it.
  - Devagamster 7y ago
    Until vscode and omnisharp support design time builds of msbuild projects, visual studio proper isn't going anywhere. Vscode cannot support anything beyond the happy path of csproj files which means I will always have to dip back into visual studio
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
paulcarroty 7y ago
15-20 commits per week says they just support it and don't implement any major features. Hope I'm not right here.
- denisw 7y ago
  Looking only at the commit numbers of the `atom/atom` repo is a bit misleading as the Atom source code as the core plugin packages (e.g., the language modes, but also fundamental features like the tree and the fuzzer) are each in their own repo. For instance, the fuzzy-finder repo alone had 15+ commits in the last three weeks.
youeseh 7y ago
And then we'll all go back to Vim and the cycle of life will once again complete itself.
xrd 7y ago
Can anyone who has stayed with Atom after evaluating VSCode comment on why to stay with Atom? I switched to VSCode and would never consider going back to Atom at this point. Since the GitHub acquisition, it makes no sense for MS to maintain both and I agree 100% with the parent comment that this will be killed soon.
- bwha 7y ago
  I was with Atom for years, switched to VS Code and feel in love (save for the find and replace as cited above, I still felt/feel Atom's is better than VS Code's) and stuck with it (VS Code) for months. The thing that made me switch back was that there was some combination of plugins I was using in VS Code (I think it was the VIM plugin and something else maybe) started freezing periodically and the whole editor would become unresponsive and I'd have to restart. After that became normal I decided to switch back. In the end I preferred to spend my time coding rather than hunt down the problem. Also Atom's VIM plugin is strictly better for my use case. The highlighting effect to show you what you just `yw` for example is great!
  - lioeters 7y ago
    Funny, I had a similar (but somewhat opposite) experience: was a happy Atom user for some years until it started slowing down, freezing at increasing frequency; it was due to my having a massive tree of folders and files (top-level folder with all projects), with lots of symbolic and hard links. I had checked out VS Code a few times, but finally a couple months ago I was forced to make a switch - then pleasantly surprised how easy it was to migrate to it. VS Code is not as hackable of an editor, but it comes with great sensible defaults out of the box. I gave up trying to fully customize it, settled with a few tweaks, and have been very satisfied with it as a daily driver. At least for my use case, it's been more reliable and performant than Atom. The type hinting and "IntelliSense" is one of my favorite features (I'm sure Atom has a plugin for it). I think VS Code hits the sweet spot between an editor and a full-on IDE. EDIT: Oh, I didn't see this in the article, but it seems Atom is addressing the exact issue I was having: > The fuzzy finder’s project crawling performance has been improved dramatically by switching to a ripgrep-powered backend. This is most noticeable in projects with large numbers of files - for example, we measured a 14x speed boost in a project with 270K files.
mdhughes 7y ago
Strongly disagree. VS Code is a corporate tool IDE, which is dull and awkward to use as just an editor, and binary spyware in it "phones home" to its users' masters in Redmond. It's exactly what an MSDN subscriber would like, but dire for anyone else. Atom is fun. It's easy to configure in weird personal ways, get rid of parts you don't use, add your own plugins, change CSS as you like. There's an insane number of plugins and themes. It's like emacs but organized and nice. So far the statements from project owners in public and on Slack have been that Atom 1 & 2 development continues full speed. If it is "killed" we'll just fork it and run up a black flag.
- equasar 7y ago
  I think you missed the /s in your comment.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - fartcannon 7y ago
    No need to insult whoever dislike your preferences.
- paulcarroty 7y ago
  > and binary spyware in it "phones home" to its users' masters in Redmond Not a problem, https://vscodium.com/ https://vscodium.com/
mythz 7y ago
> VS Code is one of the finest examples of open source Done Right™ It's easy to do OSS right when your a major cloud OSS vendor who are able to use your billions of profits from hosting OSS to fund a 30+ strong dev team in creating a free "OSS" product. If that's the definition of doing OSS right, then the only sustainable "free" products that will be done right will come from multi-billion dollar cloud vendors. I do love VS Code tho, just not a fan of seeing most of the generated wealth from OSS being collected by the major cloud vendors, this trend is going to hurt the diversity of the OSS ecosystem as we know it. Irrespective of the funding model that made it possible, I will say the VS Code team is doing a fantastic work iteratively shipping new features with each release at a super high velocity. IMO it's a poster child for why most future Desktop Apps will be built using a Hybrid or WebView dev model like Electron where its productivity is unmatched.

Hamuko 7y ago

Does Atom still eat any resources your computer has to offer?

olliepop 7y ago
Yes, and it's worse than ever before.

taylorlapeyre 7y ago

Prediction: If VS Code is the general do-it-all editor, Atom will become the GitHub editor. Atom is quickly ramping up feature integration with GitHub — seen here with integrating review comments inline with the code and the deep GitHub PR integration in general. GitHub and Atom have a very linked future, with GitHub planning to become more involved with the actual code-writing process. Atom will be the conduit though which they achieve that.

outside1234 7y ago
I think you forgot who owns GitHub.
arjun27 7y ago
fyi, the GitHub PR extension[1] for VS Code has review comments in the editor. [1] https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/itemdetails?itemName=GitHub.vscode-pull-request-github https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/itemdetails?itemName=Gi...
GordonS 7y ago
VS Code has had excellent git integration for a long time, as well as GitHub-specific integrations through an extension. Atom may have started the move towards lightweight (relatively) IDEs, but VS Code is undoubtedly the more popular one. Honestly, when I saw this post on HN I was quite surprised to see that Atom is still actively developed - if there's anyone reading this that prefers Atom over VS Code, I'd really like to find out why?
- galfarragem 7y ago
  VS Code, like Python, seems to be the second best tool on everything: it looks good but not as much as Atom, it's fast but not like Sublime or Vim, it's a lightweight IDE but not a full IDE.
  - lucidone 7y ago
    I agree except for TypeScript and JavaScript - vscode is the best code editor I've experienced for both.

elbrian 7y ago

While Atom was Mac-only, VSCode was eating their lunch. It's too little, too late now.

guessmyname 7y ago
> While Atom was Mac-only, VSCode was eating their lunch. It's too little, too late now. What do you mean? Atom has always been available for macOS, Windows, and Linux.
- nnq 7y ago
  ...ever tried actually using it on Windows? Like a year ago it got to ok-ish usable. A bit before that even on most Linuxes it had crappy performance. Again, I like Atom's hackability, and mainly avoid it because the ecosystem of plugins is so full of halfly owkring abandonware
  - kraftman 7y ago
    First I've heard of this. I used Atom for a few years on windows and ubuntu without any issues except opening very large files.

graphememes 7y ago

Atom lost the HTML Editor race.

ksec 7y ago

To anyone who is following Atom closely, 1. What happened to Xray? The Next Generation of Atom that was suppose to fix all the performance problem of Atom. 2. Is Atom as fast as VS Code now?

Klathmon 7y ago
1. I haven't heard anything about it recently but that doesn't mean work isn't continuing on it. Xray wasn't supposed to "fix" anything really, it was a fairly extreme experiment to see if it would be worth going down that path. 2. No, and it's not trying to be, as "speed" isn't their top priority, extensibility is. That being said, the days of opening a 5mb file and the editor getting brought to its knees are largely over (unless you have poorly written extensions which can still take everything down, because again in Atom extensions are EVERYTHING and can do ANYTHING).
- PurpleRamen 7y ago
  > in Atom extensions are EVERYTHING and can do ANYTHING). So Atom is the emacs of Webstack-World?
  - Klathmon 7y ago
    Pretty much! It's quite freeing if you enjoy working in an editor like that, and it's incredibly powerful! But obviously if you value "time to open" and if you don't want to customize things, neither of them is going to be a good choice for you!
- ksec 7y ago
  Strange they are not focusing on Speed. The primary reason VS Code took over Atom was because of Speed. It shows what is possible with Electron. Not that it is anywhere near the speed of Sublime Text, but it was good enough for most and at least bearable to me. Compared to Atom, all the feedback ( on most Internet forum at least ) are performance related.
  - 7y ago

dbg31415 7y ago

I get that it's got a bit more going on, but Atom's startup time is still so much slower than Sublime Text. I open a file, there's still this "clunky" lag of 2-3 seconds to open. I hope they work on optimizing this at some point.

dmnd 7y ago

I do a lot of code review, so I'm excited to be able to do that from my editor where all of my other tooling is set up instead of in a web browser. Suggested code changes will be much easier if I write them in a context where I can compile/run them. And no more clicking that "expand" thing 20 times to see something earlier in the file. Thanks, Atom team!

JHonaker 7y ago

I don’t understand why Microsoft hasn’t pulled the GitHub integration into VS Code. It seems like it would be in their best interest given that they own both now.

outside1234 7y ago

Atom is still being developed?