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I don't really see much point in Sublime Text now that GitHub's Atom is a pretty much a one->one replica but free, open-source and has a rather nice package man
by benbristow 12y ago
I don't really see much point in Sublime Text now that GitHub's Atom is a pretty much a one->one replica but free, open-source and has a rather nice package manager for plugins.
- k__ 12y agoWell, Sublime Text is much fast er.
- tombh 12y agoAbsolutely. My one and only complaint with Atom is that it eats up so much CPU. Just typing sends my usage over 50% :(
- kansface 12y agoThere is a point (mainly inertia and speed), but there won't be one for much longer. ST3 is a really great text editor, but it is only being developed by a single programmer.
- pekk 12y agoAdding more mothers to the production of one baby isn't necessarily going to speed up the process... I suspect that creating a text editor is not an embarrassingly parallel problem.
- quonn 12y agoYawn. Of course a small team will be able to ship this thing faster and with more features. If you add 20 more people that probably won't help, but 3 or 5 should.
- kansface 12y agoStrangely, I believe two other programmers work on it.. or something, but can't actually work on it until ST3 has shipped (ST3 is still in beta). I don't have much faith in future updates.
- jbrooksuk 12y agoI think it's just Jon now. I believe there was another developer at some point.
- orbifold 12y agoA text editor is made great by the plugins it has, I see no reason why a sufficiently dedicated crowd of people could'nt create better plugins in Python. The main developer has only to concentrate on a fast and easy to use text editing API so to speak.
- kansface 12y agoThe ST3 API is actually quite terrible. Superficially, it looks OK, but in truth it is: 1. extremely buggy (its trivial to crash ST3). 2. extremely limited (basically 3 pre-made widgets) 3. subject to buggy third party software for distribution (package manager often ships broken/buggy code). Of course, one can work around the bugs with sufficient time by figuring out the magic order in which API calls can be made, or by dumping them into setTimeouts. In the mean time, Atom is building a modern, extensible editor on top of two other extremely popular platforms.
- wbond 12y agoI'd appreciate it if you could take the time to report issues that you find with Package Control - I looked and couldn't find a single bug report from you. I guess sometimes it is easier to complain on HN than submit bug reports. BTW, all of the issues you have with Floobits on Sublime are trivial to work around (in fact PC 3.0 fixes them all for you). But from your comments here it sounds like you dislike Sublime so you'd rather just make excuses.
- kansface 12y agoYes, we should report up stream. I apologize for speaking ill of Package Control- it has been quite stable lately. The problems with ST3 don't make it impossible to develop plugins, they just make it harder than it should be. Bugs in the API and the 2/3 split have wasted weeks of our time.
- tonyedgecombe 12y agoAtom was very slow and cumbersome for me, nowhere near as polished as Sublime Text.
- PlzSnow 12y agoAtom is far too slow, and eats battery life. This is because of the technical decision to render text in a web view. The slowness is not a solvable problem. Therefore Atom will fail. On a more positive note, I am so happy to see SublimeText re-activated. The previous builds worked fine for me, but it's always good to see progress.
- emsy 12y agoI see this argument over and over but I've never heard why it's too slow. I enter a key, the text is immediately updated. Sure, starting the editor takes 3 seconds but that's about it. Not only that, but Atom gets a faster startup with every update. The only thing I found bothersome was the 2 MB filesize restriction.
- bjz_ 12y ago> I've never heard why it's too slow. Because it uses Webkit and Javascript rather than being implemented natively.
- emsy 12y agoI didn't mean technical reasons but what works slowly. Like: I enter a key and the letter shows up with perceivable delay (which in my experience, even with 100.000 lines isn't the case). One thing I found extremely slow for instance was copy and pasting of large chunks of text, but that's something I only experienced while testing Atom's performance. For my common text manipulation, I've never experienced the slowness that keeps so many from using Atom. I understand that people are bothered by this, but saying "Atom is slow" imho makes Atom appear as this giant unsuably sluggish piece of software that it is not.
- gtirloni 12y ago- Text editors have been around for a very long time. - Text editors are not that complex (even with plugin systems they are not doing HPC work). - Text editors were not perceived as slow many years ago. - Our computers have only got faster (10000x range). - It is 2015 and a text editor is slow (sub-second delays in GUI, large file limits, etc). - There are text editors not written in JS/Webkit that are not slow by orders of magnitude. While I'm not bothered by Atom being slowish, I think there is some basis for dissatisfaction here. Of course, nobody is obligated to use Atom.
- stef25 12y agoI had to ditch Sublime at work because it doesn't properly save files in to my Vagrant. Sometimes there's minutes long delays, used to drive me crazy. Something about atomic save, but whatever setting I try the problem remains. So now I use Atom a work but I find it harder to customise according to my liking. It also cancels shut down of my machine every single time.
- me551ah 12y agoAtom has a 2 Mb file size limitation. Ridiculous.
- pgz 12y agoI don't really like Atom because of the webkit usage, but I strongly agree that using a closed source text editor is a terrible idea for a programmer... when that editor stops being maintained all the time investment learning all it's time saving tricks is lost. Luckily I've been burned really early in my programming career by TextMate to know better: all my tools must be OSS and cross-platform.
- alandarev 12y agoThat is a great point. A year without a single beta build, and yet they have not explained to the consumers anything. Just resumed, as if nothing has happened. That is a warning: you are at mercy of a small & private company, which does not seem to care much.
- PlzSnow 12y agoI don't understand this line of thinking. For me a closed-source text editor such as Sublime Text makes me much more productive than it's open-source equivelent. The accumulated productivity gains far outweigh the timecost to learn a new tool, if Sublime Text disappeared (a couple of days at most?).
- pgz 12y agoWell, in some time you will lose all your productivity when you have to switch. With a proprietary tool it's not a matter of 'if' but 'when' (unless it's provided by a huge corporation, but then they try to lock you in their ecosystem). OTOH I will be able to use vim (or a fork of it) 20-30 years from now and become more and more productive with it during the timeframe.
- asantos3 12y agoAnd I don't understand your line of thinking. You should be using vim or emacs if the "accumulated productivity gains far outweigh the timecost to learn a new tool".
- Kaligule 12y agoAtom ist not free as in freedom, just free as in beer.