4 ms·

Honestly, I've never seen another product here getting a post for every minor build! Nice to see such a die-hard fan base! But, please, face the reality - many

by kolev 12y ago

Honestly, I've never seen another product here getting a post for every minor build! Nice to see such a die-hard fan base! But, please, face the reality - many have moved over to Atom already and are not looking back. Atom is alive, the ecosystem is already huge, atom-shell is getting popular as well. Unless Sublime gets open-sourced, it's in a slow agony. Remember TextMate? It had a huge loyal user base, but who is using it now? It got open-sourced, but a bit too late!

wsc981 12y ago
I tried Atom and to me, the editor just feels slow. I've been using Sublime Text for a long while now and last week I decided to "bite the bullet" and buy a license. It's just too nice of an editor for languages like Ruby, Markdown and even C# (with the OmniSharp plugin).
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
yAnonymous 12y ago
Atom is terrible to the point of being almost unusable compared to ST. It needs a ton of work.
PSeitz 12y ago
Atom is slow and will stay slow, due to the architectural choice. DOM rendering is too complex to become blazingly fast.
tmikaeld 12y ago
I have tried Atom, many many times. But i always get annoyed by how SLOW it is.
- kolev 12y ago
  It's slow with huge source files, agreed, but you shouldn't have huge source files anyway.
  - lttlrck 12y ago
    Automatic code generators have a nasty habit of spitting out huge source and header files, I'm routinely digging around in such files (ASN.1 to C++, multiple files 10MB and up) and switching editors to do that would be completely unacceptable. It would be more of a hassle if the compiler split up the output.
  - venomsnake 12y ago
    Tell that to the vendors and various api-s that love to produce 20-50 MB xmls
    - kolev 12y ago
      That sucks, but it's not the common case. I personally wouldn't use even Sublime for these either as you can't do anything productive with a 30MB XML document in a text editor anyway.
  - husted 12y ago
    That might be true but my tools should never dictate how I work.
  - cheald 12y ago
    You've never wanted to open a multi-megabyte data file in a text editor before? "You shouldn't be opening large files in it anyhow" is a cop-out. My text editor needs to edit whatever text files I throw at it. Choking on too-large a file is a showstopper.
    - linc01n 12y ago
      Atom has a 2MB file limitation. That's why I wouldn't use it professionally yet.
      - bobbykjack 12y ago
        I'm not sure that's even 'large', let alone 'huge'.
- chris-at 12y ago
  I'm kind of glad that Atom is written in a language I seriously dislike, otherwise I might have spent a lot of time trying to help them improve it.
- burger_moon 12y ago
  I guess I don't really really notice it being slow (I'm on a new mb air nothing fancy), I've been using atom for 6 months now without any problems. I hear people often speak about it being slow and buggy, when specifically is it running slow so I can compare it to my own environment? I love using atom, and sublime is nice but I haven't found a reason to purchase it and switch over yet.
- Matthias247 12y ago
  Imho slow is one thing (I could probably even live with the performance) - the other thing is that font rendering in Atom is horrible. At least for me on Windows the text is blurry as hell. No comparison to the clearness in Sublime Text or other native editors (Visual Studio, Eclipse, Notepad, ...). Brackets is better in that regard. Both brackets and Atom provide better extensability APIs than Sublime - but that doesn't help when the performance is worse than complete IDEs.
- lambeosaurus 12y ago
  I tried it once and had the same experience. I'm really just waiting to meet even a single person who uses it as their daily IDE in a work environment (or even at home - I still haven't seen that.) At that point I'll consider trying it again. I love the concept. Just not enamoured with the execution.
  - kolev 12y ago
    I am using Atom daily and I'm super happy. It's missing a thing or two from ST 3, but I got more than I had taken away, honestly. I have paid for Sublime unlike most here who gang up to silence me. I've bought a bunch of plugins for Sublime, too, so, I've invested more than $100 in the ecosystem.
    - bdcravens 12y ago
      I like Atom too, but the startup time between the 2 is night and day. I also get really odd Atom behavior, especially on full screen.
      - Cthulhu_ 12y ago
        I think startup time is a non-issue given how you can just leave it running in the background.
        kolev 12y ago
        My Atom is up and running all the time until there are new app updates, which require restarts.
        bdcravens 12y ago
        I use my text editor for a bunch of ad-hoc edits, not just working on projects, but you are right. Speed is less important than buggy behavior (I say this not as a hater, but as someone who is working in Atom all day)
        12y ago
- jrosenbluth 12y ago
  Over the years I've gone back and forth between Sublime, vim and emacs. Atom is the first editor I really love. I've been using is for about a month now for serious haskell development. Yes it's still a bit slow to start up and a little buggy but it's not even at version 1.0 yet. I just really like the UI and the simplicity of installing and configuring packages.
wodenokoto 12y ago
My impression when looking at HN is that people are not that impressed with Atom. Nobody I know in the real world uses atom, but I'm a poor data point. The reason why everybody is up in arms about every minor update is that a lot of people see every little peep from the dev as (hopeful) proof that the project isn't dead.
- kolev 12y ago
  People here still get excited about LISP, too. I can understand Clojure, but Lisp, come on! It was in the 80s and 90s when I used LISP for AI and my favorite muLISP, but it's 2015 already! So, this is a boutique community, don't make generalization from it. Atom is doing pretty well for its infancy! I was super excited about Intype in the past - much more excited about anybody could be about Sublime. After many, many years and ruined potential, I gave up. Just recently found that it's still alive. I remember e as well. It got open-sourced... and what? There are many editors, but Atom has all indications that's it's here to stay! I'm not so sure about Sublime given the patterns. A loyal community is not enough - a dedicated development team is what's most important!
  - wodenokoto 12y ago
    I just looked more deeply into the update cycle of Sublime and apparently the dev channel has weekly updates. I guess that they haven't been good at communicating that they are not in hiatus!
    - kolev 12y ago
      The activity is recent. There was a 6-month gap with nothing being done at all. Pretty much during this gap Atom got born.
  - weavie 12y ago
    People got excited about Richard III (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-leicestershire-32014296 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-leicestershire-32014296) and he's from the 1400's. I can understand Prince George, but Richard, come on!
coldtea 12y ago
>But, please, face the reality - many have moved over to Atom already and are not looking back. I seriously doubt it. First, people kept using TextMate when it was dead for 3 years or so. The most ST3 has been idle was 6-7 months, and before and after that the update pace (for dev releases) was great. Second, it's not like anything major was missing from the editor even 2 years ago, or that it stopped working or anything. People use Vim which is a 30 years old codebase that hasn't had major updates in a great while, so not sure were the pressure for ST is. Third, I doubt Atom has that much adoption. For one, it is and will always be slower, due to the language and rendering model (custom C++ vs Javascript and ultimately, the DOM). As an anecdotal point, most people at work use either Vim or ST3. Nobody uses Atom. >* Remember TextMate? It had a huge loyal user base, but who is using it now?* You'd be surprised.
- jsprogrammer 12y ago
  Atom may always be slower, but the speed difference could eventually become negligible. If ST3, in it's current form, existed 20 years ago, people would have been making the same argument about Vim vs. ST3.
  - melling 12y ago
    Ten or twenty years is a long time to wait for the hardware to improve so your editor is performant.
  - danieldk 12y ago
    Actually, rendering is often faster in Sublime Text than in vim. I am a vim user and use the 'cursorline' and 'relativenumber' options and until recently I could notice rendering slowness on OS X and Linux. Things seem to have gotten better recently (either in vim or due to hardware advancing), but I never saw such slowness in Sublime text. (I wanted to like Sublime and have a license, but Vintage mode is a too leaky abstraction/emulation for me ;).)
    - jbrooksuk 12y ago
      https://github.com/sublimehq/Vintage https://github.com/sublimehq/Vintage ;)

by kolev 12y ago

wsc981 12y ago

I tried Atom and to me, the editor just feels slow. I've been using Sublime Text for a long while now and last week I decided to "bite the bullet" and buy a license. It's just too nice of an editor for languages like Ruby, Markdown and even C# (with the OmniSharp plugin).

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

yAnonymous 12y ago

Atom is terrible to the point of being almost unusable compared to ST. It needs a ton of work.

PSeitz 12y ago

Atom is slow and will stay slow, due to the architectural choice. DOM rendering is too complex to become blazingly fast.

tmikaeld 12y ago

I have tried Atom, many many times. But i always get annoyed by how SLOW it is.

kolev 12y ago
It's slow with huge source files, agreed, but you shouldn't have huge source files anyway.
- lttlrck 12y ago
  Automatic code generators have a nasty habit of spitting out huge source and header files, I'm routinely digging around in such files (ASN.1 to C++, multiple files 10MB and up) and switching editors to do that would be completely unacceptable. It would be more of a hassle if the compiler split up the output.
- venomsnake 12y ago
  Tell that to the vendors and various api-s that love to produce 20-50 MB xmls
  - kolev 12y ago
    That sucks, but it's not the common case. I personally wouldn't use even Sublime for these either as you can't do anything productive with a 30MB XML document in a text editor anyway.
- husted 12y ago
  That might be true but my tools should never dictate how I work.
- cheald 12y ago
  You've never wanted to open a multi-megabyte data file in a text editor before? "You shouldn't be opening large files in it anyhow" is a cop-out. My text editor needs to edit whatever text files I throw at it. Choking on too-large a file is a showstopper.
  - linc01n 12y ago
    Atom has a 2MB file limitation. That's why I wouldn't use it professionally yet.
    - bobbykjack 12y ago
      I'm not sure that's even 'large', let alone 'huge'.
chris-at 12y ago
I'm kind of glad that Atom is written in a language I seriously dislike, otherwise I might have spent a lot of time trying to help them improve it.
burger_moon 12y ago
I guess I don't really really notice it being slow (I'm on a new mb air nothing fancy), I've been using atom for 6 months now without any problems. I hear people often speak about it being slow and buggy, when specifically is it running slow so I can compare it to my own environment? I love using atom, and sublime is nice but I haven't found a reason to purchase it and switch over yet.
Matthias247 12y ago
Imho slow is one thing (I could probably even live with the performance) - the other thing is that font rendering in Atom is horrible. At least for me on Windows the text is blurry as hell. No comparison to the clearness in Sublime Text or other native editors (Visual Studio, Eclipse, Notepad, ...). Brackets is better in that regard. Both brackets and Atom provide better extensability APIs than Sublime - but that doesn't help when the performance is worse than complete IDEs.
lambeosaurus 12y ago
I tried it once and had the same experience. I'm really just waiting to meet even a single person who uses it as their daily IDE in a work environment (or even at home - I still haven't seen that.) At that point I'll consider trying it again. I love the concept. Just not enamoured with the execution.
- kolev 12y ago
  I am using Atom daily and I'm super happy. It's missing a thing or two from ST 3, but I got more than I had taken away, honestly. I have paid for Sublime unlike most here who gang up to silence me. I've bought a bunch of plugins for Sublime, too, so, I've invested more than $100 in the ecosystem.
  - bdcravens 12y ago
    I like Atom too, but the startup time between the 2 is night and day. I also get really odd Atom behavior, especially on full screen.
    - Cthulhu_ 12y ago
      I think startup time is a non-issue given how you can just leave it running in the background.
      - kolev 12y ago
        My Atom is up and running all the time until there are new app updates, which require restarts.
      - bdcravens 12y ago
        I use my text editor for a bunch of ad-hoc edits, not just working on projects, but you are right. Speed is less important than buggy behavior (I say this not as a hater, but as someone who is working in Atom all day)
        12y ago
jrosenbluth 12y ago
Over the years I've gone back and forth between Sublime, vim and emacs. Atom is the first editor I really love. I've been using is for about a month now for serious haskell development. Yes it's still a bit slow to start up and a little buggy but it's not even at version 1.0 yet. I just really like the UI and the simplicity of installing and configuring packages.

wodenokoto 12y ago

My impression when looking at HN is that people are not that impressed with Atom. Nobody I know in the real world uses atom, but I'm a poor data point. The reason why everybody is up in arms about every minor update is that a lot of people see every little peep from the dev as (hopeful) proof that the project isn't dead.

kolev 12y ago
People here still get excited about LISP, too. I can understand Clojure, but Lisp, come on! It was in the 80s and 90s when I used LISP for AI and my favorite muLISP, but it's 2015 already! So, this is a boutique community, don't make generalization from it. Atom is doing pretty well for its infancy! I was super excited about Intype in the past - much more excited about anybody could be about Sublime. After many, many years and ruined potential, I gave up. Just recently found that it's still alive. I remember e as well. It got open-sourced... and what? There are many editors, but Atom has all indications that's it's here to stay! I'm not so sure about Sublime given the patterns. A loyal community is not enough - a dedicated development team is what's most important!
- wodenokoto 12y ago
  I just looked more deeply into the update cycle of Sublime and apparently the dev channel has weekly updates. I guess that they haven't been good at communicating that they are not in hiatus!
  - kolev 12y ago
    The activity is recent. There was a 6-month gap with nothing being done at all. Pretty much during this gap Atom got born.
- weavie 12y ago
  People got excited about Richard III (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-leicestershire-32014296 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-leicestershire-32014296) and he's from the 1400's. I can understand Prince George, but Richard, come on!

coldtea 12y ago

>But, please, face the reality - many have moved over to Atom already and are not looking back. I seriously doubt it. First, people kept using TextMate when it was dead for 3 years or so. The most ST3 has been idle was 6-7 months, and before and after that the update pace (for dev releases) was great. Second, it's not like anything major was missing from the editor even 2 years ago, or that it stopped working or anything. People use Vim which is a 30 years old codebase that hasn't had major updates in a great while, so not sure were the pressure for ST is. Third, I doubt Atom has that much adoption. For one, it is and will always be slower, due to the language and rendering model (custom C++ vs Javascript and ultimately, the DOM). As an anecdotal point, most people at work use either Vim or ST3. Nobody uses Atom. >* Remember TextMate? It had a huge loyal user base, but who is using it now?* You'd be surprised.

jsprogrammer 12y ago
Atom may always be slower, but the speed difference could eventually become negligible. If ST3, in it's current form, existed 20 years ago, people would have been making the same argument about Vim vs. ST3.
- melling 12y ago
  Ten or twenty years is a long time to wait for the hardware to improve so your editor is performant.
- danieldk 12y ago
  Actually, rendering is often faster in Sublime Text than in vim. I am a vim user and use the 'cursorline' and 'relativenumber' options and until recently I could notice rendering slowness on OS X and Linux. Things seem to have gotten better recently (either in vim or due to hardware advancing), but I never saw such slowness in Sublime text. (I wanted to like Sublime and have a license, but Vintage mode is a too leaky abstraction/emulation for me ;).)
  - jbrooksuk 12y ago
    https://github.com/sublimehq/Vintage https://github.com/sublimehq/Vintage ;)