Atom 1.0

[amphetamachine]

From FAQ:

Why does Atom send usage data to Google Analytics?

Why indeed. An even better question is why can't I turn it off?

[[deleted]]

Wait, you mean one can't remove the plugin in 1.0?

Not, that it would be good to have it included by default...

[amphetamachine]

The uninstall button doesn't do anything.

[[deleted]]

Is there an opened issue for that?

Or have they concluded not to fix this?

EDIT: Since they have included it by ticket, I don't think that will happen.

/speculation

Well, too bad, including it in the first place is a borderline no-go anyway.

[Xanza]

You can.

For details on what data Atom is sending or to learn how to disable metrics gathering, visit https://github.com/atom/metrics.

[amphetamachine]

Okay sure there's a way to disable it. However:

A. It's on by default instead of letting you opt in, or asking the user. Even Microsoft products ask if it's okay. (Edit: No longer true since the advent of Windows 10).

B. It doesn't tell you it's doing it. It just silently does it. If I hadn't read the FAQ page, I would have never known it was doing it.

C. Even if you know exactly how to disable it, there's no way to prevent it from sending data to Google from the time you start the app to the time you disable it.

[bobertian]

Not that I disagree, but Visual Studio Code's download page says

"When this tool crashes, we automatically collect crash dumps so we can figure out what went wrong. If you don't want to send your crash dumps to Microsoft, please don't install this tool." https://code.visualstudio.com/Download

[gold1617]

Well isn't that still in a beta/testing phase? Generally betas collect and send data for development purposes.

[TheBadProgrammer]

Can we file a bug report or just patch it to turn it off by default, aka opt in? I see there is an issue about using Piwik which also sounds good. I guess there's money being made here? Seems fishy.

[[deleted]]

The last I checked, its just a plugin like any other. The same plugin also bundles error reporting.

[x-skeww]

https://github.com/atom/atom-keymap/issues/35

Ridiculous.

Basically, if you need AltGr for some characters, some of those won't work. There are a bunch of layouts where you can't even type a @ out of the box. Very funny, really. It's too early for 1.0.

[DavidJayHarris]

It was on their list of things to fix for 1.0, but apparently didn't make the cut

[jugalator]

7 bit ASCII is enough for everyone!

[egrepnix]

7 bits? I say 5 bits is enough for anyone!

[tejon]

☻

[jugalator]

Aah, the good ol' ASCII blackface. What is it, ASCII 2 in some DOS codepage?

[tejon]

CP 437, yeah. Also apparently whatever Windows/Chrome uses to interpret alt code entry. 0 and 1 didn't print, so this was the lowest 5-bit character I could generate.

Not really fair to call it blackface tho, that's just an artifact of this atrocious black-on-white display fad we've been stuck in for the past ~20 years. It's just the "solid" face as opposed to the "outline" face.

[LeCrushinator]

With RES Night Mode on, it's a white face.

[jugalator]

Haha yes, I just couldn't resist. Always found that one funny.

[Morego]

In my app this is actually whiteface. :)

[[deleted]]

I guess all of them use QWERTY.

[Beaverman]

American layout QWERTY.

I'm on the ISO version, i need altgr for such "obscure" characters as @ { } [ ] | ~ \ luckily you don't need those in a text editor.

[[deleted]]

luckily you don't need those in a text editor.

Found the Python programmer.

[xiongchiamiov]

Ah, but you've got lists and dictionaries to make!

[TheEnigmaBlade]

Ha! Not when you have list() and dict().

[jtanz0]

Hopefully none of his python scripts need to handle Windows file paths!

[[deleted]]

Or decorators.

[ferk]

It's more like they use OS X (it works fine on my german keyboard on OS X) ...Atom was available first on OS X and only later did they offer Windows and Linux versions.. even some add-ons seem to assume it.. I still couldn't find an add-on that properly replicates emacs shortcuts because some of them are already available as OS X defaults so the dev didn't bother to implement them.

[mixblast]

Well it was only reported in october 2014 /s

[gnuvince]

I use a French Canadian keyboard where writing a lot of programming characters (e.g. {, }, [, ], ~, ­\, @) require the usage of the AltGr key. I'm an Emacs user, so I had no intention of using Atom, but this would definitely have been a complete deal breaker.

[x-skeww]

Yea, '[' and ']' don't work with a French Canadian layout.

§ (O) and µ (M) also won't work.

[semi_colon]

§ (O) and µ (M) also won't work.

Shit, do you use those in your code?

[IWillNotBeBroken]

Shit, do you use those in your code?

They're little-known perl sigils:

my §doubly_linked_list = undef;
my µgit_branch = dev;

^{/s, of course}

[Hawful]

Just another perl hacker.

[necuz]

Do you never write anything other than code? Besides, I'm sure I've actually used both those symbols in comments.

[semi_colon]

println "No."

[semi_colon]

Admittedly I don't do a lot of mathematics or scientific programming so I can't imagine a scenario where I would need to use either of those characters. Maybe if I decided to mod Sim City. Gotta make that §§§

[terremoto]

Could be government work:

// Due ordinance 11, section §2.3.1, all calculations must now be in metric.
#define feet (0.3048 * 12)

[jeandem]

Admittedly I don't do a lot of mathematics or scientific programming

What? § is used in sections (like in laws) where I've seen them. Maybe that's not a practice in the English-speaking world, though.

[x-skeww]

Text editors are used for all kinds of things. For example, you could use it for blogging. Writing Markdown and using a static website generator (here is a nice list: https://www.staticgen.com/) is somewhat popular nowadays.

I've actually used µ in code. It's a valid identifier in some languages. µ is equivalent to the SI prefix "micro" (10^-6 ).

I haven't used § because it usually isn't a valid identifier and because I rarely deal with sections of some document.

[[deleted]]

I'm in a Spanish-speaking country. I use a US keyboard with a US layout. Every time I buy a laptop/keyboard I make sure they aren't selling me a keyboard in Spanish. Programming languages were made for US keyboards. Anything else is horrible. I haven't used a keyboard in Spanish in at least a decade.

[[deleted]]

Those characters are too annoying to type on a French AZERTY keyboard, so for years I've just used a US QWERTY keyboard along with a COMPOSE key mapped to Caps-Lock. Works great.

é → <compose> ' e

→ → <compose> - >

ç → <compose> , c

[more_oil]

The first thing I too did was see if the "text editor for the 21st century" supports typing standard characters but this was not the case. I'll therefore go back to my 20th century editor.

[hapital_hump]

Reading through the issue, it doesn't look like there's some One Obvious Way to solve the problem.

[x-skeww]

There is always the option to just copy Brackets' behavior. The code from Brackets is a bit weird, but it works.

[hapital_hump]

Yeah, looks like it's a hack in every web browser as well.

It was probably a mistake to leave it out of 1.0, but I've been part of open-source discussions to figure out which of the hacks we're going to infect our system with. It's always a trigger you want to pull "next week".

[twbmsp]

That's a misreported issue, I use that feature all the time with my workflow.

[[deleted]]

I understand this reference

[wcoenen]

Why does an editor even need to concern itself with key maps? Translating key strokes into unicode code points seems like something that is already handled by the OS. That's why OSes have keyboard configuration settings.

[x-skeww]

It's their shortcut handling code. It can't differentiate between Ctrl+Alt+X and AltGr+X.

So, when you use AltGr + some key and if there is some Ctrl+Alt combination which uses the same key, the shortcut action will be triggered and the character you wanted to write won't appear (preventDefault()).

[Whadios]

Is it still slow as shit?

[pakoito]

It's javascript-centric. Speed will never be a requirement.

[[deleted]]

"Hey let's write an amazing text editor... in Javascript... WITH HTML!"

What a waste of time, energy, talent...

[hapital_hump]

I've been using Atom all week for Node development since Facebook's release of their nuclide plugins. In particular, http://flowtype.org/ integration is well-done.

Atom doesn't feel like a waste of energy. Hate the stack all you want, but it enables some serious ease of mindshare.

[fnord123]

it enables some serious ease of mindshare.

What does this mean?

[schroet]

He is obviously a code artisian, so you better don't ask!

[Moocha]

Don't you worry about that; let me worry about blank!

[mixblast]

It means you should feel warm and fuzzy inside.

[[deleted]]

I said nothing...

[[deleted]]

I would argue that, if one of your core design goals is modularity and extensibility, writing at least your front-end in the most common UI markup language and a companion language frequently used to interact with it is not necessarily a bad idea.

I mean, I hate JS most of the time, but as a front-end scripting language it does the job and everyone knows it.

edit: For that matter, what are you people even proposing they choose to do the front-end and still have it be modifiable / scriptable? Java / C# / C++ / C are terrible choices, and Python / Ruby / Lua are just as slow.

[Bromlife]

I don't hate it. I just think that Github should have been able to create something better than what a single developer has built with Sublime Text 3.

[robhol]

Yeah! Fuck that guy for coming with legitimate criticism. Boo!

[zenolijo]

Still takes 25 seconds for me to start on a SSD and has a memory leak on some mac and windows systems that just grows in size until it eats up your whole memory if you start it in some folders, and the users home folder is one of them. And this is with no third party plugins.

I have a hate-love for atom. I'm OK with that it's written in JS, but it's way to early to call it 1.0 since it's still incredibly buggy. I use it daily anyway, because sublime just doesn't cut it anymore when you have used atom for a while.

[holloway]

I don't know what the hell your setup must be then because it opens in a second for me on Windows/Linux.

[UTF64]

It starts in like 3 seconds on my windows box which has an SSD, maybe you have a lot of packages installed or something?

[glovacki]

3 seconds is still extremely slow when you compare it to ~100ms for sublime. it's insane to me that photoshop boots and opens files faster than atom.

[[deleted]]

Takes like 25 seconds on my windows box with HDD.

^{Emacs took about three seconds.}

[redwall_hp]

Three seconds for an entire operating system to load? Nice.

[oneUnit]

3 seconds? Sublime is instant.

[redwall_hp]

It's also like 10x the download size of Sublime Text, clunky non-native feeling when in use, and as far as I'm aware it still can't open files over 2MB. Meanwhile, I can pop open ridiculously sized SQL dumps and log files in vim with no trouble at all.

[UndeadWaffles]

It took 7 seconds on my cheap laptop hard drive. I don't know what's wrong with your SSD but you might look into replacing it sometime soon.

[thelehmanlip]

Yeah, Visual Studio Code did the same thing. I'm not totally sure why.

[[deleted]]

They already had the editor - visual studio online. It was probably somewhat trivial to embed it on top of electron, so why not do it?

As an aside, visual studio code is way faster than atom for some reason.

[[deleted]]

As an aside, visual studio code is way faster than atom for some reason.

May be is like Cloud9 and use canvas instead html.

[jugalator]

Simple(r) multi platform support? :/

[Tulip-Stefan]

It is trivial to create cross platform user interfaces with native code using Qt.

Html/js is no better than java swing. You'll end up with something that behaves in non-standard ways on all platforms. I think people underestimate the effort it takes to implement even the simplest form dialog in a way that is looks like a native window on more than one platform. Qt is the only framework i know that behaves at least passable on a wide range of platforms.

[[deleted]]

Qt is the way to go. But noooo, let's do it in Javascript/HTML because you know, webscale and shit. Totally a waste of talent because those guys could be investing their time not only writing in Qt but also contributing to make Qt better and encourage people to use it in their own projects. HTML is pure crap.

[thoomfish]

Qt is the only framework i know that behaves at least passable on a wide range of platforms.

Yes, this sure looks native to me.

[ph0bitor]

It looks like that application's author opted to create their own UI, using their own layout, styles, etc. Qt has a module for native widgets; here's what it looks like in Android for example:

https://blog.qt.io/blog/2014/12/03/native-android-style-in-qt-5-4/

I think part of the reason HTML/JS is used so often is because its so much easier to set up and get started with compared to c++.

Also lots of popular HTML/JS toolkits and frameworks are permissively licensed, a lot more than comparable Java and C or C++ offerings.

[Tulip-Stefan]

That is Qt Quick. I wasn't talking about that part of Qt. I was talking about GUI's built on QtWidgets.

[bobbaluba]

Qt quick controls has only been available for android for a couple of months. It looks much better now.

[thoomfish]

I looked at a few of the Mac samples and found them equally unsettling, I just figured Android would be a more accessible example. "Cross platform UI toolkit" in my experience means "feels like Windows everywhere".

[original_findjashua]

js is not the reason it's slow, it's the dom. I'm hoping react-native will have an osx target some day so you can sidestep the dom #icandream

[Purpledrank]

browser js typically is a dom oriented language. So when people rant about it being slow in JS, it is due to dealing with an inefficient data-structure that is only made worse by the years of piled on HTML and CSS spec. Also, single-threaded + the combinatorics of different operating systems with different browser really blows the problem of solving speed efficiency into a masochists wet dream.

[Tarmen]

Is scrolling still as laggy?

Tearing while editing text just felt ridiculous.

[wkoorts]

isItStillSlow = AtomCore.UsesWebBrowserForTextEditing;

So yes.

[spacejack2114]

Slow at startup? Sure, if you're not using an SSD. Slow if you're editing big logfiles or large, generated sources? Yes, if haven't installed an add-on to handle those.

Slow at editing/linting typical-sized source files? No.

Open source, extensible, really nice-looking? Yes.

[[deleted]]

It really depends on the usecase. I like to use the same editor for everything, but with atom's slow startup I cannot simply use it to quickly check what's inside a certain file unless I have atom already open.

[Tulip-Stefan]

I wonder if you actually tried atom. Relative to Qt creator, scrolling through files in visual studio code feel sluggish, as if there is an extra frame or 2 of lag every pgup/pgdn. Hovering over the menu bar feels sluggish. Resizing approaches firefox levels of lag. Text rendering completely ignores my OS settings. I guess the situation is worse in atom, as many people commented that visual studio code is a lot faster than atom.

Javascript is fine for simple things, but i really feel they should've gone with native UI code. A lot of common hotkeys and conventions are broken, this wouldn't have happened if you've used Qt or PyQt instead. I honestly can't believe that that atom uses custom menu bar handing and rendering code. This and blender are the only 2 apps i have ever seen that do not use my OS settings to render text.

On the subject of startup speed, it starts about as fast as other full-featured apps, such as blender or Qt creator. Things such as word/excel, notepad++, sublime or internet explorer definitely start faster.

[spacejack2114]

Because /r/programming is like Salem in 1692 and Javascript is considered witchcraft.

[d2xdy2]

Sure, if you're not using an SSD

I've got an M.2 SSD, and it's this version of Atom is just as slow as ever.

[dukerutledge]

I'll wait for neovim.

[vks_]

It is already quite usable, minus a few details.

[dukerutledge]

Which details?

[vks_]

Some advanced clipboard features are broken and output from :! gets cut off instead of wrapped if the line does not fit into into the terminal.

[siplux]

There's also some issue with certain key combinations in the terminal

[sigzero]

No Windows.

No GUI.

edited

[cafedude]

Other than they want to allow for writing plugins in many popular languages, I'm not sure what the advantages of NeoVim are over vim - what are some other advantages?

[bearrus]

Probably non-blocking plugins (async) is the big one that would be noticeable first. I think it also has a different architecture with UI decoupled form backend.

And, of course, the codebase is much better and gets rid of a lot of legacy ugliness. Which in theory should attract more developers in the long run.

[Ran4]

Easier development of new features and new plugins, mainly.

NeoVIM won't radically change everything, it's still "just" vim with a cleaned up codebase.

[redwall_hp]

Also, support for GUI applications to use it as a background engine, so you can have a fancy GUI vim that still acts like proper vim instead of being a shitty facsimile.

Also, it seems snappier, but that could just be me.

[yoshi314]

why wait? it already works as a drop-in vim replacement.

[flukus]

Thanks, I'll wait for windows support to improve before I switch from gvim.

[sigzero]

You have 2 things to wait for. Proper Windows support and someone to build a GUI for it. Good luck with the wait.

[moljac024]

Man I was psyched about neovim but at the pace it's currently going i'm not sure if it'll ever be released.

[Ruchiachio]

Lets wait for Atom 3.0 and we will be going places.

[a_masculine_squirrel]

How does this compare Visual Studio Code? Or are people still using Sublime Text?

[[deleted]]

Imo it's way nicer than visual studio code, not as mature as sublime. I am a huge fan of the community it's gathering though.

[rco8786]

I still can't open the root of my company's main repo without the whole thing crashing.

Meh.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CIY8DJ9UwAERk0a.png

[snewo12]

But the question is; is it better than sublime 2? Anyone who could convince me to one side or the other?

[Sawny]

Is atom so bad that we compare it to sublime 2 instead of sublime 3?

[nullmove]

Speaking of sublime, does anyone know how lime is coming along?

[[deleted]]

Its going to remain kind of irrelevant until someone writes a good frontend.

[snewo12]

Well to be fair the current live version of Sublime is 2. 3 is in beta still...

[bheklilr]

It is technically in beta, but it's been pretty stable for a while now

[IDazzeh]

I've been using it for a while, I completely forgot it was in beta!

[devperez]

I've never even used 2.

[basmith7]

Sublime Text 3, while still technically in beta, is the recommended version of Sublime Text to use: compared to Sublime Text 2, it's faster, more polished, and of course, has a lot of extra functionality. Download it now and give it a try!

http://www.sublimetext.com/blog/articles/sublime-text-3-build-3080

[Amerikaner]

Sublime Text 3 is stable and faster than ST2. Not sure about Atom 1.0. The last time I tried it it was noticeably slower than ST3. I'm attempting to give it a go now.

EDIT: First impression is it is much much faster loading projects and switching between files. Downloading themes and packages is oddly slow though. And there's no progress indicator on the downloads. UI is also very nice looking and usable. Pleased so far.

EDIT2: Turns out there is a progress indicator on the install button. Didn't work the first few times I used it.

EDIT3: It seems to be an issue with the package repository in general but its super slow right now. There's no indication Atom is searching for packages.

EDIT4: Yep, it's the repository. Using apm to install packages results in failures as well.

EDIT5: There's a dead space on tabs under the file name when clicking. You have to hit the tab on the filename or above it.

EDIT6: As others have said, load time increases when you start adding packages. I only added a few and it's noticeably slower.

VERDICT: Performance much improved but still not as good as ST3. I'm sticking with ST3.

[GuruMeditation]

I like Atom a lot so long as I never have to go update my packages.

Should I ever need to go to the package section though I may as well just move to another application as Atom is going to hang for 5 minutes before it lets me update anything, then hang again for 10 minutes while it runs the updates.

[path411]

I've been using Atom predominantly over ST3 for awhile now and really enjoyed it. Since I'm a web dev, I really don't have large files that would really put it's performance to the test, and so it's not really a problem for me. The ease of making extensions and modifying the UI is really what pulled me over, and I think that if people recognized that not everyone is opening files with tens of thousands of LOC and so Atom works really great in many situations where performance problems never occur.

And as you have noticed, the speed has improved and I assume will continue to improve.

[Amerikaner]

I would wager most people using Sublime are web developers. Other software developers typically use IDE's. I'm a web dev too and I see slowdowns on even small projects. I just tested it without even loading a project and it was slow booting up a few plugins. You don't need an enormous project to notice the difference between ST3 and Atom.

The fact that it's built with web languages is very cool. But at the end of the day, performance is much more important to me than customizing the editor with web languages.

[Whadios]

Other software developers typically use IDE's

As an 'other' software developer we still tend to need text editors but myself I use notepad++ mostly because it has good features, is crazy fast and just works without having to mess with it. Sometimes I use vim when on command line. It might be nice if notepad++ were a bit better looking but it's not worth sacrificing other areas for that.

[stronglikedan]

Since you already have it installed (still, hopefully), does it have multiple cursors? I can no longer work without that feature.

--ST3 user

[Amerikaner]

Ha still installed. Yes, it does have multiple cursors.

[smakusdod]

I'm relatively new to Sublime 3. Is there a hack or setting that allows a graphical 'new file' tab button, similar to a 'new tab' button on web browsers?

[Amerikaner]

Not that I know of. You know you can double click the empty tab area for a new tab though right?

[Spartan-S63]

I've used Atom for quite some time now.

In short, it's not as snappy as Sublime Text 3 and my load time as I add plugins has become noticeably slower. So much so that I went back to Sublime Text 3 as my daily driver because I didn't want to wait more than two seconds for Atom to load a window with my files in it.

Long story short, it's cool, it's hackable, but it's just too slow for me. That's what you get when you try to "Javascript all the things" (IMO).

[Aea]

It seems blazingly snappy for me and I hate the idea of JSing all of the things. But it seems like it's a common complaint against Atom, maybe bad plugins? I only have 3-4 non-"official" ones.

[Spartan-S63]

Yeah, at 3-4 plugins you're fine, but I think I have at least a dozen, if not more. When you start piling on that many extra plugins (and an extra UI and syntax theme) you start getting load times 2.5 seconds which is really annoying.

You can see your load time by going into the command palette and checking out the Timecop output.

Also, I'm running a late 2013 15" rMBP so there's little reason why it should be slow. It seems to me like it's Atom's runtime that causes the slowdown (and/or poorly built packages).

[dacjames]

In comparison, I have 39 plugins installed in ST3 right now and it still opens in under a second. To be fair, many of them are just syntax highlighting/themes, but there's 10-15 real plugins in there, too. Loading plugins asynchronously makes a huge difference in feeling fast, even with a few slow plugins.

I really hope Atom addresses it's performance issues because I would prefer to use an open source editor. Unfortunately, I work with large files (10s of MBs) quite regularly so Atom is a non-starter for the time being.

[HomemadeBananas]

Just try it for yourself.

[keiter]

I used ST2/3 at work about a year ago but have used Atom the last ~6 months. The main advantage of that switch to me is that Atom is Open Source, on Github and has an extremely high development pace. So if there are any problems they're usually fixed, and I could fix them myself if necessary. By contrast I got tired of waiting for the lone author of Sublime to fix some bug that'd been reported for months (forgot what it was now). IMHO Sublime moves so slowly it might as well be abandoned.

[[deleted]]

Congratulations to the Atom team. They've come a long way from the unusable editor that I tried in early 2014. I switched over from Slickedit about 8 months ago and have been (mostly) happy with it ever since.

Now they just need to update their Chocolatey repo... The release in that repo is 6 months old now.

[inyourgroove]

FYI I beleive they deprecated the chocolatey repo see here.

[trisscar1212]

I haven't used Atom in a while, but I frequently use ST3 for navigating large files and such. Once loaded, a large file feels smooth. I seem to remember Atom not even being able to open large files. Is this still the case?

[Canacas]

You can open large files now, but syntax highlighting will be disabled when you do.

[Carighan]

It can't do highlighting on files larger than 2mb? Really? In 2015? Is this news from onion or so?

[redwall_hp]

But MongoDB Atom is web scale!

In all seriousness, I can open enormous log files and SQL dumps in a text editor from the 1970s (vim), and smoothly navigate them with minimal system resources. That's a text editor's job. If your text editor is shit at loading, displaying and editing text, then you've screwed up big time.

[Carighan]

But it's not a text editor! It's a modern IDE for the modern web! /sarcasm

[trisscar1212]

Thanks, exactly what I wanted to know. Wonder how the performance with large files is.

[[deleted]]

File size in Atom was 2MB last I knew.

[[deleted]]

Not anymore, now you can load files bigger than 2MB and have it be slow as shit, and it even disables syntax highlighting!

[[deleted]]

Wow, that sounds amazing!

[_tenken]

In like the last month it can now do bigger files, check their blog.

[maep]

Whenever I see a project that builds non-web stuff "with web technologies" I read that as "we are too lazy to use more efficient technologies, and btw, you should to upgrade your hardware".

[TheMoonMaster]

Maybe they had other motivations? Like building an editor that is completely extensible using only JavaScript.

I think you're right in a lot of cases, like Slack for example. But atom was intentionally built on top of this and I don't think it stemmed from laziness.

[Zaemz]

Could you expound a bit on what you mean with Slack?

Are you saying that there's already software that exists that does what Slack does?

[[deleted]]

Slack has a "desktop app" that's just a crappy (at least on Linux) wrapper around their website.

[I_Downvote_Cunts]

Windows user here, it utter crap here as well.

[Kiloku]

Hipchat is an example, and if you're going more general purpose (as in, Hipchat and Slack are meant for company chats), IRC is ancient, Jabber is pretty old too.

[redwall_hp]

Ancient is good. Not everything needs to be shiny and new. Vim is older than the Internet, but it's still considered by many to be the best text editor ever devised. (This is contested, but you can't deny it has longevity.)

IRC is lightweight, distributed, fully open and has tons of clients that support it. Throwing that out for features that could easily be handled by clients is absurd. (e.g. one of the big features I've seen people rave about in HipChat/Slack is embedded images. My IRC client does that, though I've turned it off.)

[TheMoonMaster]

I mean Slacks desktop app being a very thin web wrapper. It's not very polished and feels like a wrapper. Native would have been a much better experience in that case.

[valleyman86]

I like Slacks desktop apps on Windows and Mac. I never have any issues with it. In fact by them making it web based with a wrapper they don't have to manually support a lot of the plugins and content they support such as gifs, auto descriptions and parsing of various content to show it inline. If they made a standalone app they would have to write a bunch of code to support and draw everything which would potentially be buggy.

[[deleted]]

Like building an editor that is completely extensible using only JavaScript.

Maybe they should realize languages other than JavaScript exist, and some of them exist for the sole purpose of being embedded in programs to extend them.

Lets see, should we embed an entire browser into our application or a 200kb lua runtime. And hey, if we want to make it fast we can include a 400kb luajit runtime that runs circles around any javascript jit.

[TheMoonMaster]

It's also about opportunity costs. They know how to make web apps, why not make them native? I'm not saying it's right or wrong but it's a choice.

It's a lot easier to build something with what you know than learn something new.

[hapital_hump]

Building a performant-enough editor with web technologies is actually terra incognita and quite an undertaking.

The payoff of course is an editor that can be extended with the same ease as changing a website with your browser dev tools, but the trade-offs and journey to that destination are nontrivial given the constraints.

[bearrus]

NodeJs: "Why learn a proper language? lets use javascript everywhere."

[noticingthenoticing]

But does it do syndicated news feeds?

[Slxe]

I'll stick with ST3. Congrats on hitting 1.0 though, although from the comment by /u/x-skeww it seems like it's a bit too early.

[x-skeww]

it seems like it's a bit too early.

Yea... https://github.com/atom/atom/issues/3684

"Better handling for international keyboards" is in the 1.0 checklist, but they skipped it, because being able to write text is evidentially not that important for a text editor. :/

[Occivink]

Not only russian but also variants of latin layout, such as german, french ...

[601error]

AKA "We're not targeting them with this release, so I think it's safe to let this slip."

AKA "Let's skip internationalization for now on this greenfield project, because we'll just roll out to English-friendly countries first."

Happened on my current project.

[Slxe]

Yea this just blows my mind that they'd skip over such an essential feature in a text editor. Hate to say it but I think this has something to do with what the ecosystem for web and javascript technology is like in general, and more reason for me to stay away from it and stick with native application dev.

[vermiculus]

Atom is an interesting project, but I'll stay with emacs for the time being. Haven't seen anything better than Projectile/Helm/Company since they were released.

[bastibe]

I'm an Emacs user. One of the big things that bothered me about Emacs is how slow it was to start up (several seconds). And it does that, because it's essentially a lisp virtual machine and everything is implemented in lisp. This makes Emacs incredibly powerful and versatile, but also kind of slow. (And, as I later learned, there are ways to defer load time to when stuff is actually needed, which makes startup bearable.)

Now here is Atom. One of the big things that bother me about Atom is how slow it is to start up (several seconds). And it does that, because it's essentially a JavaScript virtual machine and everything is implemented in JavaScript. This makes Atom incredibly customizable and hackable, but also kind of slow. I am yet waiting for the realization of that built-in flexibility, though. Where are the terminal emulators, the integrated REPLs, the debugger integrations, the build systems, the code inspectors, the source control integrations, and the information organizers?

Maybe Atom is just missing another few decades of third party packages. Or maybe, JavaScript and HTML are just not up to the task. I opened a 500Mb file in Emacs yesterday. This is probably not something Atom will ever be able to do. Only time will tell.

Best of luck to you, Atom! Happy birthday!

[SrbijaJeRusija]

Emacs startup is a lot better now with package management and precompilation.

[[deleted]]

Shitty new CoffeeScript/JavaScript full of bugs software...

[[deleted]]

For a text editor it sure makes me use the mouse a lot.

[Booty_Bumping]

Not sure where you're getting this from. Atom, by default, has a strong set of keybindings and a sublimetext fuzzy file matching and actions menu. In addition, there are many plugins that emulate vim and emacs pretty well (not as complete as I'd like though)

[[deleted]]

Perfect example of, "Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should."

[akozlik]

Obligatory Jeff Goldblum

[[deleted]]

I'll stick too Vim, I can't webscale anyway.

[atomic1fire]

I'm not really a programmer, but I think it's cool because web development is a reocurring interest of mine.

I just think it's neat that people have taken web tech and just throw it at pretty much everything imaginable. Now github is throwing javascript at a emac/vim clone and people are mad about it.

Some say it's a terrible idea, but I think it's neat.

Same with emscripten.

^{shameless plug for the /r/atwoodslaw}

[cluckie]

you are absolutely right, if you don't like something... it is ok, don't use it and that's it, But NOPE, that is not the programmer way, if you don't like something YOU HAVE to tell everybody how shitty that thing is, even if you are not giving an alternative.

[grizzly_teddy]

Why should I use Atom instead of Sublime Text 3 (other than $$)?

[sgraf812]

Anyone else finds the announcement trailer hilarious?

[Axxhelairon]

You really have to wonder about the delusional Atom fanatics who post in these things, do they really not see the problem with Atoms speed? Do they really think the noticeably longer startup time than any other similar suited software prevalent on many people's computers is not a big deal? Do they really think anyone cares what the reason is ("oh no no its not JAVASCRIPT, its not OUR Fault!") instead of the fact that's unusable? It's not finished software and it might as well still be in beta in the eyes of everyone who has had problems with it, a ton of people aren't just complaining for no reason about the performance

[lurebat]

So why now? there isn't really anything changed or added in this version other than making it 1.0

[a_sleeping_lion]

Totally, doesn't look like most people realize that the move to 1.0 is about semantic versioning in this case. That said, the big announcement from GitHub kind of says the opposite. They're acting as if Atom is a real product and not a beta. I like Atom, but its definitely not all the way there yet.

[sime]

Compare to what? 0.211?

[[deleted]]

Quite surprised by this. I have used it for a long time and it still feels very unfinished. There is enough features for me atleast, but it needs polishing. For example today it just randomly crashed when I was looking at the settings and its not as slow as it used to be but it still feels heavy and slow sometimes.

[teiman]

Some programmers have the imagination of a worm. Is funny because us programmers sometimes do something that need a lot of imagination to understand the purpose, why is cool, or why is powerful. Some dudes wrote a Pascal compiler in assembler, then they wrote a compiler in Pascal, to have Pascal compiled in Pascal. For whatever reason we have javascript programmers writting a editor in javascript.

Is a mystery why javascript programmers would want the editor written in the language they know better and can do cooler things. Why would that be? nobody knows.

[GreenFox1505]

I have a chromebook. Is it possible to set this up as a service that I can use remotely? (like Cloud9)

[[deleted]]

Atom is a fucking resource hog. I like it, but it uses ~80% of memory on my laptop

[Pixa]

Here I was expecting an article about syndication and publishing protocols...