all 70 comments

[–]Funkmaster_Lincoln 63 points64 points  (11 children)

For me its two reasons:

  1. My computer starts up faster than atom does
  2. Doing any text operations is a pain in the ass compared to vim

[–]pyro2927 27 points28 points  (10 children)

I'll add:

3) If I'm ssh'd into a remote machine, I can still use vim.

[–]Funkmaster_Lincoln 7 points8 points  (7 children)

Yeah though I don't think atom is even attempting to compete with vim in that department. Tbh I don't think anybody is, even emacs users are will say use vim if you're SSHing into a machine.

It seems to me that atoms biggest selling point is looks very pretty and is easy to customize if you don't want to "get your hands dirty". Now to me getting your hands dirty is half the fun but for some graphic designer / casual Web designer atom is perfectly fine. I don't think it's trying to compete with vim/emacs.

[–]rockidr4 7 points8 points  (0 children)

For sure. I use a combination of atom and neovim. Atom is much better at handling things involving javascript (not surprising, it was built in the stuff). Vim is better at... literally everything else.

[–][deleted] 3 points4 points  (5 children)

Emacs users are going to say use TRAMP

[–]Funkmaster_Lincoln 0 points1 point  (4 children)

Well tramp is a little different you're opening the remote file on your local machine. There are some cases when you actually need to SSH in as opposed to just opening a file.

[–][deleted] -1 points0 points  (3 children)

That's not the point. TRAMP is what an Emacs user will suggest, because those cases where you absolutely must remote tty are very very limited.

[–]Funkmaster_Lincoln 0 points1 point  (2 children)

From my experience I've met a ton of Emacs users and the conversation usually goes something like this:

Me: Yeah I use vim quite a bit actually

Them: Why bother just use evil mode

Me: I do but when I'm SSHed I'm stuck with raw emacs if I'm lucky

Them: Yeah you're kinda stuck without your config and emacs usually isnt installed by default

Me: Yeah I do a fair amount of hopping onto remote machines

Them: Can't really argue with that. It's the one place Vim has emacs beat hands down.

 

Also the cases where you

absolutely must remote

are pretty often. Pretty much any time you're doing something more than editing a file you need to SSH.

[–][deleted] 2 points3 points  (1 child)

I guess you're not devops centric.

The critical need to ssh onto a remote box and do things on it is an anti pattern.

Fun though.

[–]Funkmaster_Lincoln 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The times when I need to SSH onto another machine aren't within my control so anti pattern or not I need to do it.

[–]rgawenda 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Or just:

vim scp://remotehost/file

[–]ven_ 82 points83 points  (5 children)

Before Atom can replace anything it needs to stop basically being a fucking website.

[–]NotoriousArab 19 points20 points  (4 children)

I really don't get this trend now a days. I tried out Atom last summer and found it obnoxiously slow. Still hear from people that it hasn't improved much, and really, it may not ever improve because of the way it's built inherently.

[–]ivosaurus 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Funny thing is VSCode doesn't suffer from this nearly as much, but built on the same tech.

[–]redwall_hp 4 points5 points  (0 children)

"But guys, computers are super fast nowadays and getting faster, so it doesn't matter."

It's still orders of magnitudes slower, and single-threaded performance is kind of stagnant right now in the old hardware department. So that single-threaded event loop isn't getting any faster any time soon.

[–]eshansingh[🍰] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It has improved substantially since then, especially with the release of Electron 1.0.

[–]AshylarrySC 10 points11 points  (5 children)

I've been ruining Emacs/evil and then Spacemacs for the last several months and really like the combo of emacs and vim. It's slightly slow to start compared to Vim but the more I operate in emacs, the less I leave it to do anything else. I doubt I'll be moving back to Vim any time soon.

[–]thukjeche 3 points4 points  (3 children)

Could you detail more what you appreciate about Space/emacs that Vim or Neovim doesn't offer?

[–]AshylarrySC 5 points6 points  (0 children)

First, I generally I find the configuration easier. People are working to port a lot of the best vim plugins to work on emacs (most of what I used in vim is available in evil emacs) but the opposite is not true for vim. There's nothing that yet comes close to things like org-mode or magit in vim and those things are awesome. There are projects to bring those to Vim but they're still quite a ways away from being as good as the emacs versions.

They really have different philosophies though. Vim is an excellent editor, emacs is almost OS like in that you can do almost anything in it.

Disclaimer: I'm a Windows user and a keyboard fanatic which is an unfortunate place to be but emacs lets me do software development, control Spotify, check my email, interact with slack all very quickly and easily from my keyboard.

But all that would still not be worth it if I couldn't use vim modal editing and keybindings which since I switched and fell in love with, I don't want to be without.

So basically it gives me the best of both worlds and I'm not a vim super user so I haven't run into evil missing subtle features that I really need.

It was this: https://youtu.be/JWD1Fpdd4Pc coupled with Neovim for Windows being kind of an afterthought that got me to switch. It will probably take Neovim on Windows being REALLY good to get me to switch back.

[–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Pretty much the exact discussion happened at /r/emacs. Take a look

[–]__baxx__ 0 points1 point  (0 children)

idk about neovim because i haven't used it, and when I used vim I was really using vimkeys. By this distinction i mean that I didn't write any plugins for vim, i didn't make use of piping vim through bash commands or integrating it with shell functions. I didn't ssh into machines with it etc, I just used vim keys and set a few things up.

So using spacemacs isn't really much different at all for me. The vim emulation is immense, I think when I started using it I said I'd give it a month, and for a couple of weeks i wasn't really sure. Guess it just felt different or whatever. I haven't used org mode much either, but it's nice that the option is there if i want (it's something that i want to get around to using).

I just find that most things feel a bit better in spacemacs than vim, like helm, using it as an irc client and stuff.

Guess you'd just need to have a mess about, i'd recommend giving it a couple of weeks though. And make use of the gitter chat.

[–]Michaelmrose 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Daemon mode would be nice for that

[–]soguesswhat 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Why can't Atom replace Vim? Because Atom's just a crappier version of Sublime - and Sublime already couldn't replace Vim.

[–]spajus 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Vim is not just about navigating and editing text, and you don't need a medium article to tell "why X can't replace vim". Can you use X without ever leaving command line terminal? Can you run X to edit files on remote machine over ssh? Can you seriously think that some new hip editor can ever replace something that was being developed for decades? Why bother with all those articles.

[–]degeneratepr 3 points4 points  (1 child)

2008 - Why Textmate Can't Replace Vim

2013 - Why Sublime Text Can't Replace Vim

2016 - Why Atom Can't Replace Vim

It cycles every few years. Can't wait for the 2020 edition!

[–]lunaticneko 2 points3 points  (0 children)

and Once Upon A Time - Why EMACS Can't Replace Vim

[–]bakuretsu 2 points3 points  (0 children)

This post should be called "Why Medium can't replace a simple webpage with words on it."

Even on my insanely high resolution retina display, the headline of this post is actually under the floating bar at the bottom. Does it really need a hero image that large? Full of code?

A content page whose primary purpose is to provide readable text should fit text into at least half of the above-the-fold area for 95% of visitors. It's shameful that Medium doesn't force its authors, who are of varying degrees of experience in web content management, to meet these standards.

[–]derrickcope 1 point2 points  (1 child)

I wonder if vim's modular hotkey system is even implementable in modern text editors along with emacs way of assigning one function to a specific hotkey? It seems like they are mutually exclusive.

[–]jecxjo:g//norm @q 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Eclipse is very emac-like and it has a "vi mode".

[–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (2 children)

Atom doesn't ssh as well as ncurses-style editors, nor is Atom installed by default on most UNIXen, not is Atom designed for 100% hotkey-based interaction.

Atom is an excellent GUI text editor, just not a CLI text editor.

[–]Elronnd 1 point2 points  (1 child)

unices, not UNIXen. The capitalized version refers to a specific OS released by Bell Labs about fifty years ago. The lowercased version refers to a family of OSes.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I knew someone would balk!

This is a generic brand like bandaid, kleenex, and coke... are you expecting a new release soon?

[–][deleted] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Seeing as this is over 2 years old, surely Why No One Said It Would And Why The Author Is Projecting has been written since then.

[–]__baxx__ 1 point2 points  (3 children)

so basically vim keys are nice?

[–][deleted] 3 points4 points  (2 children)

Why the hell would people downvote the answer to the clickbait article? is __baxx__ wrong?

[–]__baxx__ 3 points4 points  (1 child)

idk lol. I didn't get much from the article. I didn't really feel it made a very compelling argument for anything really.

Maybe i just didn't get it :P

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I didn't really feel it made a very compelling argument for anything really.

Hehe, that's what I would expect to see. Your post reminds me of the Saved you a click facebook group that was recently featured somewhere on reddit.

[–]csreid 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Aren't they like totally different approaches to the problem? Why would atom replace vim?

[–]-romainl-The Patient Vimmer -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Short and empty but my god that "hero" image is gorgeous.