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by grosbisou 3583 days ago
Try opening a database dump or a log file in Atom. It is slow and it will crash.
3 comments

Just move on man. I used to be a big hater of Atom, but then I realized that I was not contributing on its development so I stopped being a "hater" and continue with my own life using another editor that actually works for my use case. As the parent comment says, Atom works for some people and that is enough for them to continue its development, I am fairly confident that it will never have the performance that a native editor has but it is workable as long as you don't do resource intensive tasks.

My computer is not powerful at all so Atom is obviously slow as hell and lags all the time, at first I thought I improved my typing skills because I was typing faster than the editor was displaying the characters, but that was obviously not the case. Most Atom users — or at least the most active users — use rMBPs with i7 CPUs and (maybe?) 16GB of RAM, I don't want to buy a computer like that just to use a code editor like this, I would do it for an IDE though; and even if I had a computer like this I would not want to give most of its resources to the code editor when there are more important things to spend the CPU / RAM on.

If your intention is to open a database dump then use a different tool, a proper log viewer or something like that, I don't even understand why would you want to use a code editor — even with good performance — to inspect a DB dump in the first place.

I am not a hater. I rather like it even.

Database dump and log files are just good example of potentially big text files. They should be usable in any text editor. Not looking at the issue is not a good way to build software.

Having never heard of Atom before this, I appreciate the notice that it is not a suitable replacement for a general-purpose editor like vim. Saved me who-knows-how-many hours of frustration.
I think nobody is really an atom hater. Usually it goes more like "I really want to love Atom so much, but I'm still concerned about it's performance and stability".
Suggesting to screw a nail or hammer a screw will lead to similarly unsatisfactory results.

Atom is for writing code, not viewing logs. We have tail and syslog and a thousand other tools for that.

That's sort of true, but OTOH vi, Emacs and even Notepad++ can write code and view huge log files. People who are holding out on Atom because of speed maybe don't want two tools where one will do, which is perfectly reasonable.
Large files bring vim to it's knees if you forget to turn off syntax highlighting first. I've done it many times debugging bundled JavaScript before.
I thought it was a text editor. It is rather curious that it cannot open large text files.
Even emacs completely shits the bed when it comes to long lines. I love it, but there are things about every tool that requires tradeoffs. I'm willing to deal with bad performance due to decades old technological decisions, in order to gain (to me) unparalleled editing and customization.
No, it's a code editor.
No, it's a text editor, like it says on https://atom.io/. It doesn't do much for "code" besides draw keywords in pretty colors.
Not according to their website https://atom.io

"Atom - A hackable text editor"

Ok, so I'll open it in Sublime/Vim/Emacs, read it, close it, then continue programming in Atom.