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by bobsoap 3561 days ago
I share your sentiment about the buggy software and the unresponsive devs; I moved to Atom for the same reason.

However great Atom is though, it's unbelievably slow and nearly unusable because of that. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find a better alternative since.

2 comments

> However great Atom is though, it's unbelievably slow and nearly unusable because of that. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find a better alternative since.

Have you given emacs a shot? While once upon a time it was derided as eight megabytes and constantly swapping, it's extremely fast after forty years of Moore's Law.

It's cross-platform: if you run an OS, odds are emacs runs on it. It runs in both the terminal (convenient for remote sessions) and in the X/Cocoa/Windows GUIs.

It has modes for just about every programming language in use, and then some.

It has a plethora of keybindings for dealing with code semantically, e.g. navigation by expressions or blocks. If you prefer, it also has vi keybindings.

It's extraordinarily extensible, so much so that web browsers (three that I can think of), mail readers, news readers, process browsers and shells have been implemented in it.

Indeed, for many people emacs can become more of an OS than their OS.

It's pretty awesome.

As a former Emacs fan, I think Atom is actually the best modern alternative to Emacs.

I just recently looked at my old .emacs file to discover that the majority of code in there was to get the features that come out of the box with Atom. Of course Emacs does allow you to configure and program way more than Atom, but the downside is that you have to do it because the defaults come from computer history museum - it's great fun though if you like to learn about the history of the field.

I've been pleasantly surprised just how easy it is to extend Atom. It invites you to configure it, with very approachable docs and built-in tooling, but it doesn't force you to.

Are you using the latest version? I can hardly see a speed difference compared to VS Code anymore, even for big projects and files. It's certainly very far from being unusably slow.

>buggy software and the unresponsive devs

I mainly use VS Code for that reason. It does feel a bit more polished and Atom is missing some much requested features, most notably a list of open files in the sidebar (the plugins that offer this are all terrible).

Tried Atom for Mac right now. Opening a tiny (10k rows) csv file took multiple seconds, opening a larger (100k rows) csv put out a warning about potentially taking a lot of time and in a second simply crashed before loading it.
Opening a CSV with 100k rows takes about 10s for me and is pretty workable with an i7 and 16GB RAM. Selecting and editing text is almost instant.
...

And why should you need that kind of machine to do text-editing?

If a text editor can't open a big file unless you are on a beast of a machine, it isn't a very good text editor.

A 5-year old i7 is far from a beast machine. You're a typical Apple customer that pays too much for an underperforming piece of crap and then complains about the performance.
My computer - a 3+ year old i7 - opens the 20 million line CSV from http://files.grouplens.org/datasets/movielens/ml-20m.zip in ST3 in about 25s and opens the 1 million line CSV from there in little over a second. 10s to open a 100 thousand line file on a modern machine is unnecessarily slow.