| > 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. |
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.