[timehastoldme]

Atom (hear me out):

+ runs graphically

+ runs linux, macos, windows (nothing else?)

+ open source

+ ridiculously, easily extensible

+ not riddled with bugs (slowness is not a bug)

+ for small files, comparably quick to Sublime on my machine

+ major dev community; already much better than 6 months ago

- slow in some instances, esp. large files

- doesn't run in terminal

- doesn't run in less-popular OSes

+/- moderate RAM usage, decreasing

[omginternets]

Honestly I don't get the Atom hate. It's a great editor.

I came to Atom from Sublime because the plugin ecosystem was growing much faster and the community felt more active. I haven't looked back since.

And no, Atom not designed to open 30Mb files. Complaining about this is akin to stomping on a land mine and complaining that your Timberland boots didn't save your foot. Just use Atom for its intended purpose: editing source files written by reasonably reasonable people.

[KZeillmann]

I just want to be able to look at the first 10 lines of a 15MB JSON I downloaded of the internet without having the entire application crash. It doesn't seem like too much to ask. There's a big difference between asking for a 15MB file and a 500MB file. 15MB is a pretty reasonable size for a text editor to be able to open without crashing, IMO. Unfortunately, I have to peek at those in Vim instead. Nothing wrong with Vim, but I hate having to switch editors to look at one file.

[aaron987]

If it's just JSON, can't you do this:

head -10 myfile.json

[oblio]

Ideally you'd want to configure the browser to open JSON files & co with your default editor, since that makes for a very pleasant workflow.

[tehwebguy]

I don't know now what goes into these apps or why newer apps can't handle it but I still keep TextWrangler around for huge files. It's not really a "modern" editor I guess but it screams.

[di4na]

head ?

[elmigranto]

head — https://linux.die.net/man/1/head

tail — https://linux.die.net/man/1/tail

less — https://linux.die.net/man/1/less

[kleptako]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head_(Unix)

[konart]

>And no, Atom not designed

And that's exactly one of it's problems. It's not designed to be a damn text editor. Instead - it's just another "hipster editor". You can find a growing number of useless plugins, but can't open log file sent to you, or connect via proxy without a trouble.

Not to mention the speed and ram usage. My IDEA instance with a large project opened up use less memory than Atom without any files opened (but with a bunch of plugins loaded).

Sorry for the emotional replay, but I just do not understand how people can go from Sublime, which is, in my opinion, almost ideal text editor, to something like this js crap.

[y4mi]

> And that's exactly one of it's problems. It's not designed to be a damn text editor. Instead - it's just another "hipster editor". You can find a growing number of useless plugins, but can't open log file sent to you, or connect via proxy without a trouble.

since when do you need to edit log files? you don't need an editor for that, you need a log explorer. there are other tools for hat.

what exactly do you mean with proxy problems? i'm behind a proxy at work and didn't have any problems?

> Not to mention the speed and ram usage

that thats its only real problem. especially if you're on a laptop without a power outlet nearby. i tend to just use vim in that situation notice a significant increase in battery life.

> I just do not understand how people can go from Sublime [...] to something like this js crap.

at least its fully extensible. i love the linting, auto-beautification, Markdown Preview, extensible autocompletion, useful autosave, Git-WIP support, extensive git integration and so much more.

its just not meant to be used as anything beside editing small code files. and most people don't have to code monolithic code files beyond a few MB in size.

[falcolas]

> since when do you need to edit log files?

Any time I want to re-hydrate escaped control sequences like newlines, or explore the log using a host of tools available in a text editor.

> at least its fully extensible

As are most text editors and IDEs. Atom's only difference here is that the extensions must be written in Javascript. Not everyone sees this as a good thing.

> its just not meant to be used as anything beside editing small code files

And that's the problem. Why should a user be forced ahead of time to consider their usecase for editing a file just to choose which gimped file editor they want to use?

[gglitch]

I don't feel one way or the other about Atom, but agree that "text editor" as a category is a superset of "editor of texts smaller than Xmb."

[coldtea]

>And no, Atom not designed to open 30Mb files. Complaining about this is akin to stomping on a land mine and complaining that your Timberland boots didn't save your foot.

No, it's more like having a car that doesn't get to 70mph.

It's useless on the Interstate, and it's also not that good on regular city traffic, because the same limitations that make it unable to reach 70mph also make it clunky at 10mph.

[captainmuon]

Though it is not too much to ask for to be able to edit large files. 30MB should easily fit in memory, even with metadata like syntax highlighting. And if it really doesn't fit, only load a portion of the file into memory (maybe scan the whole file for newlines once) - that was a solved problem already 20 years ago.

As to why I'm opening such large files: It's not like I chose to do so, but sometimes I have to. It's great to be able to (in Sublime) `<Ctrl+P> log <Ctrl+F> blah` and see immediately what I'm looking for without switching to another tool. I even have a simple syntax highlighting definition for my log file that makes it really nice.

I'd really like to like Atom, but the fundamental problem is that it tries to emulate a text editor widget in a web browser. That works, but creates a certain amount of latency that I can't work with. It's really irritating.

[flukus]

> Just use Atom for its intended purpose: editing source files written by reasonably reasonable people.

Let me know when they start advertising atom as a source code editor instead of a text editor.

[omginternets]

Let me know when this distinction is anything other than pedantry.

It takes all of 200ms and a wee bit of inference to figure out that their usage of "text editor" is different from yours.

From the tone of some of these posts, you'd think downloading Atom and subsequently realizing it doesn't suit one's needs caused lasting psychological harm.

Semantics aside, Atom is good at what it does. For 99% of projects it's an excellent, flexible tool.

[konart]

> For 99% of projects it's an excellent, flexible tool.

Well, this is simply a bullshit, sorry. This is might be a point of view of someone who never worked on an enterprise project or something of a similar scale.

Atom is good at one thing - opening small js\ruby\python scripts and showing you them in a modern UI. That's it. Anything more than that - he just can't do it.

[flukus]

> From the tone of some of these posts, you'd think downloading Atom and subsequently realizing it doesn't suit one's needs caused lasting psychological harm.

No lasting harm, but I did invest quite a bit of time to discover that it doesn't suite my needs.

> It takes all of 200ms and a wee bit of inference to figure out that their usage of "text editor" is different from yours.

No it doesn't, it takes experience with the editor. 200ms of googling shows there are some log and tail plugins, which would lead me ot believe it was good at handling large files.

[dilap]

even emacs can open 30mb files. that's like stomping on a popper and having it blow your foot off (1)

i mean we're talking about opening a file that is 1% of typical system memory.

(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bang_snaps

[543y4eryy4]

Not to be confused with poppers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poppers

[cdelsolar]

log files?

[543y4eryy4]

    tail -f *

[omginternets]

Use something else for viewing log files!

Going through log files and developing software are related, but distinct enterprises. It's no wonder the tools for one are sometimes suboptimal for the other.

Atom is about nice aesthetics, github integration and a plugin ecosystem. It's not trying to solve the problem of reading through massive log files.

[konart]

>Atom is about nice aesthetics, github integration and a plugin ecosystem

Same goes for Sublime. And arguably - Sublime has much better plugin ecosystem. With easier discovery and installation.

[aryamaan]

Last time I checked (I might be wrong), Atom didn't have default behavior of auto save and it made me to lose some work. Not that I am saying that this can't be the default behavior but that expectation should be cleared to the users.

[SCdF]

> (slowness is not a bug)

Woah. woah. woah. Back the truck up.

Slowness is most definitely a bug.

[chiefalchemist]

Slowness isn't a bug. It's a feature.

[SCdF]

Are you being glib or serious? If you're serious I'm interested in your take.

[wsc981]

+ not riddled with bugs (slowness is not a bug)

In that case I'll assume it's a feature :)

[Philipp__]

- ELECTRON. I just cannot get over it. Tried VSCode few days ago, it is great, much better than Atom, but still not there. There is nothing that Atom does better than Emacs, it looks better only, but that's not the point. I find Atom to be more WebDev and Fronted Dev oriented editor.

[voltagex_]

Have you tried VS Code? It was noticeably faster than Atom when I tried it.

[timehastoldme]

I have, and it's fine, even on my mbp. Perhaps I'll switch? Margins are low because I don't code all that much.

[leonatan]

It's an excellent text editor, don't pay attention to its title too much. It does a better job than Atom at both.

[eivarv]

> + major dev community...

Do you mean major as in "large", or as in "possessing some positive quality"? While I'm not commenting on Atom's dev community in particular, the two don't have a causative relationship.

A particular downside I see with Atom is it's performance - the perception of which is in some cases arguably approaching that of its competitors - and hence its energy impact, which affects my battery life.

[timehastoldme]

It's large... Perhaps, not as high-quality as some other development communities... But quantity may help over quality.

[qwertyuiop924]

Atom lacks the unform abstractions that make emacs so great.