I wish atom would just add preloading. I be happy to always have a hidden, sleeping window ready to pop to front on request. There must be some reason this is harder than I imagine...
You can basically do that now: just don't quit. If you start Atom and it discovers that it's already running, it tells the running process to handle the request. It even honors environment variables and flags like --dev.
For example, starting Atom cold on my medium-sized project (by running `atom .` in the base dir) takes 6 seconds. If I close all windows but leave Atom running, do something else for a while, and then run that command again, it takes 3 seconds.
(That's still a disturbingly long time... but it's quick enough once launched. I like Atom enough that I can live with it for now.)
Edit: just tried the beta. It's a little quicker: 4.5ish seconds and 2 seconds. Still OK for long-term coding but too slow to be $EDITOR for things like `git commit`.
You are right, it is things like 'git commit' where I'd like it to be faster -- and that's where an invisible window feels like the right option. Start opening another one whenever I start using the last hidden one.
I always hated this argument. It feels to me like someone is complaining why a train can't go from 0-60 in 10 seconds while many cars can. The answer is always "because that's not what it's designed to do".
Regardless of how you feel about it, the team behind Atom made a design decision to sacrifice performance to gain a large amount of other benefits ("easier" higher level language, easy cross platform support, extremely easy to write plugins for it from it's target "demographic", etc...).
Because of those architecture choices, things like spawning a new window aren't as easy and straightforward as they might be in another architecture.
So just because you want a method of transportation that goes from 0-60 in 10 seconds, doesn't mean that all methods of transportation need to go from 0-60 in 10 seconds. And just because a method of transportation can't go from 0-60 in 10 seconds doesn't mean the designers were lazy or cut corners, it just means that they prioritised other things, and are solving different problems.
For example, starting Atom cold on my medium-sized project (by running `atom .` in the base dir) takes 6 seconds. If I close all windows but leave Atom running, do something else for a while, and then run that command again, it takes 3 seconds.
(That's still a disturbingly long time... but it's quick enough once launched. I like Atom enough that I can live with it for now.)
Edit: just tried the beta. It's a little quicker: 4.5ish seconds and 2 seconds. Still OK for long-term coding but too slow to be $EDITOR for things like `git commit`.