Just writing a bit of code in Atom shouldn't rinse a fairly new MacBook Pro in under three hours.

Sublime, on the other hand, lasts all day.

I'm very hesitant to standardize on a non-OSS editor, though, so I think Sublime is out for me.

A gig of RAM is probably less than a tenth of your total resources. If it makes your job easier, surely it's worth it, no?

I ideologically like the idea of OSS, but I'm past sacrificing usability for it. Hence I'm on a MacBook with macOS coding in Sublime with 12h battery life, instead of on a XPS13 with ElementaryOS coding in Atom with 7h battery life. Or a bulky, ugly Lenovo with great battery life but a horrible touchpad and a shitty screen. But on all of those situations I'd torrent with Transmission, because it looks beautiful, is consistent, and to top it all off is the lightest and smoothest torrent client there is.

These things are true. I still use Atom on my MacBook Pro though because it has, at least in my corner of the world, a much better ecosystem than Sublime. I do keep Sublime around for the rare cases where Atom can't handle something, but if I didn't already have a Sublime license, I wouldn't feel the need to pick one up: Vim is more than capable of handling the large-file case for me. We all have different experiences though.

> Or a bulky, ugly Lenovo with great battery life but a horrible touchpad and a shitty screen.

The new X1 Carbon with the OLED panel is pretty good, I think. Color accuracy is something of an issue, but it does cover Adobe RGB and should be fantastic for anything other than professional-level color-critical work. That's neither here nor there though.

> The new X1 Carbon with the OLED panel is pretty good, I think. Color accuracy is something of an issue, but it does cover Adobe RGB and should be fantastic for anything other than professional-level color-critical work. That's neither here nor there though.

Just Googled it. Just from the Google images:

* Why is there 'Thinkpad' sprayed on lower-right corner? Ugly and useless.

* Touchpad mouse buttons, circa 1990

* Red-black color scheme

* Mouse nipple (I know this is Lenovo thing and people actually buy them for it)

I realize style is subjective, but very few people are going to pick the X1 over either the Macbook or the XPS13 in terms of design. And design matters. Not only in a 'oh this looks nice way', people are actually measurably more productive on attractive gear.

When I'm doing development, I spend most of my time interacting with Atom. If I had to buy another pair of 16 GB DIMMs just for the sake of running it, I would. This is what I do professionally and I'm happy to throw a little RAM at something that makes my job more enjoyable and myself more productive.

I appreciate easy customization as much as any dev, but, in this case, I don't know if that's an advantage when as a result Atom doesn't do its primary task terribly well: stay open all day, let me type code.

I'm not suggesting Atom is better than Sublime, and there are definitely many cases where Sublime is better than Atom, particularly in terms of performance. I just think Atom gets more abuse than it should given how useful it is in general. Many of the complaints I see are more rooted in what they feel an app should do in the abstract (e.g. idle at under N megabytes of RAM) rather than actual issues that affect their use of the tool.

Presumably everything Electron based is using Irregexp under the hood, so I doubt that's a real competitive advantage.

The performance difference between Atom and Visual Studio Code is interesting, given that they're built on the same framework.

2) What exactly do you mean by this?

3) This is true, the scheme is great, but themes aren't really there yet. The default is nice enough, though.

4) Also true, perhaps a plugin could work? I have no idea where I'd use macros though. What do you use macros for?

5) Also true, I use vim for those but it's a rare case.

The CPU issue seems weird, I certainly don't get 100% CPU.

2) You can't set tab = 8 and indent = 2. This isn't common, but sometimes one deals with foreign sources where that's an issue.

4) Repetitive editing tasks where just doing them once is much faster than coming up with a shell/sed/awk/perl/python on-liner. I switch to vi for those right now.

2) Also fair enough, I don't find that I have to deal with this too much. Can you switch editor for those files? It's only a Cmd+Tab away :)

4) I use multiple cursors for stuff like this.