Atom now using Io.js

Re:Atom now using Io.js by pbiggar on Tuesday February 03, 2015 @04:29PM (#8993520)

So the thing about Atom (and any "disruptive" software) is that it doesn't have to be amazing at everything. It only has to be 10x better for some niche of people who will be this product's early adopters and evangelists.

That will gain it enough traction to prove itself in the market, and over the next few years it will fix all the problems such as the 2MB limit, and whatever else is there. And then, laggards (well, you're probably more of an "early majority" type of person in Crossing the Chasm lingo) will see enough value to join.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Atom now using Io.js by awalton on Tuesday February 03, 2015 @04:49PM (#8993644)

It needs to be amazing at something though.

And well... it isn't. The biggest thing I can tell is that it's "hip". Meanwhile Sublime Text spins around it at 40MPH doing donuts.

I tried. I really tried to use Atom. But the text editor is just so slow and unresponsive, and that is a flat out dealbreaker for a text editor. Its extensibility isn't any better than Sublime's, and I feel like Python's a way better language than Javascript, so I'm happier tooling against Sublime.

I too wish Sublime Text was open source, coming from an open source development background, but I understand exactly how hard it is to develop open source software and feed and clothe yourself - people only buy "support contracts" for the first year and rarely renew, and only for software they feel is technically complex enough that they might actually need help or customizations.

For the record, I also backed GNOME Builder (which I also already find superior to Atom) in the hopes of some day it becoming the text editor and development environment I lust after. But my greatest fear is that more time will be spent on the shiny features and not enough time on the things I really care about like a decent GUI debugger so I don't have to live with poking at GDB, ahead-of-build compiler warnings/errors, and code refactoring tools.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Atom now using Io.js by georgeecollins on Tuesday February 03, 2015 @09:23PM (#8994966)

I was really interested in Atom but I found it to be a little sluggish (particularly when I switched it to the background) and sometimes unstable on my Macbook.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Atom now using Io.js by crucialfelix on Tuesday February 03, 2015 @05:32PM (#8993968)

Perhaps your computer might be older. Its blazingly fast on my machine. as people move to newer machines then speed is not going to be an issue.

Compared to Sublime, Atom developers can build much richer interfaces.

my own supercollider IDE in Atom:

https://atom.io/packages/supercollider

this is a full repl with a debugging call stack

haskell IDE:

https://atom.io/packages/ide-haskell

preview your development work in a web pane:

https://atom.io/packages/mobile-preview

but yet I think the packages are still young and there is much more that can be done. its early days.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Atom now using Io.js by mwcampbell on Tuesday February 03, 2015 @05:40PM (#8994015)

The trouble is that an editor shouldn't require a 2010+ MacBook Air in order to be blazing fast. As I recall, we were running syntax-highlighting editors on ~166 MHz Pentium machines in the mid 90s. Hell, maybe I even ran one on my old 80486 laptop.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Atom now using Io.js by awalton on Tuesday February 03, 2015 @06:35PM (#8994333)

I have a 2014 Macbook Pro and it's sluggish there. I have half a dozen Linux machines around me daily and it's entirely unusable on them. You can visibly tell when the GC is running, it's that terrible.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Atom now using Io.js by jsheard on Tuesday February 03, 2015 @08:48PM (#8994875)

Time to launch various editors on my SSD-backed, 4x4ghz Windows desktop:

ST3: Instantanous, VS2013: 1 second, Atom: 3 seconds

You know you've got problems when Visual Studio is running rings around you.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Atom now using Io.js by pbiggar on Tuesday February 03, 2015 @05:02PM (#8993732)

You just described a load of things that it's amazing at:

- it's hip (dont discount that, its important. it excites people, and gives contributors a reaso to contribute)

- it's in JS - maybe not right for you, but there are lots of people who have the opposite opinion.

- it's open source: for some, a closed source editor is a deal breaker. Imagine the people who say "i hate emacs and vim; I'd love to use sublime but it's closed source" - they'll run to atom.

- its got corporate backing (gnome builder may die or wither, there are many who can believe that atom wont because of GitHub's backing)

So those are some pretty big niches right there!

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Atom now using Io.js by kristianp on Wednesday February 04, 2015 @03:13AM (#8995827)

None of those things are actually features.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Atom now using Io.js by pbiggar on Wednesday February 04, 2015 @01:07PM (#8998441)

Doesnt matter. They're reasons to use it. (I'd argue being in JS is a big feature for many, but since it doesn't matter, nothing to discuss :)

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Atom now using Io.js by hit8run on Tuesday February 03, 2015 @05:44PM (#8994032)

Sublime seems to be back on track. In the last week it received two updates :)

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Atom now using Io.js by thedufer on Tuesday February 03, 2015 @05:34PM (#8993986)

The biggest issue with Sublime is that it's been unchanged for over a year. I think that's the big problem that Atom is solving - Sublime + active development.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Atom now using Io.js by awalton on Wednesday February 04, 2015 @05:49AM (#8996185)

Sublime devs released a build today:

http://www.sublimetext.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=17509

The product is alive but understandably slow with a single developer.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Atom now using Io.js by Cthulhu_ on Wednesday February 04, 2015 @09:11AM (#8996833)

Single developer shouldn't be that big of a factor in slow development and complete media silence for six months to a year on end; any half-decent developer can churn out an update every week, whether it's a new feature or just a bugfix. That's how you keep people excited about your program, and how to prevent it from seeming stale and dead.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Atom now using Io.js by danellis on Tuesday February 03, 2015 @06:22PM (#8994261)

What is it that you would like to see fixed in or added to Sublime Text?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Atom now using Io.js by thedufer on Tuesday February 03, 2015 @07:39PM (#8994605)

I don't use it; I just know that this is the reason many of my coworkers are moving away from it. I've heard concerns about it breaking on a future OS upgrade, or just failing to keep up with others in features.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Atom now using Io.js by SchizoDuckie on Wednesday February 04, 2015 @02:37AM (#8995741)

https://twitter.com/sublimehq Development will speed up in 2015. 2 releases in a week 'stable' enough for you?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Atom now using Io.js by MozMorris on Wednesday February 04, 2015 @03:24AM (#8995855)

Is my Twitter screwed? No tweets since Dec 2013.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Atom now using Io.js by bpicolo on Tuesday February 03, 2015 @09:35PM (#8995002)

Except it HAS changed. http://www.sublimetext.com/3dev

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Atom now using Io.js by thedufer on Wednesday February 04, 2015 @10:38AM (#8997388)

If you're looking to lose any and all good will you've established, charging all previous customers $70 to get updates is a great way to do it. ST2 dev is dead, which is what matters to the people who already paid for the product.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Atom now using Io.js by PlzSnow on Tuesday February 03, 2015 @04:48PM (#8993642)

The 2MB/slowness isn't something that can just be "coded away". It's a direct result of the technology stack chosen. It is not a solvable problem. Therefore Atom cannot succeed beyond niche usage.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Atom now using Io.js by pbiggar on Tuesday February 03, 2015 @05:06PM (#8993765)

"not a solvable problem" and "cannot succeed" are very strong assertions that are not backed up by evidence.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Atom now using Io.js by laurent123456 on Tuesday February 03, 2015 @05:33PM (#8993977)

Why is there a 2MB limit anyway? Is it because the document is rendered to HTML? In this case, why don't they render only the part currently visible on screen?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Atom now using Io.js by iends on Tuesday February 03, 2015 @06:05PM (#8994154)

https://github.com/atom/atom/pull/1607/files

The editor is intentionally crippled.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Atom now using Io.js by davidy123 on Tuesday February 03, 2015 @08:13PM (#8994734)

They were probably tired of people complaining about problems with this corner case of opening humongous files in an editor meant for editing source code. Atom properly should be optimized for kilobyte sized files, not megabyte.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Atom now using Io.js by jussij on Tuesday February 03, 2015 @10:47PM (#8995205)

Machines these days have Giga Bytes of RAM so handling a file only a few megabytes in size should hardly be an issue.

I'm the author of the Zeus editor and I regularly use an old 1.25 Pentium with 512 MBytes of RAM to test the performance of the editor.

Even running on that 15 year old machine Zeus stays fully responsive while editing a 60+ MByte file.

For a modern day tool a 2 Mega file limit seems rather low.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Atom now using Io.js by userbinator on Tuesday February 03, 2015 @11:43PM (#8995343)

Atom is essentially a web browser running a text editing web app. Given how much web pages tend to "expand" when loaded into memory in a browser, it's not so surprising.

I'm guessing that Zeus isn't based on a web browser but was designed from the beginning to be an editor.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Atom now using Io.js by Cthulhu_ on Wednesday February 04, 2015 @09:12AM (#8996839)

> Zeus isn't based on a web browser but was designed from the beginning to be an editor.

But Atom was also supposed to be an editor...

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Atom now using Io.js by jussij on Wednesday February 04, 2015 @07:29AM (#8996460)

Zeus, like a lot of text editors is an in memory editor, which basically means it loads the whole file into memory.

So it too is limited by the total memory available to the application.

For a 32 bit Windows application the available memory comes in at around 2 Gigs and for a 64 bit Windows application that explodes to 8 Terra bytes.

So even if Atom was 32 bit it should have 2 Gigs of memory to play with.

I'm not sure why Atom does limit files to 2 megs, but if it is because of the expansion of memory then there must be some serious expanding happening there.

[ Parent | on HN ]