7 ms·

Atom Reaches 1M Active Monthly Users

71 points by joefitzgerald 10y ago

tombert 10y ago
I'm actually kind of happy about this. While I don't personally use Atom at all, I think it's good that an open source editor is getting extremely popular. Much as I like Sublime Text, the fact that it's proprietary has prevented me from using it.
- shmageggy 10y ago
  > Much as I like Sublime Text, the fact that it's proprietary has prevented me from using it. Same here, and when I recently ran into some built in limitations with gvim regarding its inability to easily deal with proportional width fonts, I switched to Atom. I've been really happy so far -- the vim mode plugin is nice. Atom isn't perfect, but it's good enough for now, and the extensibility model makes me confident that it will just keep getting better.
  - cormacrelf 10y ago
    Why would you want proportional width fonts in Vim? Forgive me for asking, it's probably pretty obvious to you.
    - jensnockert 10y ago
      Write 'normal' text for example, also if you're including CJK-strings in your app it is kind of nice if they are not rendered as teensy or on top of each other.
    - shmageggy 10y ago
      For non-code writing such as academic papers, notes and things written in markdown. All of which feature a mix of code, math, and plenty of prose. I don't love writing prose in monospace, and I also don't love using multiple tools for one task, and I also don't love using the pointer on the laptop (as oppposed to navigation keys in vim-like environments). With Atom, I can kill all of these birds with one editor.
  - tombert 10y ago
    I like Atom, but what's kept me with Vim is slight performance hit that you seem to have with Atom. I'm sure this will get ironed out more, and maybe it has been in later iterations. Have you managed to get good performance out of it?
saberworks 10y ago
Is anyone else creeped out that this desktop application phones home every time you start it? Is this just the new normal now?
- bgammon 10y ago
  I have no idea what the system is, but it could be something as innocuous as automatic updates. In reality, they probably do send some form of diagnostic information, but since the application is open source, it seems unlikely there would be no way to disable that if it exists.
  - joefitzgerald 10y ago
    https://github.com/atom/metrics#collected-data https://github.com/atom/metrics#collected-data Metrics collection can be disabled by the user, and this option is also presented to the user on first load of Atom.
- smarx007 10y ago
  It checks for updates automatically, so I think that gives them the stats, same should be valid for Sublime.
  - tlrobinson 10y ago
    Atom actually uses Google Analytics too: http://i.imgur.com/bXwEDes.png http://i.imgur.com/bXwEDes.png
    - taylorfausak 10y ago
      You can disable the analytics from within Atom by disabling this package: https://atom.io/packages/metrics https://atom.io/packages/metrics
- jsprogrammer 10y ago
  If that creeps you out, you should probably run a completely closed firewall, where you specifically enable applications' access to the network. I don't know if it is new normal, or old normal, or even normal, but many applications have been doing it for a long time now.
revelation 10y ago
Can you imagine, Notepad celebrating 1 billion monthly users?
- charliedevolve 10y ago
  A program bundled with every copy of Windows, ever? Yes, that would be silly.
nish1500 10y ago
Just switched over from Sublime to Atom yesterday. Couldn't be happier. The community around Atom is active, and exciting, much unlike Sublime Text. I hope subsequent updates make it faster, since ST still has an edge there.
- wmeredith 10y ago
  I also made this switch recently. I'm loving it.
- bithush 10y ago
  How is Atom for non-web languages such as C?
  - qz_ 10y ago
    C? It has syntax highlighting, but it's very obviously geared towards web development.
  - calgoo 10y ago
    Its fine. I'm using it for: Go, Perl, NodeJS, Scheme, Bash, C++, and Rust. You might have to add some of the syntax highlighting etc, but there are packages for most languages available directly in the built in package manager.
  - samueloph 10y ago
    Well, I'm no professional yet but I'm finding it pretty good coding in C while using the proper lintian together with clang, I also use the package script, which allows me to run the code from within the editor. If you give enough tweak, I believe it can be a pretty usefull IDE. Didn't try any gdb integration yet.
  - mchahn 10y ago
    The languages Atom supports have very little to do with the languages Atom is built with. Anyone can add first-class language support to Atom and many have. I watch all the new Atom packages as they are released, which is taking more and more of my time, and I have been shocked at how many languages there are. There are many many weird languages I've never heard of.
qz_ 10y ago
Atom is very nice. The Emacs of 2016.
- dguaraglia 10y ago
  Except for the whole "run anywhere with a terminal", "high quality packages with decades of bugfixes" and "pretty much extensible in every way". (I'm a Vim user myself, but I feel like comparing Atom to Emacs is a big... optimistic. People keep complaining about how slow Atom is, how much memory it hogs up, etc. I think it needs at least a few more years of maturation before being able to call it "the Emacs of X")
  - vdaniuk 10y ago
    >People keep complaining about how slow Atom is, how much memory it hogs up, etc Which is exactly what people have been saying decades ago about Emacs, aka "Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping".
    - dguaraglia 10y ago
      The difference being that, functionality-wise, you don't get anything from using Atom over, say, Emacs or Vim. High memory and CPU utilization is a tradeoff I'm willing to take for the added benefit of running IntelliJ or Visual Studio, because as environments they do way more for certain code bases than either Vim or Emacs could do. But Atom? Not so much. "It's made of Javascript and HTML" is not an advantage (to me) worth the memory and lag.
  - qz_ 10y ago
    You're right on run anywhere with a terminal and high quality packages. However, Atom is truly extensible in any way you want because it's actually made up of lots of packages that you can replace and fork.
PhilipA 10y ago
What are the main reasons to choose Atom over e.g. Visual Studio Code?
- adrice727 10y ago
  I recently switched from Atom to VS Code. Everything in VS Code just seems to work, and I don't have any of the high CPU usage issues I had with Atom.
- jaxondu 10y ago
  When you have a faster computer?
- grinich 10y ago
  Atom currently has more plugins, larger community, etc. Ironically, both are built on ElectronJS: http://electron.atom.io/ http://electron.atom.io/
- erokar 10y ago
  Ecosystem, but not much more. Code is faster and has very good intellisense for JS. Though it's still in Beta it's been very stable and a pleasure to use.
  - hccampos 10y ago
    Indeed, the VSCode intellisense for JS is amazing, especially after the latest February release.
    - vbit 10y ago
      Given it is open source, couldn't Atom just re-use VSCode's intellisense?
- taylorwc 10y ago
  I use and like both. VS Code is definitely faster, but I love the tabs in Atom. As someone who grew up more in a browser than in a terminal, it just feels very natural. There are also more packages available within the Atom ecosystem, or at least, discovering useful packages and searching through them is better.
vdnkh 10y ago
Is it me, or are there horrible stability issues on Windows 10? I cannot have more than one editor open without one of them crashing. This is an issue on 3 of my W10 machines.
- ardzoht 10y ago
  It is definitely not you, having issues as well, that's what has been keeping me from jumping the ship from Sublime Text.
amykhar 10y ago
This is the first time I've opened a discussion about Atom where all the top posts weren't about how horrible and slow it is. Has it gotten better, or have people who know better just given up on this editor?
- grinich 10y ago
  It has gotten WAY faster.
  - akerro 10y ago
    Faster than netbeans?
  - hccampos 10y ago
    Still not fast enough, especially when you have VSCode that is built with the same technologies and performs way way better. Atom can and should be faster.
    - grinich 10y ago
      > Atom can and should be faster. I bet the core Atom team would agree with you. :) You should join the Slack channel and dive in. Pretty smart+driven group of people working on it. http://atom-slack.herokuapp.com/ http://atom-slack.herokuapp.com/
  - based_n00b 10y ago
    still crashes on my mac when trying to open big file
- blisterpeanuts 10y ago
  I'm a confirmed Emacs user since the early 1990s. But when I saw Atom in use on a Youtube tutorial video, I decided to try it. Always interested in finding out what "the young'uns" are using. It's a pretty nice editor, actually. I like the tabs approach; I like the restore at startup. Colorized text works well and detects file types correctly even without filename extension. I notice there's an atom-macros module. Nice. For me, nothing replaces Emacs... yet... but one of these new kids might sooner or later fit the bill.
grinich 10y ago
The most fantastic thing about Atom to me has been the underlying technology-- specifically Electron, which is a novel combination of Chromium and NodeJS. We at Nylas built an email app that originally was a fork of Atom, and now runs on Electron (which is evolving way faster). http://github.com/nylas/n1 http://github.com/nylas/n1 I honestly think that Electron is the future of desktop software, and it all started with Atom. Hats off to those folks for continuing to invest in this project! (also, zcbenz is a complete badass who doesn't get enough credit)
- samueloph 10y ago
  [ot] N1 is great, too bad I can't recommend to pretty much anybody because there's no translation support. The bug is open since October 2015, has 50+ comments and no feedback from devs. https://github.com/nylas/N1/issues/24 https://github.com/nylas/N1/issues/24 IIRC Atom doesn't have translation support either, I wonder if it has something to do with Electron.
  - grinich 10y ago
    It's not Electron, it's just a focus issue for us right now. Shipping things like swipe-to-archive and open tracking are more important than localizing the interface. It's definitely on our roadmap though! (For people who want to help... https://jobs.lever.co/nylas/3c688d62-4985-4224-b59f-ab0a4f4857d0 https://jobs.lever.co/nylas/3c688d62-4985-4224-b59f-ab0a4f48... ;)
- sz4kerto 10y ago
  > I honestly think that Electron is the future of desktop software I like your software but this statement makes me sad -- it's really not a great situation where a desktop software is written in a language that's not exactly great (to say the least); it runs on the top of countless abstraction layers that make the product comparatively very slow. I have 20 CPU cores and 64G RAM, and Slack starts much slower (!) than MS Word 2016.
  - 13years 10y ago
superplussed 10y ago
The only thing that keeps me from using Atom, and I admit that this might seem trivial, is how much I hate the delay before the syntax highlighting loads. Somehow it's an immersion-breaker for me, and a deal breaker. Anyone know if this issue is being worked on?
transcranial 10y ago
Congrats! Atom may not be perfect (no editor is), but it's constantly and consistently improving, which is a lot more than one can say about most other editors. For those who use Jupyter: there's a package called Hydrogen that let's you run your code directly within Atom using Jupyter kernels (not just python!). To me, that's the perfect example of the power of a hackable editor.
- matt4077 10y ago
  Is there a way to get Jupyter-style layout as well? I'm intrigued by the idea of completely different style of writing code where, essentially, comments become first-class citizen and include markup (markdown rendered immediately when the cursor leaves the comment or even rich-text editing), diagrams, links etc. I tried to implement it but Atom just wasn't there at the time. The new block-level decorators should make it possible.
wnevets 10y ago
The fact that this is still a problem blows my mind. https://github.com/atom/atom/issues/5901 https://github.com/atom/atom/issues/5901
tambourine_man 10y ago
I just now tweaked my vimrc to be a bit nicer on remote ssh servers. Atom seems to be getting cooler every day, but I just can't see myself parting from Vim. Not yet anyway. Another thought just stroke me as well: everywhere I look I see Atom, it seems like almost everyone has adopted it. If that everyone is just 1M, our world is very small indeed.
homero 10y ago
It's awesome but I just can't give up my pspad
ConAntonakos 10y ago
One of the only reasons I haven't fully moved over to Atom is due to its SFTP support. Any recommendations? I'm definitely considering switching from ST.
- vbit 10y ago
  SSHFS?

71 points by joefitzgerald 10y ago

I'm actually kind of happy about this. While I don't personally use Atom at all, I think it's good that an open source editor is getting extremely popular. Much as I like Sublime Text, the fact that it's proprietary has prevented me from using it.

shmageggy 10y ago
> Much as I like Sublime Text, the fact that it's proprietary has prevented me from using it. Same here, and when I recently ran into some built in limitations with gvim regarding its inability to easily deal with proportional width fonts, I switched to Atom. I've been really happy so far -- the vim mode plugin is nice. Atom isn't perfect, but it's good enough for now, and the extensibility model makes me confident that it will just keep getting better.
- cormacrelf 10y ago
  Why would you want proportional width fonts in Vim? Forgive me for asking, it's probably pretty obvious to you.
  - jensnockert 10y ago
    Write 'normal' text for example, also if you're including CJK-strings in your app it is kind of nice if they are not rendered as teensy or on top of each other.
  - shmageggy 10y ago
    For non-code writing such as academic papers, notes and things written in markdown. All of which feature a mix of code, math, and plenty of prose. I don't love writing prose in monospace, and I also don't love using multiple tools for one task, and I also don't love using the pointer on the laptop (as oppposed to navigation keys in vim-like environments). With Atom, I can kill all of these birds with one editor.
- tombert 10y ago
  I like Atom, but what's kept me with Vim is slight performance hit that you seem to have with Atom. I'm sure this will get ironed out more, and maybe it has been in later iterations. Have you managed to get good performance out of it?

saberworks 10y ago

Is anyone else creeped out that this desktop application phones home every time you start it? Is this just the new normal now?

bgammon 10y ago
I have no idea what the system is, but it could be something as innocuous as automatic updates. In reality, they probably do send some form of diagnostic information, but since the application is open source, it seems unlikely there would be no way to disable that if it exists.
- joefitzgerald 10y ago
  https://github.com/atom/metrics#collected-data https://github.com/atom/metrics#collected-data Metrics collection can be disabled by the user, and this option is also presented to the user on first load of Atom.
smarx007 10y ago
It checks for updates automatically, so I think that gives them the stats, same should be valid for Sublime.
- tlrobinson 10y ago
  Atom actually uses Google Analytics too: http://i.imgur.com/bXwEDes.png http://i.imgur.com/bXwEDes.png
  - taylorfausak 10y ago
    You can disable the analytics from within Atom by disabling this package: https://atom.io/packages/metrics https://atom.io/packages/metrics
jsprogrammer 10y ago
If that creeps you out, you should probably run a completely closed firewall, where you specifically enable applications' access to the network. I don't know if it is new normal, or old normal, or even normal, but many applications have been doing it for a long time now.

revelation 10y ago

Can you imagine, Notepad celebrating 1 billion monthly users?

charliedevolve 10y ago
A program bundled with every copy of Windows, ever? Yes, that would be silly.

nish1500 10y ago

Just switched over from Sublime to Atom yesterday. Couldn't be happier. The community around Atom is active, and exciting, much unlike Sublime Text. I hope subsequent updates make it faster, since ST still has an edge there.

wmeredith 10y ago
I also made this switch recently. I'm loving it.
bithush 10y ago
How is Atom for non-web languages such as C?
- qz_ 10y ago
  C? It has syntax highlighting, but it's very obviously geared towards web development.
- calgoo 10y ago
  Its fine. I'm using it for: Go, Perl, NodeJS, Scheme, Bash, C++, and Rust. You might have to add some of the syntax highlighting etc, but there are packages for most languages available directly in the built in package manager.
- samueloph 10y ago
  Well, I'm no professional yet but I'm finding it pretty good coding in C while using the proper lintian together with clang, I also use the package script, which allows me to run the code from within the editor. If you give enough tweak, I believe it can be a pretty usefull IDE. Didn't try any gdb integration yet.
- mchahn 10y ago
  The languages Atom supports have very little to do with the languages Atom is built with. Anyone can add first-class language support to Atom and many have. I watch all the new Atom packages as they are released, which is taking more and more of my time, and I have been shocked at how many languages there are. There are many many weird languages I've never heard of.

qz_ 10y ago

Atom is very nice. The Emacs of 2016.

dguaraglia 10y ago
Except for the whole "run anywhere with a terminal", "high quality packages with decades of bugfixes" and "pretty much extensible in every way". (I'm a Vim user myself, but I feel like comparing Atom to Emacs is a big... optimistic. People keep complaining about how slow Atom is, how much memory it hogs up, etc. I think it needs at least a few more years of maturation before being able to call it "the Emacs of X")
- vdaniuk 10y ago
  >People keep complaining about how slow Atom is, how much memory it hogs up, etc Which is exactly what people have been saying decades ago about Emacs, aka "Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping".
  - dguaraglia 10y ago
    The difference being that, functionality-wise, you don't get anything from using Atom over, say, Emacs or Vim. High memory and CPU utilization is a tradeoff I'm willing to take for the added benefit of running IntelliJ or Visual Studio, because as environments they do way more for certain code bases than either Vim or Emacs could do. But Atom? Not so much. "It's made of Javascript and HTML" is not an advantage (to me) worth the memory and lag.
- qz_ 10y ago
  You're right on run anywhere with a terminal and high quality packages. However, Atom is truly extensible in any way you want because it's actually made up of lots of packages that you can replace and fork.

PhilipA 10y ago

What are the main reasons to choose Atom over e.g. Visual Studio Code?

adrice727 10y ago
I recently switched from Atom to VS Code. Everything in VS Code just seems to work, and I don't have any of the high CPU usage issues I had with Atom.
jaxondu 10y ago
When you have a faster computer?
grinich 10y ago
Atom currently has more plugins, larger community, etc. Ironically, both are built on ElectronJS: http://electron.atom.io/ http://electron.atom.io/
erokar 10y ago
Ecosystem, but not much more. Code is faster and has very good intellisense for JS. Though it's still in Beta it's been very stable and a pleasure to use.
- hccampos 10y ago
  Indeed, the VSCode intellisense for JS is amazing, especially after the latest February release.
  - vbit 10y ago
    Given it is open source, couldn't Atom just re-use VSCode's intellisense?
taylorwc 10y ago
I use and like both. VS Code is definitely faster, but I love the tabs in Atom. As someone who grew up more in a browser than in a terminal, it just feels very natural. There are also more packages available within the Atom ecosystem, or at least, discovering useful packages and searching through them is better.

vdnkh 10y ago

Is it me, or are there horrible stability issues on Windows 10? I cannot have more than one editor open without one of them crashing. This is an issue on 3 of my W10 machines.

ardzoht 10y ago
It is definitely not you, having issues as well, that's what has been keeping me from jumping the ship from Sublime Text.

amykhar 10y ago

This is the first time I've opened a discussion about Atom where all the top posts weren't about how horrible and slow it is. Has it gotten better, or have people who know better just given up on this editor?

grinich 10y ago
It has gotten WAY faster.
- akerro 10y ago
  Faster than netbeans?
- hccampos 10y ago
  Still not fast enough, especially when you have VSCode that is built with the same technologies and performs way way better. Atom can and should be faster.
  - grinich 10y ago
    > Atom can and should be faster. I bet the core Atom team would agree with you. :) You should join the Slack channel and dive in. Pretty smart+driven group of people working on it. http://atom-slack.herokuapp.com/ http://atom-slack.herokuapp.com/
- based_n00b 10y ago
  still crashes on my mac when trying to open big file
blisterpeanuts 10y ago
I'm a confirmed Emacs user since the early 1990s. But when I saw Atom in use on a Youtube tutorial video, I decided to try it. Always interested in finding out what "the young'uns" are using. It's a pretty nice editor, actually. I like the tabs approach; I like the restore at startup. Colorized text works well and detects file types correctly even without filename extension. I notice there's an atom-macros module. Nice. For me, nothing replaces Emacs... yet... but one of these new kids might sooner or later fit the bill.

grinich 10y ago

The most fantastic thing about Atom to me has been the underlying technology-- specifically Electron, which is a novel combination of Chromium and NodeJS. We at Nylas built an email app that originally was a fork of Atom, and now runs on Electron (which is evolving way faster). http://github.com/nylas/n1 http://github.com/nylas/n1 I honestly think that Electron is the future of desktop software, and it all started with Atom. Hats off to those folks for continuing to invest in this project! (also, zcbenz is a complete badass who doesn't get enough credit)

samueloph 10y ago
[ot] N1 is great, too bad I can't recommend to pretty much anybody because there's no translation support. The bug is open since October 2015, has 50+ comments and no feedback from devs. https://github.com/nylas/N1/issues/24 https://github.com/nylas/N1/issues/24 IIRC Atom doesn't have translation support either, I wonder if it has something to do with Electron.
- grinich 10y ago
  It's not Electron, it's just a focus issue for us right now. Shipping things like swipe-to-archive and open tracking are more important than localizing the interface. It's definitely on our roadmap though! (For people who want to help... https://jobs.lever.co/nylas/3c688d62-4985-4224-b59f-ab0a4f4857d0 https://jobs.lever.co/nylas/3c688d62-4985-4224-b59f-ab0a4f48... ;)
sz4kerto 10y ago
> I honestly think that Electron is the future of desktop software I like your software but this statement makes me sad -- it's really not a great situation where a desktop software is written in a language that's not exactly great (to say the least); it runs on the top of countless abstraction layers that make the product comparatively very slow. I have 20 CPU cores and 64G RAM, and Slack starts much slower (!) than MS Word 2016.
- 13years 10y ago

superplussed 10y ago

The only thing that keeps me from using Atom, and I admit that this might seem trivial, is how much I hate the delay before the syntax highlighting loads. Somehow it's an immersion-breaker for me, and a deal breaker. Anyone know if this issue is being worked on?

transcranial 10y ago

Congrats! Atom may not be perfect (no editor is), but it's constantly and consistently improving, which is a lot more than one can say about most other editors. For those who use Jupyter: there's a package called Hydrogen that let's you run your code directly within Atom using Jupyter kernels (not just python!). To me, that's the perfect example of the power of a hackable editor.

matt4077 10y ago
Is there a way to get Jupyter-style layout as well? I'm intrigued by the idea of completely different style of writing code where, essentially, comments become first-class citizen and include markup (markdown rendered immediately when the cursor leaves the comment or even rich-text editing), diagrams, links etc. I tried to implement it but Atom just wasn't there at the time. The new block-level decorators should make it possible.

wnevets 10y ago

The fact that this is still a problem blows my mind. https://github.com/atom/atom/issues/5901 https://github.com/atom/atom/issues/5901

tambourine_man 10y ago

I just now tweaked my vimrc to be a bit nicer on remote ssh servers. Atom seems to be getting cooler every day, but I just can't see myself parting from Vim. Not yet anyway. Another thought just stroke me as well: everywhere I look I see Atom, it seems like almost everyone has adopted it. If that everyone is just 1M, our world is very small indeed.

homero 10y ago

It's awesome but I just can't give up my pspad

ConAntonakos 10y ago

One of the only reasons I haven't fully moved over to Atom is due to its SFTP support. Any recommendations? I'm definitely considering switching from ST.

vbit 10y ago
SSHFS?