15 ms·

Atom 1.0

1096 points by mrbogle 11y ago

Globz 11y ago
I am really tempted to give it a try but I am already all setup with Brackets and I am having a hard time understanding what are the benefits if I make the switch over Atom. I will surely give it a try a some point!
snarfy 11y ago
The site is severely hammered right now. I'd like to try it again to see if the performance issues have improved.
- WorldWideWayne 11y ago
  You don't have to go through their site to download it. Just go here - https://github.com/atom/atom/releases https://github.com/atom/atom/releases
- tauchunfall 11y ago
  Downloads are also available from https://github.com/atom/atom/releases/tag/v1.0.0 https://github.com/atom/atom/releases/tag/v1.0.0.
jscheel 11y ago
I still haven't given Atom a go. Is it worth switching from ST3?
- iamd3vil 11y ago
  Atom is nice but much slower than ST3. It takes 30 seconds to open a file while ST3 almost instantly loads. It's not worth switching from Sublime.
  - Klathmon 11y ago
    I've been using atom for several months now, and i've never had a file take 30 seconds to open.. Granted all my devices use SSDs, but still for me it's been like 10 seconds at the worst, and currently it opens in like 3-4 (and i have about 30 plugins too)
    - iamd3vil 11y ago
      I use may be 10 plugins. The speed is improved but still the startup time is so slow. May be I exaggerated a bit, but it will be definitely around 15-20 seconds for me.
      - wisew 11y ago
        You don't have to guess about the startup time – you can find the actual startup time by searching for Timecop in the Command Palette.
- agmcleod 11y ago
  Comes down to preference. I still use sublime for opening really large files. But otherwise i stick with Atom. I've found when using linters, typescript compile checking and such Atom is just better. The notifications built in and such are great, where as the bottom bar for listing that kind of stuff in sublime feels archaic.
  - bshimmin 11y ago
    The consensus seems to be that Atom is still much slower than ST3; I'm still on ST2, and I find it terrible for opening large files and mostly resort to Emacs for that sort of task (and anything involving search and replace with regular expressions on even moderately-sized files). Is ST3 markedly faster than ST2 and generally worth upgrading to now? (I've held off upgrading because I've always been in the middle of a project... but I'm now realising that I really am just always in the middle of a project, so I might as well just get it over with.)
    - balls187 11y ago
      The files ST3 has choked on, VIM also choked on. All other files, ST3 has performed incredibly well.
- teamhappy 11y ago
  I switched from Atom back to ST3 a month ago.
- grayrest 11y ago
  If you have a setup that works for you, probably not. Atom's main advantage is that it's in a DOM environment and people could do neat things with it but at the moment the efforts have gone into putting it roughly at feature parity with ST3.
- jszymborski 11y ago
  I prefer Atom, although I never was quite a ST3 super-user. The speed issues are all but gone imho (start-up is a bit slow, but I have it open almost all the time so I hardly notice). The main reason I switched was because Atom is FOSS, and that always bothered me about ST3. It's also very easy to hack on, which is nice as well.
- Kequc 11y ago
  Both are good editors, I haven't tried Atom in about a year. Try it and then report back.
- flytwokites 11y ago
  I only keep using ST because of: https://github.com/atom/atom/issues/5344 https://github.com/atom/atom/issues/5344 https://github.com/atom/fuzzy-finder/issues/57 https://github.com/atom/fuzzy-finder/issues/57
  - to3m 11y ago
    People just don't seem to know how to do fuzzy searching. Xcode has the same problem. I used Xcode every day for 2 years and its fuzzy matching never once made me happy. Fortunately, I have a concrete solution: copy what Visual Assist does. Space-separated substrings. It makes it very easy to be more precise about what you're looking for, while still letting you be vague when you'd rather, and the computer never has to make a judgement call. See here: http://docs.wholetomato.com/default.asp?W193 http://docs.wholetomato.com/default.asp?W193 and search for "filtering in the dialog" (their page has no anchors! - I'm certainly not suggesting you should copy their HTML style)
- rcchen 11y ago
  I would say that it's at 90+ percent feature parity with ST3; the only real downside is that the package/extension ecosystem is nowhere near as mature as with ST3 right now, but that looks like it is changing very quickly. In addition, ST3 is closed source vs. Atom is open source, and that alone could be a good reason for a number of people to switch. My recommendation is to give Atom a chance, see if it fits into your workflow (whether it has native support for the languages/frameworks you work in, or if packages exist). If it works out, then you have a viable alternative to ST3 :)
  - jdc0589 11y ago
    the package ecosystem isn't on par yet, but the package DEVELOPMENT ecosystem far surpasses sublime in every way imaginable. I really did not enjoy writing plugins for sublime. The development/debugging/testing experience isn't especially pleasant.
    - zzleeper 11y ago
      Agreed with the last bit. I wrote a few plugins and it drove me insane. Maybe it's the lack of tutorials or sparse documentation. That said, the new features (.sublime-syntax files instead of TM files, etc.) look very refreshing.
- szastupov 11y ago
  At least worth trying. I like atom a lot but it's still noticeably slower than ST3 on my late 2011 Macbook, even with SSD.
  - MozMorris 11y ago
    I'm running this spec and I personally don't find the speed is an issue. I waste far more time when once a week Thunderbolt causes a kernel panic.
- rev_bird 11y ago
  I'm not a heavy plugin user, so I don't get a lot of the power-user benefits of ST, but the git integration alone has been worth switching. If you're editing a file under source control, it keeps track of changed segments (and files) out of the box. Nice, simple tool that's been really handy even though I only switched last week.
- veidr 11y ago
  No, it still fares very poorly when matched up against ST3 (or Textmate 2, or basically any high-quality native editor). It is slow slow slow, and has lots of little quirks which are clearly a result of the wacky way they decided to build a text editor. BUT.... it is way, way better than it used to be. I keep it installed and use it from time to time, to let it update itself and see how it has grown. It clearly has momentum, and computers clearly are getting faster... probably one day the slowness of it won't matter. But it still matters today -- Atom is noticeably slow on the fastest Mac notebook you can currently buy.
  - MozMorris 11y ago
    Sorry be that guy who posts his specs and disagrees... :-) Running on a stock mid-2011 Air w/ 4GB Ram plus a Thunderbolt display. If it was slow, I would have switched or upgraded my machine sometime ago. Things that are slow to me are waiting for node-sass to compile on save, server-side code reloading, npm installing... and so on.
    - lvillani 11y ago
      It highly depends on your usage pattern. I usually have one long-lived instance of an editor for the project/thing I'm focusing on, but I also frequently fire up "temporary" instances for one-off editing jobs, from the terminal. The difference between, let's say, "subl ." (launch Sublime Text in the current directory) and "atom ." is staggering: Sublime Text starts instantly with a boatload of plugins; Atom starts nearly instantaneously but then takes around 5 seconds to become usable, without plugins, after repeated runs. (Speaking of specs, I'm on a late 2013 Retina MacBook Pro, 16 GB of RAM)
      - MozMorris 11y ago
        Yup, that is totally where it is slow. Would be great if they could nail that. I must be more tolerable to that startup time, perhaps I've even become used to it.
      - rplnt 11y ago
        I never close my text editor (ST2 that is). Why would I do that? So I guess Atom is not for me then?
- AlexMax 11y ago
  As a paying user of Sublime Text 3, I finally jumped on the Atom bandwagon a few months ago and have overall been pretty happy. It's certainly a slower editor - I have found that opening it, creating a new window, and quitting all take more time than I would like. However, I have stuck it out primarily for two reasons: 1. It's far more extensible. Sublime Text has a thriving package ecosystem, but the limitations of the extension API show up in lots of little places. Atom being browser-based comes with its downsides, but it also allows flexibility that Sublime could only dream of. 2. It's open source. Sublime Text is a great editor, but it's closed source, maintained by a single guy, and updates have slowed to a crawl. It's not something I ever felt 100% comfortable with relying on as part of my day-in-day-out workflow.
  - jjawssd 11y ago
    Amazing how a single guy can outdo the design by committee that is Atom?
LoSboccacc 11y ago
what's up with name reuse these days. atom (the syndication format) may be on the verge of becoming obsolete, but it's also forgotten and irrelevant already to warrant a name reuse?
- Spiritus 11y ago
  I don't see the problem, they aren't even in the same domain.
  - rev_bird 11y ago
    Why would we name a text editor after a particle?!!?! I THOUGHT I WAS INSTALLING A HYDROGEN MOLECULE.
  - yincrash 11y ago
    Yet when you see a Hacker News headline that is just "Atom 1.0" it is close enough in the same category (tech news) where it can be confusing.
- kbody 11y ago
  It's not really a big deal on this case. But either case, there are so many things, unless you are competing or there is a big player with such name, I think it's fine. Also, in these cases you usually say Atom editor or Atom feed.
- sehr 11y ago
  Is anyone really going to be confusing a text editor and an outdated rss format
  - treve 11y ago
    How is it outdated? Atom is absolutely everywhere and there's no replacement, or a need for it.
    - sehr 11y ago
sneak 11y ago
I had initially dismissed the whole thing as folly as JavaScript is really stupid, but I had someone install Atom the other day and came to learn that it is really quite an impressively great editor these days. The ease of finding and installing themes and plugins is unparalleled. Considering trying it for a week or two as my daily driver (with vim mode, of course.)
facepalm 11y ago
What is it?
- rev_bird 11y ago
  -_- a text editor.
- a1b2c3 11y ago
  LOL my thoughts exactly.
engi_nerd 11y ago
Is it still limited to only editing files < 2 Megabytes? For most people that is not a showstopper, but it may be for some.
- 13years 11y ago
  This has been improved and no longer has this limit. However, I still find Brackets more responsive in general and is what I still use mostly. I think the future has a lot of potential though, as Visual Studio Code has demonstrated you can indeed have a very responsive editor built on javascript.
- romanovcode 11y ago
  No, recent patch increased the limit to blazing 4 MEGABYTES!
  - hugozap 11y ago
    People editing files longer than that are certainly in the minority.
    - neverminder 11y ago
      Unless it's a CSV. Or XML. Or JSON, Or <insert another popular format>
    - debaserab2 11y ago
      Of course, but if you find yourself in one of these instances of editing a large file (search and replacing database dumps is a common use case for me), you'll be disappointed. It's easy to argue that should be left to command line tools, but ST3 actually does a pretty good job at this.
    - SCdF 11y ago
      I severely doubt that. You don't edit them every day, but: 1) It comes up sometimes, and your editor should cope 2) Having a hard file size limit so low is (to me) indicative of you doing something wrong.
hitlin37 11y ago
i have been using it for 3-4 months now and its getting there each month. Sometimes the plugins fail but this could be because of the rapid development cycle of atom. On the positive side, its a good text editor, easy interaction, plugin install super easy. A downside is that its not easy on your ram though. Consumes more than what vim would do. But overall, if you need a modern editor, this is the way forward.
- melling 11y ago
  How well does it support other languages other than JavaScript? Will I be able to do mobile Android and iOS development at some point, or Haskell, Go, etc?
  - edvinbesic 11y ago
    Facebook has built a set of plugins for doing just this. It basically turns Atom into an IDE. Haven't tried it myself but from the videos it looks nice. http://nuclide.io http://nuclide.io
  - danhardman 11y ago
    I regularly work on Go projects with Atom using the go-plus[0] plugin [0] - https://atom.io/packages/go-plus https://atom.io/packages/go-plus
    - irq-1 11y ago
      Looks like it's not working just now: Searching packages failed: atom.io is temporarily unavailable, please try again later. Also, install Mercurial before the go-plus package. See "Missing Tools" near the bottom of the page.
  - hitlin37 11y ago
    i use it for some c development markdown, python, etc.
- smrtinsert 11y ago
  What does modern editor mean? flimsy plugin system and multiple cursors come to mind.
octref 11y ago
Congrats! I started using Atom a year ago, but at that time it was very unstable and the performance sucks so I switched back to Vim. This 1.0 still has something to pine for: some of the essential packages are still not updated for the 1.0 API (vim-mode, etc), and when processing large files it still slows down significantly, but as they say, it's now a good foundation to build upon.
- bnferguson 11y ago
  While I can't speak to all of your favorite packages, vim-mode is most definitely updated for 1.0 (it's very, very actively developed). If you ever did any development on packages, you may have a development version laying around preempting things. Check in ~/.atom/dev/packages and remove old versions (or git pull them up to the latest dev version). I had a super old version of tree-view for a long time this way. :)
- tw04 11y ago
  I get the impression that the large file issue isn't ever going to be fixed. Every time there's an update to Atom posted here on HN, and I ask about it, I get down voted into oblivion. It's a bummer too - I love the interface, I love the package, but the refusal to address opening large file makes it a non-starter for me. (No, I don't want to have two separate workflows for reviewing log files and writing code).
grandalf 11y ago
Congrats! I still prefer emacs but perhaps not for long (I use both day to day)...
- brlewis 11y ago
  I use emacs but might try atom when it's a true replacement possibility. How can I know it's crossed the threshold?
  - grandalf 11y ago
    I'm really looking forward to emacs-like tab behavior and also now that the rate of change will slow down we'll likely see the best quality extensions rise to the top and stabilize a bit. Also looking forward to seeing Facebook's fork of Atom for React...
    - crucialfelix 11y ago
      apm install nuclide-installer it seems to run inside of Atom, not a fork
    - jfb 11y ago
      I would have switched off of Emacs for some things ages ago if not for the broken behavior of the TAB key when editing text in what seems like every other editor. No, I do not ever want to insert a \t literal. Never. Ever. And if I do, I can do it with a more ponderous key sequence. But I never do. On the other hand, I need to indent a line to the correct tab stop perhaps a BILLION TIMES A DAY. Emacs has the benefit of decades of Huffman coding for its keystrokes, and I appreciate that.
      - Sirenos 11y ago
        > Emacs has the benefit of decades of Huffman coding for its keystrokes, and I appreciate that. Huffman coding, emacs, keystrokes, ... what?
        11y ago
dothething 11y ago
Have they resolved the long-standing performance issues present for the last six months? I've tried using Atom numerous times, but the longer it runs, the less stable it gets.
- jdc0589 11y ago
  this release includes a lot of performance optimizations. Check out there blog, there have been a couple articles in the past week or two talking about some of them. I haven't been using atom for those exact reasons. Definitely going to give it a shot again now.
- freshyill 11y ago
  I'm brave/a masochist. I've been using it since the very start. It has come very, very far—performance especially.
joefitzgerald 11y ago
The killer feature of Atom to me is the ease with which it can be extended (via packages) and the openness to community contribution on core features. That's not a knock against any other editor (some of which share similar characteristics in this regard) – it's just what draws me to Atom. It's super easy to hack on and contribute to.
- omouse 11y ago
  Welcome to what I've felt with Emacs since I first used it. Might be time to work on some tutorials and examples to make Emacs easier to hack on and contribute to...
  - kajecounterhack 11y ago
    I've felt largely the same about vim. I think atom is the GUI'ed equivalent of excellent extensible minimalist command line tools.
    - afarrell 11y ago
      You have felt it is easy to install, debug, and write vim plugins? As a vim user, I am super curious how?
      - palmer 11y ago
        Installing and managing plugins at least is pretty easy with pathogen and vundle.
        kajecounterhack 11y ago
        And for writing: https://github.com/google/vim-maktaba https://github.com/google/vim-maktaba
  - jflatow 11y ago
    Yes. I keep trying to like Atom because I want to have native WebView buffers while I'm editing. Every time I try it, I end up wondering how anyone can be comfortable using it. I'm not sure how much of that is due to instability that will be fixed over time, and how much is because I'm coming from Emacs. Have any experienced Emacs users found that Atom makes them more productive in any dimension? I want to like it but I can't see the light at the end of the tunnel.
lpgauth 11y ago
alias mate="atom" - old habits die hard.
- rkuykendall-com 11y ago
  I still keep TextMate 2 around for simple text processing. Atom treats everything like a project, which is great for projects, I don't mind my project taking 5 seconds to open, since I rarely close it. But for a little note, a copy-paste bin, or a quick regex? Textmate 2 is instant, better at larger files, and has the best find-replace window of all my editors.
deleted 11y ago
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ahoge 11y ago
Eh. Why is 1.0 out already? Keyboard layouts which use AltGr are still broken. E.g. I can't type '@', '\', and 'µ'. Yes, I can't write metadata annotations or escape some characters.
- coldtea 11y ago
  >Eh. Why is 1.0 out already? Keyboard layouts which use AltGr are still broken. Perhaps such keyboards don't concern that many people?
  - ahoge 11y ago
    AltGr is used by many layouts such as German, Turkish, French, Polish, and US International. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AltGr_key https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AltGr_key Also, this was supposed to be fixed in 1.0. I don't know why they decided to release 1.0 prematurely.
    - k__ 11y ago
      Yes, I'm from Germany and had the same problem. LiveScript is a pain with it :\
    - Nadya 11y ago
      Today I learned I can type an acute accent ´ without memorizing the "alt code" by using right alt. Now I can `quote´ in annoying ways or more ‘proper’ ways. This is life changing. It's also nifty to be able to type ¼ and ½
  - GolDDranks 11y ago
    That's going to render whole countries worth of developers reconsider using Atom. AltGr is widely used at Nordic countries at least and I wouldn't be surprised if elsewhere too.
    - SamReidHughes 11y ago
      Let them speak English! This'll bring the world closer together.
Mahn 11y ago
I really want to like Atom but it's such a pity that they went for CoffeeScript instead of plain ES5/ES6.
- kbd 11y ago
  That's something I like about it.
- tlrobinson 11y ago
  Do you really care that much which dialect of JavaScript your text editor is written in?
  - timr 11y ago
    It's a bit like worrying about the brand of gruel you're eating.
- geoffharcourt 11y ago
  That's really only a problem if you're contributing to the core, right? You can write your own packages in JS, and if you're just a user of the editor I don't see how that matters.
  - lojack 11y ago
    Sure, you can write your own packages in vanilla JS. Unfortunately though all of the documentation (and most packages themselves) are all written in coffeescript. Basically, the only way you can write a plugin in Javascript is if you already know Coffeescript (at least enough to read it). It's just one extra barrier of entry for non-coffeescript developers. I personally thought about writing a simple plugin, went to the documentation and realized it was all in coffeescript with no JS option, and gave up. I simply don't have the mental capacity to learn another language that probably won't be around in 10 years.
    - eric_h 11y ago
      I wouldn't even classify CoffeeScript as another language. It's really just javascript with some syntactical sugar. It took me about 20 mins to get comfortable with it.
wodenokoto 11y ago
A lot of people complain about the slowness of the Dom/JavaScript backend, but I see a lot of potential for some really cool things, like integrated juPyter notebooks, semi wysiwyg rendering of latex and markdown and maybe drawing rendering trees or other creative things.
- cnp 11y ago
  Honestly, its not slow anymore between their React integration and this: http://blog.atom.io/2015/06/16/optimizing-an-important-atom-primitive.html http://blog.atom.io/2015/06/16/optimizing-an-important-atom-.... Feels ~95% native.
  - VeejayRampay 11y ago
    Until you search and replace with regex that is. Jest aside, it's a great editor, thanks to everyone involved.
  - spleeder 11y ago
    They dropped React a while ago.
deleted 11y ago
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swasheck 11y ago
I so desperately want to like Atom (and Code), but I have a window refresh issue with it (https://discuss.atom.io/t/display-does-not-refresh-when-focus-is-taken-off-of-atom-win7x64/15589 https://discuss.atom.io/t/display-does-not-refresh-when-focu...). This issue is still present in the current release. It seems like a minor annoyance but when it happens it really kills my productivity.
solveforall 11y ago
I was lucky enough to get a key to use Atom when it first came out. I was not very impressed at the time, with its limited capabilities, so I ended up switching to Brackets for a while. Later in my search for an editor that handles EJS, I rediscovered Atom. It really has improved since it first started. AFAIK, Atom and Sublime are the only editors that handle EJS. I also use Atom to edit JS, JSX, gradle, and FTL which work well as well. Still I stick to IntelliJ for most programming languages since I haven't found a way to get code completion, reference jumping, etc to work on Atom. Very impressive work from the Atom team and the contributors!
d0m 11y ago
Is it possible to use atom right in the browser, rather than in a separate app? I know facebook engineers have an in-browser editor.. is this atom or something else?
- nulltype 11y ago
  Are you talking about http://nuclide.io/ http://nuclide.io/ or some other editor?
joshburgess 11y ago
I've gotta say, honestly, I'm preferring Visual Studio Code over Atom simply due to the fact that it seems MUCH more stable and lightweight. Atom is very visually appealing, and I'm a fan of the project, in general, but it constantly freezes up and crashes on me. I think I'll be sticking with VS Code & Sublime.
- euroclydon 11y ago
  Visual Studio code needs to let me make CoreCLR executables on OSX and Linux, yesterday.
  - ossreality 11y ago
    DNX does. Right now. You just want it to trigger 'dnu package' for you?
- yulaow 11y ago
  I have the same problem but VS code. I was using it for my node projects because it was very easy to use the debugger tool but it practically crashed (freezing the whole editor) 1/2 of the times so I reverted back to atom (that for me never crashed)... Can it be that we are both using old version of the editors (atom for you and vsCode for me)? Else it seems strange this difference of behaviors
  - joshburgess 11y ago
    In the case of Atom, I don't think so, as I just updated to the recent version TODAY and had it freeze literally 3-4 times and fully crash once. I hear many people complain about similar issues with Atom. VSCode is in a much earlier development state (nowhere near Version 1.0 yet), but I've used it on Windows 8, Linux Mint, and Elementary OS without any issues whatsoever. shrug
- deleted 11y ago
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- bad_user 11y ago
shadowmint 11y ago
woo! awesome work. I use atom for everything now. ...but realizing the full potential of Atom is about more than polish. We're considering questions such as: What does super deep git integration look like? What does "social coding" mean in a text editor? How do we enable package authors to build IDE-level features for their favorite language? O_o you what? Things I'm interested in ---> A hackable, fast, extensible editor. Things I have no interest in at all ---> 'Super Deep' github integration, 'social' coding in my text editor. Dont get me wrong, atoms a great piece of work, and making it extensible for building custom tooling is really great, but what on earth are you talking about? I hope this is just 'and now we're going to make some plugins' talking...
cnp 11y ago
I made the switch yesterday not knowing 1.0 would be released today, and I am seriously psyched. Their Vim bindings are now good enough, and there are tons of tweaks you can do to make them better (which will inspire more people to contribute). I found a few bugs here and there related to installing / removing packages (just checked and 1.0 fixes them), but nothing major, and was able to migrate my mammoth .vimrc configuration file over over the course of an afternoon, with everything I need having already been developed by the community. Super fast, too. Also! I was able to create the colorscheme of my dreams in about 15 minutes, thanks to to the dev tools integration.
- jonahx 11y ago
  What are the main advantages that atom gives you over native vim?
  - cnp 11y ago
    From the perspective of a web app developer it's just so modern. The language of the interface takes all of the (admittedly subjective) best-practice lessons that the web has taught us over the years and embeds them directly in, and then lets you hack them apart however you wish -- simply. Code editing works without a thousand inconsistencies, and then you have things like embedding your terminal directly with ease (its trivial to create a tmux like environment), etc. The limitations feel very few, and as someone who spent a LOT of time getting my Vim environment exactly as I wanted it, switching over to Atom was a breeze as I went through my .vimrc trying to match functionality; most of it was already there. One thing I wish they would implement (and I'm sure it will come with time) is the ability to fully navigate the file tree with the keyboard, similar to NERDTree. All you can do right now is arrow up and down, after toggling over. I've heard its like Emacs -- and now I know what people are talking about!
    - vowelless 11y ago
      I haven't looked at Atom yet, but can it parse the vimrc file to load the right settings?
franciscop 11y ago
I am a paying customer of Sublime Text, but I will give Atom a try. They both seem really similar feature-wise, but Atom is open source, something I care about. Also is based on web technologies, which is really cool (although I've heard it's not so fast).
- stared 11y ago
  Just recently started switching for ST2 -> Atom. Key things were: - either I am getting slower or Atom is getting much faster, - some things with linting for ES6 don't work in ST2. However, for some tasks I need to open bigger files, and for them I still use ST. It's just sad it didn't go open source... (now it is too late).
- serve_yay 11y ago
  I would concur with all of that. It's very similar to sublime, to the point that I can't really justify switching. If you care about open source that is a compelling aspect, though. It pains me to say this as a JS dev, but I think basing it on web tech was a mistake. It makes the app slightly, but noticeably, less responsive. Just recently they posted a big long thing about getting scrolling to be fast. I dunno, I feel like if such things are an issue in 2015 you may have made a mistake.
  - WaxProlix 11y ago
    What did they get out of that decision anyway? There was a moment in the blurb film where the narrator says, "Atom is based on JavaScript - so it's easy to use!" What? I don't get the value proposition.
    - schneidmaster 11y ago
      The primary purpose was to make it easily hackable - since the whole thing is JS (actually CoffeeScript) and webviews, creating views and stuff is as easy as making a website. That said, I think I care more about performance. Sublime Text is just unbelievably rock solid.
niuzeta 11y ago
I remember when Atom beta came out I was turned off because it (presumably) didn't run on Windows(my workstation at the time). Then I remember trying to give it a try once again a few months ago but gave up because I've heard so many horror story about performance issues. Now I'm willing to give it yet another try because of vim-bindings and performance issue improvements. Is it at workable state?
- cgcardona 11y ago
  > Is it in a workable state? Yes, I've used atom every single day since it came out to write my daily notes in markdown and then see them rendered as markup in the markdown previewer. However after finding out about the vim bindings I've been using it as my primary text editor for the last month and I really like it. It's got 95% of the `vim` goodness that I use combined w/ the thriving package scene and being able to extend it w/ JS. FWIW here is a list of the packages which I'm currently using: https://gist.github.com/cgcardona/79fa3a6dcd329c60c290 https://gist.github.com/cgcardona/79fa3a6dcd329c60c290 * atom-fuzzy-grep * atom-jshint * color-picker * git-plus * highlight-selected * minimap * minimap-autohide * minimap-bookmarks * minimap-find-and-replace * minimap-git-diff * minimap-highlight-selected * minimap-pigments * minimap-selection * pigments * vim-mode
  - crucialfelix 11y ago
    this really enhances writing in markdown: https://atom.io/packages/markdown-writer https://atom.io/packages/markdown-writer I now write up tasks there (ctrl-t) and even switched from using org mode in spacemacs
- BinaryIdiot 11y ago
  > Is it at workable state? I would say so. I've used it as my primary code editor for several months now and really enjoy it. Yeah occasionally you can tell it's a web app running on the desktop but only because opening projects or large files is kinda slow (also an occasional JavaScript error but I haven't seen those in a least two months) but beyond that it works very well. Very speeding on my MacBook and my HP Spectre. The plugins are the best part and the primary reason I use it.
Yhippa 11y ago
I have this way of picking technologies where I will try a bunch of them at the same time and naturally gravitate to the one that works best for me. After using Notepad++, ST2, and Atom I feel that Atom works best for me. I rarely have to use Google to find out how to use some features and it's reasonably snappy. I do need to give Visual Studio Code a fair shot. Heard a lot of good things about it.
mparramon 11y ago
I wrote a small guide to set up Atom for web development: www.developingandstuff.com/2015/04/setting-up-atom-for-rails-development.html
jokoon 11y ago
Have they fixed the sluggishness ? The installer is almost 10x times as large as the sublime text installer. Please leave "web technologies" where they belong.
amoney 11y ago
So where do I get that nifty terminal they were using in the video?
- ChrisArchitect 11y ago
  yeah wow, they put some work into building that 'prop' heh. Jetsons? Needed an octocat 'Rosie'
- jssjr 11y ago
  It's here at CodeConf! https://gist.github.com/jssjr/018717ddcb81b76e1829#file-img_4044-jpg https://gist.github.com/jssjr/018717ddcb81b76e1829#file-img_...
discreditable 11y ago
I find it to be a bit depressing that software bloat has advanced to the point that we have text editors plagued with performance issues.
- deleted 11y ago
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- lispm 11y ago
  Thirty years ago people complained that GNU Emacs needed 8 megabytes of RAM.
  - peatmoss 11y ago
    "Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping"--Seems quaint now, doesn't it?
    - TheSoftwareGuy 11y ago
      A little, but at least it could open an 8mb file, not to mention a 2mb file...
  - georgemcbay 11y ago
    This is true, but if you gave emacs the 8 megabytes it wanted it ran great even at scale (lots of buffers into lots of giant open files) in my experience. OTOH (also in my experience), Atom is somewhat Eclipse-esque (though admittedly not nearly as bad as Eclipse) in that the performance problems it has at scale cannot really be solved by throwing more hardware at it... whether you are on a relatively low-end laptop or a high end pro workstation with a 3ghz CPU and dozens of gigabytes of memory, if you open just a few big (>2 megabyte) files in Atom you're pretty hosed.
  - tbolt 11y ago
    Thirty years ago 1MB of RAM was $800+ ...I would have complained too.
    - 11y ago
smaili 11y ago
Just downloaded and opened Atom for the first time, and I have to admit the look and feel is amazing! Fantastic job to all those involved! However, one thing that stands out to me, the file size of Atom.app is 203MB!! How in the world can a text editor be that large? Compare that with MacVim, which is about 27MB.
- mcao 11y ago
  It's because the shell (http://electron.atom.io/ http://electron.atom.io/) is based on Chromium, which can be quite large if you include everything. But in the future, the size should get smaller. NWJS, which is also based on Chromium, is already making efforts to significantly shrink the binary size.
- guywithabike 11y ago
  What problem does the extra 176MB present to you when you likely have 256+GB of disk storage?
  - Karunamon 11y ago
    Who said it was a problem? I wonder this too - it's a freakin text editor. A very cool text editor, but hundreds of megabytes?
  - harperlee 11y ago
    I only hace 64 in my tablet. Half of which the OS already ate. More to the point it is suspicious that such a basic functionality as a text editor has so much weight without reusing things with other programs. If every program measures itself by the same standards of size, we will all run out of disk...
  - paracyst 11y ago
    This kind of reasoning is exactly why we have even more bloated, crap software these days
  - jjawssd 11y ago
    Do not write software ever
yummybear 11y ago
Just tried to install Nuclide and Atom complained about atom.io being unavailable. Guess I know why now.
anantzoid 11y ago
https://atom.io/ https://atom.io/ is down, btw.
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isuraed 11y ago
Broke the default font, ugh! Anyone know how to get the old font back?
- wisew 11y ago
  Just add Inconsolata to your Font Family in Settings. If you want the old font size and line height too, set those to 16px and 1.3, respectively.
  - isuraed 11y ago
    thank you!
intrasight 11y ago
I had assumed this was browser-based, but upon visiting the site I see there is an installer. Can this editor run in a browser? If not, what's the point?
- xbryanx 11y ago
  It does run in a browser of sorts (http://electron.atom.io/ http://electron.atom.io/), just not the browser, you're using to read this.
harperlee 11y ago
Wow... just downloaded the windows installer version and it autoinstalled itself wherever it chose fit, without questioning, it installed shortcuts on the start menu, placed itself on an already bloated contextual menu on several file extensions as an Open option, instead on "Open with...", etc. I usually install software on my user folder on the work laptop, as I don't have enough priviledges. This time the installer worked, but why override the questions to the user, like install location, etc.? There's a standard for Windows installers, why did they ignore it? Not cool.
- 16bytes 11y ago
  To be fair Chrome doesn't ask you either, at least on the storage location. It looks like Atom puts itself in APPDATA, which is the easiest place to install because you have known permissions and update strategies. I actually like this method. I agree that I didn't like the default shortcut and context menu entries, however.
  - deleted 11y ago
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  - chii 11y ago
    i also hate that part of chrome - i don't have a fast disk on my default C drive, and i want to move my apps to a separate disk. But chrome doesn't let you do that easily...why do product teams think they can make the best choice for the user, without giving a way out? For a normal user, they can just use a default, and it should be fine. But let me choose if i want to, god damn it!
    - hobarrera 11y ago
      Can't you create a symlink to another drive, and keep chrome on the same logical location?
- Cthulhu_ 11y ago
  It's optimizing the onboarding and install process to its bare minimum. I'm sure they go "Well you don't get a choice for OSX or mobile apps either, so why should you for windows"? Actually they have a point. But Windows and PCs are not as straightforward as that.
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- notatoad 11y ago
  >Please forgive the approach no. please stop spamming unrelated stuff in the hn comments
lucaspottersky 11y ago
can it handle files larger than 2MB yet? :P Incredible promo video though!!!
dbbolton 11y ago
It's nice that they provide a .deb, but a signed repository/PPA would be really great.
tomc1985 11y ago
I always liked the Winamp approach: ship a core system with a base set of plugins, and implement new functionality via new plugins. The base system almost never changes, and version updates are simply a new payload of plugins. Why do the best plugins need to be added back to base? Why not just keep them separate. Believe it or not Firefox was originally written in this fashion, but right around the time they added built-in spellcheck, new functionality started appearing as additions to the base system as opposed to browser extensions. Why?
misiti3780 11y ago
Off topic Does anyone here use Light Table? If so - what do you think of it compared to atom?
deleted 11y ago
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drvortex 11y ago
I am loathe to install something like Atom with a 4MB limit on file size and 80 MB install size when Sublime Text does the same or better in a 8 MB install package with no limits.
- zevyoura 11y ago
  Do you really do your work on a computer where an 80MB install is a problem? No argument on the file size limit.
  - drvortex 11y ago
    Yes, I program on a netbook. I find the resource limitations useful in writing programs that are very efficient. I do mostly scientific programming, so if it runs on my netbook, it flies on my cluster.
Walkman 11y ago
Atom is the ONLY editor which cannot handle my keyboard layout properly so I can't write brackets :D ([]) I reported it on the first day when the alpha came out, still no fix for this. Let me put it this way: I CAN'T WRITE BRACKETS IN A TEXT EDITOR. LOL
- imdsm 11y ago
  Link the GH issue please.
  - Walkman 11y ago
    https://github.com/atom/atom-keymap/issues/35 https://github.com/atom/atom-keymap/issues/35
    - pacofvf 11y ago
      Have you tried this https://github.com/andischerer/atom-keyboard-localization https://github.com/andischerer/atom-keyboard-localization ? Looks like they almost fixed it.
- omegote 11y ago
  I can't use half the keybindings in my spanish keyboard lol.
  - harperlee 11y ago
    I'm on a spanish keyboard and it works for me {çñ¬#%|ª}, etc. so there might be something that you can do!
mattdeboard 11y ago
For anyone wondering, Python indentation of new lines inside lists, tuples, etc. is still broken (https://github.com/atom/language-python/issues/22 https://github.com/atom/language-python/issues/22). However, it looks like hitting tab at least allows you to manually indent the line, which is a passable bridge until it works properly. Auto-indent will completely remove any manual indentation, however, which seems like something that should be fixed.
sagarun 11y ago
How do anyone run tox from atom editor?
usaphp 11y ago
I tried atom, the only thing I liked about it was design and color scheme, the rest are superior in sublime text, so I just went ahead and created a theme/color scheme for sublime which matches atom (1). Atom is laggy, even basic file navigation using arrows can be slow sometimes (and I have a latest retine macbook pro). But the biggest issue for me is a battery usage, it reduces my battery usage on RMBP15 by 2 hours compared to sublime text, I am mostly working from remote places and having a good battery usage is vital for me. [1] - https://www.evernote.com/shard/s21/sh/cc73487c-08c9-4937-ac69-8070c9b253f5/6b957b0938a218f0/res/3d36bb47-b576-4df4-9f92-2d2e8a696b66/skitch.png https://www.evernote.com/shard/s21/sh/cc73487c-08c9-4937-ac6...
- jewbacca 11y ago
  > https://goo.gl/tF6M4C https://goo.gl/tF6M4C – this goo.gl shortlink has been disabled. It was found to be violating our Terms of Service. ---- For what an isolated anecdote is worth, I originally switched from Textmate to Sublime because I preferred Sublime's default colour scheme. Not for any trivial reason like features or "being in active development".
  - usaphp 11y ago
    First time I tried to use google shortening service and it let me down :) Not sure what kind of violation they've found in a code snipped to showcase a color scheme
- theone 11y ago
  even this evernote is not working.
therealmarv 11y ago
They should do a LOST remake of that Atom Youtube Video ;)
therealmarv 11y ago
I still cannot search for whole word expressions in directories without using RegEx, bummer.
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merrua 11y ago
I think Atom could still have better performance. It wouldn't hurt to have performance tips for package developers too (maybe it has, and I missed them).
typedweb 11y ago
Both emacs keybinding emulation packages are sub-optimal. One misses C-p, the other misses C-e, both basic editor movement commands. Not impressed.
a1b2c3 11y ago
What is this? I can't even tell. A text editor?
- TranquilMarmot 11y ago
  Uhh... go to the main page (https://atom.io/ https://atom.io/) and it says right there "A hackable text editor" It's github's text editor. It runs on "electron" which is a framework for making desktop apps. It uses node.js and Chromium.
reledi 11y ago
Congratulations GitHub and Atom team! Atom is my favourite editor for coding in, and it just keeps getting better. I introduced my team to it today (pre 1.0 release, this is a nice surprise) and they were surprised by how pleasant the experience was - just a few minor hiccups. We've tried a bunch of editors and usually stick with Sublime because it's easiest to use while pairing, but I think that will change now. Sorry for the tough HN crowd, you can never please them. Here's to Atom 2.0 <3
- techpeace 11y ago
  Hear, hear! Well done, GitHub! This will be an invaluable resource for the software development community for years to come. Congrats on 1.0.
- BenjiSujang 11y ago
  Great job from the Atom team for such an outstanding editor. Our whole company switched over from IntelliJ and never looked back. Everyone is totally thrilled.
sytse 11y ago
I'm surprised that in their vision for Atom GitHub doesn't mention integrating Atom as the webeditor for GitHub.com. I always assumed it used web technology so it could form the foundation of a online IDE integrated closely with GitHub.com It will be interesting to see if this happens and what Koding, Nitrous.io, Cloud9, CodeAnywhere, Codio and CodeEnvy will do. At GitLab we currently have no plans in this direction.
jmtucu 11y ago
I don't know why, but is very slow on my computer and I have 8Gb of RAM / i3 This message appears everytime http://i.imgur.com/hTZixD8.png http://i.imgur.com/hTZixD8.png
- mrcwinn 11y ago
  Slow on mine too, even scrolling. Sublime, on the other hand, is super fast. However great the community might be, this is a flawed concept. Native apps are better for certain things today. This is one of them.
bdcravens 11y ago
Congrats to the team for reaching this important milestone. I'm a Sublime license holder, but I use Atom as much as I can, because the more open source can win, the better. However, yesterday I was doing some complex regex's (porting a random sql dump file into a seeds.rb), and Atom kept dying, whereas Sublime was pretty much instantaneous. I'm not doing the usual "Atom is slow" drum beating, but saying some undertones of the announcement make me worry a bit. I hear discussion of things like Electron and "social coding" as the future, and I'm hoping that means that no one considers 1.0 to equate to the core editing experience being finished. It's not, and I hope the Atom team continues to iterate before moving on to new features. Being able to open files larger than 2MB isn't sexy, but it's necessary. Having to hard-kill my editor because the save dialog is trapped on my other full screen session that it won't let me get to deserves more than a "but it's open source" response. tl;dr congrats team and your core users want the best editor possible over bells and whistles
- arikrak 11y ago
  I know it's off-topic, but is regex the best way to convert SQL into seeds.rb? I'm thinking of doing the same thing, but I figured I'd use Ruby or a gem. https://github.com/rroblak/seed_dump https://github.com/rroblak/seed_dump
  - bdcravens 11y ago
    This was a data dump from a previous development effort, and the Rails app was no longer connected to that database. Moreover, it was MySQL, not Postgresql, the new target. I probably could have stood up MySQL and used that gem to achieve the same result, but honestly, while the regex is at times a bit complex, it's straight-forward, since an insert's parenthetical list of values is very close to what you pass to Model.create. Thanks for the gem recommendation though, and hopefully it'll be a better solution the next time I encounter a similar situation.
  - elinchrome 11y ago
    "...now you have two problems" Seems off base to me too.
- 11y ago
bitmapbrother 11y ago
The absolute disregard for any thanks for the Chromium team in the announcement is disgusting and a slap in the face to the foundation this editor is based on.
logn 11y ago
With the following Atom community packages, I basically have a Rust IDE: linter, linter-rust, build, language-rust, racer
BenjiSujang 11y ago
It's only fashion. There're no hard facts why someone should prefer it to vim, notepad++ or sublime or even a proper IDE like a Jetbrains product or Visual Studio.
- jjawssd 11y ago
  Correct
z3t4 11y ago
Cool video and great copy-writing. The editor still seems crude though. The new install used some old packages from a previews install that I though was uninstalled!? It also called home to report a bug without asking for permission. Then it froze after I had uninstalled the old package.
ajryan 11y ago
Is there anyone with a BGR subpixel-order monitor who has been able to configure Atom (or VS code for that matter) to do the right kind of antialiasing?
Dingler 11y ago
Pretty cool intro vid. A breath of fresh air from the typical startup/product videos I encounter everywhere. I'm excited to see how this progresses. The development appears to be extremely active, with frequent + quality updates. Spotted the new-ish Office Code Pro[1] font in use too... [1]https://github.com/nathco/Office-Code-Pro https://github.com/nathco/Office-Code-Pro
thomasrossi 11y ago
Congrats to the Atom team:) what happened to rAtom?
bobbles 11y ago
Maybe something worth pointing out.. I wanted to download this but after clicking every link I still hadn't seen a way to do it anywhere... Obviously if I go to the homepage now the first thing I see is a big download link, which is great. I think a 'download' link on the site though would be good since if anyone links ANYWHERE else it's hard to find.
- bobbles 11y ago
  Also.. installing on windows, it just says 'installation failed, contact the author'. No idea where I'm supposed to look to find the installation logs, doesn't tell you where they are...
  - bobbles 11y ago
    ...defaults to install to AppData?? How do I get rid of this crap now? No entries in the Windows Programs listing. IMO They really need to think if this is a 1.0 ready release for windows...
sagarjauhari 11y ago
Huge milestone! Congrats. And in case you're wondering about the video, well, its this 50 year old documentary "The Home Of The Future: Year 1999 A.D.": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RRxqg4G-G4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RRxqg4G-G4
tomkin 11y ago
I'm sure there's a few problems with this software, just like others. After reading some of these FWP, and the whining...I dunno, man. There are people throwing acid in the face of girls on the other side of the world, and you're all complaining about having to go into the registry and manually remove context menus. I don't know anything about Atom, but I'm willing to bet there's really nothing this software is doing that prevents you from sleeping at night.
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zippy786 11y ago
Seriously, creators of Atom, what feature did you not find in any of the current text editors that you had to built one. Let's have a editor in every language!!!
gaoshan 11y ago
Downloaded it and added Facebook's Nuclide plugin suite but many things seem to not work. the mercurial plugin doesn't appear to function at all and frequently the config section where you list installed plugins just seems to hang, without loading anything. I'll stick with Webstorm (favorite) and Brackets (favorite "Atom like" editor) and vim (favorite command line). Atom seems too buggy to me.
norman784 11y ago
I like Atom, was using for few days and I'm quite happy, also seems much like Sublime Text experience when first launch after Textmate "dies"
JoshMnem 11y ago
I'd rather write vimscript than coffeescript.
naryad 11y ago
Go To Matching Bracket taking almost 2 seconds in atom, happens instantaneously on vim/sublime.
roelvanhintum 11y ago
Nice, this is the first thing i start in the morning, use all day and close at the end of the day. I'm using Atom with monokai and linter and love it. That mid century video is hilarious.
gabeio 11y ago
I have to say amazing job to the team. My reason: last time I looked/was regularly using Atom the generic memory size was around 100mB if I remember correctly. I just checked with 1.0 and the memory size has now dropped below Sublime Text 3.0 (~70mB) to ~60mB. (OS X.10)
- tehbeard 11y ago
  Seems to still be north of 100mb on Windows machines perhaps? Same project and files open in ST3, 30mb. I may be reading it wrong though; task manager is reporting ~30mb for atom , but there's ~100mb of background processes for atom shown as well.
  - gabeio 11y ago
    Interesting, maybe they made the tabs more chrome like breaking each into separate processes.
tehbeard 11y ago
Ok I gotta ask. Is there no recent files menu? Or am I just missing where they placed it? I do like the find/replace UI compared to ST3, but the lack of a recents menu and it choking if I accidentally click a large file just aren't making me feel the need to swap to this.
Betelgeuse90 11y ago
Can anyone explain to me why startup speed is such an important factor for them? I really can't get my head around it. It's such a non-issue for me. I care so much more about general performance post-startup. I wouldn't even bring startup speed up as an issue as long as it's in the few-seconds range, which it always was for me using Atom.

1096 points by mrbogle 11y ago

Globz 11y ago

I am really tempted to give it a try but I am already all setup with Brackets and I am having a hard time understanding what are the benefits if I make the switch over Atom. I will surely give it a try a some point!

snarfy 11y ago

The site is severely hammered right now. I'd like to try it again to see if the performance issues have improved.

WorldWideWayne 11y ago
You don't have to go through their site to download it. Just go here - https://github.com/atom/atom/releases https://github.com/atom/atom/releases
tauchunfall 11y ago
Downloads are also available from https://github.com/atom/atom/releases/tag/v1.0.0 https://github.com/atom/atom/releases/tag/v1.0.0.

jscheel 11y ago

I still haven't given Atom a go. Is it worth switching from ST3?

iamd3vil 11y ago
Atom is nice but much slower than ST3. It takes 30 seconds to open a file while ST3 almost instantly loads. It's not worth switching from Sublime.
- Klathmon 11y ago
  I've been using atom for several months now, and i've never had a file take 30 seconds to open.. Granted all my devices use SSDs, but still for me it's been like 10 seconds at the worst, and currently it opens in like 3-4 (and i have about 30 plugins too)
  - iamd3vil 11y ago
    I use may be 10 plugins. The speed is improved but still the startup time is so slow. May be I exaggerated a bit, but it will be definitely around 15-20 seconds for me.
    - wisew 11y ago
      You don't have to guess about the startup time – you can find the actual startup time by searching for Timecop in the Command Palette.
agmcleod 11y ago
Comes down to preference. I still use sublime for opening really large files. But otherwise i stick with Atom. I've found when using linters, typescript compile checking and such Atom is just better. The notifications built in and such are great, where as the bottom bar for listing that kind of stuff in sublime feels archaic.
- bshimmin 11y ago
  The consensus seems to be that Atom is still much slower than ST3; I'm still on ST2, and I find it terrible for opening large files and mostly resort to Emacs for that sort of task (and anything involving search and replace with regular expressions on even moderately-sized files). Is ST3 markedly faster than ST2 and generally worth upgrading to now? (I've held off upgrading because I've always been in the middle of a project... but I'm now realising that I really am just always in the middle of a project, so I might as well just get it over with.)
  - balls187 11y ago
    The files ST3 has choked on, VIM also choked on. All other files, ST3 has performed incredibly well.
teamhappy 11y ago
I switched from Atom back to ST3 a month ago.
grayrest 11y ago
If you have a setup that works for you, probably not. Atom's main advantage is that it's in a DOM environment and people could do neat things with it but at the moment the efforts have gone into putting it roughly at feature parity with ST3.
jszymborski 11y ago
I prefer Atom, although I never was quite a ST3 super-user. The speed issues are all but gone imho (start-up is a bit slow, but I have it open almost all the time so I hardly notice). The main reason I switched was because Atom is FOSS, and that always bothered me about ST3. It's also very easy to hack on, which is nice as well.
Kequc 11y ago
Both are good editors, I haven't tried Atom in about a year. Try it and then report back.
flytwokites 11y ago
I only keep using ST because of: https://github.com/atom/atom/issues/5344 https://github.com/atom/atom/issues/5344 https://github.com/atom/fuzzy-finder/issues/57 https://github.com/atom/fuzzy-finder/issues/57
- to3m 11y ago
  People just don't seem to know how to do fuzzy searching. Xcode has the same problem. I used Xcode every day for 2 years and its fuzzy matching never once made me happy. Fortunately, I have a concrete solution: copy what Visual Assist does. Space-separated substrings. It makes it very easy to be more precise about what you're looking for, while still letting you be vague when you'd rather, and the computer never has to make a judgement call. See here: http://docs.wholetomato.com/default.asp?W193 http://docs.wholetomato.com/default.asp?W193 and search for "filtering in the dialog" (their page has no anchors! - I'm certainly not suggesting you should copy their HTML style)
rcchen 11y ago
I would say that it's at 90+ percent feature parity with ST3; the only real downside is that the package/extension ecosystem is nowhere near as mature as with ST3 right now, but that looks like it is changing very quickly. In addition, ST3 is closed source vs. Atom is open source, and that alone could be a good reason for a number of people to switch. My recommendation is to give Atom a chance, see if it fits into your workflow (whether it has native support for the languages/frameworks you work in, or if packages exist). If it works out, then you have a viable alternative to ST3 :)
- jdc0589 11y ago
  the package ecosystem isn't on par yet, but the package DEVELOPMENT ecosystem far surpasses sublime in every way imaginable. I really did not enjoy writing plugins for sublime. The development/debugging/testing experience isn't especially pleasant.
  - zzleeper 11y ago
    Agreed with the last bit. I wrote a few plugins and it drove me insane. Maybe it's the lack of tutorials or sparse documentation. That said, the new features (.sublime-syntax files instead of TM files, etc.) look very refreshing.
szastupov 11y ago
At least worth trying. I like atom a lot but it's still noticeably slower than ST3 on my late 2011 Macbook, even with SSD.
- MozMorris 11y ago
  I'm running this spec and I personally don't find the speed is an issue. I waste far more time when once a week Thunderbolt causes a kernel panic.
rev_bird 11y ago
I'm not a heavy plugin user, so I don't get a lot of the power-user benefits of ST, but the git integration alone has been worth switching. If you're editing a file under source control, it keeps track of changed segments (and files) out of the box. Nice, simple tool that's been really handy even though I only switched last week.
veidr 11y ago
No, it still fares very poorly when matched up against ST3 (or Textmate 2, or basically any high-quality native editor). It is slow slow slow, and has lots of little quirks which are clearly a result of the wacky way they decided to build a text editor. BUT.... it is way, way better than it used to be. I keep it installed and use it from time to time, to let it update itself and see how it has grown. It clearly has momentum, and computers clearly are getting faster... probably one day the slowness of it won't matter. But it still matters today -- Atom is noticeably slow on the fastest Mac notebook you can currently buy.
- MozMorris 11y ago
  Sorry be that guy who posts his specs and disagrees... :-) Running on a stock mid-2011 Air w/ 4GB Ram plus a Thunderbolt display. If it was slow, I would have switched or upgraded my machine sometime ago. Things that are slow to me are waiting for node-sass to compile on save, server-side code reloading, npm installing... and so on.
  - lvillani 11y ago
    It highly depends on your usage pattern. I usually have one long-lived instance of an editor for the project/thing I'm focusing on, but I also frequently fire up "temporary" instances for one-off editing jobs, from the terminal. The difference between, let's say, "subl ." (launch Sublime Text in the current directory) and "atom ." is staggering: Sublime Text starts instantly with a boatload of plugins; Atom starts nearly instantaneously but then takes around 5 seconds to become usable, without plugins, after repeated runs. (Speaking of specs, I'm on a late 2013 Retina MacBook Pro, 16 GB of RAM)
    - MozMorris 11y ago
      Yup, that is totally where it is slow. Would be great if they could nail that. I must be more tolerable to that startup time, perhaps I've even become used to it.
    - rplnt 11y ago
      I never close my text editor (ST2 that is). Why would I do that? So I guess Atom is not for me then?
AlexMax 11y ago
As a paying user of Sublime Text 3, I finally jumped on the Atom bandwagon a few months ago and have overall been pretty happy. It's certainly a slower editor - I have found that opening it, creating a new window, and quitting all take more time than I would like. However, I have stuck it out primarily for two reasons: 1. It's far more extensible. Sublime Text has a thriving package ecosystem, but the limitations of the extension API show up in lots of little places. Atom being browser-based comes with its downsides, but it also allows flexibility that Sublime could only dream of. 2. It's open source. Sublime Text is a great editor, but it's closed source, maintained by a single guy, and updates have slowed to a crawl. It's not something I ever felt 100% comfortable with relying on as part of my day-in-day-out workflow.
- jjawssd 11y ago
  Amazing how a single guy can outdo the design by committee that is Atom?

LoSboccacc 11y ago

what's up with name reuse these days. atom (the syndication format) may be on the verge of becoming obsolete, but it's also forgotten and irrelevant already to warrant a name reuse?

Spiritus 11y ago
I don't see the problem, they aren't even in the same domain.
- rev_bird 11y ago
  Why would we name a text editor after a particle?!!?! I THOUGHT I WAS INSTALLING A HYDROGEN MOLECULE.
- yincrash 11y ago
  Yet when you see a Hacker News headline that is just "Atom 1.0" it is close enough in the same category (tech news) where it can be confusing.
kbody 11y ago
It's not really a big deal on this case. But either case, there are so many things, unless you are competing or there is a big player with such name, I think it's fine. Also, in these cases you usually say Atom editor or Atom feed.
sehr 11y ago
Is anyone really going to be confusing a text editor and an outdated rss format
- treve 11y ago
  How is it outdated? Atom is absolutely everywhere and there's no replacement, or a need for it.
  - sehr 11y ago

sneak 11y ago

I had initially dismissed the whole thing as folly as JavaScript is really stupid, but I had someone install Atom the other day and came to learn that it is really quite an impressively great editor these days. The ease of finding and installing themes and plugins is unparalleled. Considering trying it for a week or two as my daily driver (with vim mode, of course.)

facepalm 11y ago

What is it?

rev_bird 11y ago
-_- a text editor.
a1b2c3 11y ago
LOL my thoughts exactly.

engi_nerd 11y ago

Is it still limited to only editing files < 2 Megabytes? For most people that is not a showstopper, but it may be for some.

13years 11y ago
This has been improved and no longer has this limit. However, I still find Brackets more responsive in general and is what I still use mostly. I think the future has a lot of potential though, as Visual Studio Code has demonstrated you can indeed have a very responsive editor built on javascript.
romanovcode 11y ago
No, recent patch increased the limit to blazing 4 MEGABYTES!
- hugozap 11y ago
  People editing files longer than that are certainly in the minority.
  - neverminder 11y ago
    Unless it's a CSV. Or XML. Or JSON, Or <insert another popular format>
  - debaserab2 11y ago
    Of course, but if you find yourself in one of these instances of editing a large file (search and replacing database dumps is a common use case for me), you'll be disappointed. It's easy to argue that should be left to command line tools, but ST3 actually does a pretty good job at this.
  - SCdF 11y ago
    I severely doubt that. You don't edit them every day, but: 1) It comes up sometimes, and your editor should cope 2) Having a hard file size limit so low is (to me) indicative of you doing something wrong.

hitlin37 11y ago

i have been using it for 3-4 months now and its getting there each month. Sometimes the plugins fail but this could be because of the rapid development cycle of atom. On the positive side, its a good text editor, easy interaction, plugin install super easy. A downside is that its not easy on your ram though. Consumes more than what vim would do. But overall, if you need a modern editor, this is the way forward.

melling 11y ago
How well does it support other languages other than JavaScript? Will I be able to do mobile Android and iOS development at some point, or Haskell, Go, etc?
- edvinbesic 11y ago
  Facebook has built a set of plugins for doing just this. It basically turns Atom into an IDE. Haven't tried it myself but from the videos it looks nice. http://nuclide.io http://nuclide.io
- danhardman 11y ago
  I regularly work on Go projects with Atom using the go-plus[0] plugin [0] - https://atom.io/packages/go-plus https://atom.io/packages/go-plus
  - irq-1 11y ago
    Looks like it's not working just now: Searching packages failed: atom.io is temporarily unavailable, please try again later. Also, install Mercurial before the go-plus package. See "Missing Tools" near the bottom of the page.
- hitlin37 11y ago
  i use it for some c development markdown, python, etc.
smrtinsert 11y ago
What does modern editor mean? flimsy plugin system and multiple cursors come to mind.

octref 11y ago

Congrats! I started using Atom a year ago, but at that time it was very unstable and the performance sucks so I switched back to Vim. This 1.0 still has something to pine for: some of the essential packages are still not updated for the 1.0 API (vim-mode, etc), and when processing large files it still slows down significantly, but as they say, it's now a good foundation to build upon.

bnferguson 11y ago
While I can't speak to all of your favorite packages, vim-mode is most definitely updated for 1.0 (it's very, very actively developed). If you ever did any development on packages, you may have a development version laying around preempting things. Check in ~/.atom/dev/packages and remove old versions (or git pull them up to the latest dev version). I had a super old version of tree-view for a long time this way. :)
tw04 11y ago
I get the impression that the large file issue isn't ever going to be fixed. Every time there's an update to Atom posted here on HN, and I ask about it, I get down voted into oblivion. It's a bummer too - I love the interface, I love the package, but the refusal to address opening large file makes it a non-starter for me. (No, I don't want to have two separate workflows for reviewing log files and writing code).

grandalf 11y ago

Congrats! I still prefer emacs but perhaps not for long (I use both day to day)...

brlewis 11y ago
I use emacs but might try atom when it's a true replacement possibility. How can I know it's crossed the threshold?
- grandalf 11y ago
  I'm really looking forward to emacs-like tab behavior and also now that the rate of change will slow down we'll likely see the best quality extensions rise to the top and stabilize a bit. Also looking forward to seeing Facebook's fork of Atom for React...
  - crucialfelix 11y ago
    apm install nuclide-installer it seems to run inside of Atom, not a fork
  - jfb 11y ago
    I would have switched off of Emacs for some things ages ago if not for the broken behavior of the TAB key when editing text in what seems like every other editor. No, I do not ever want to insert a \t literal. Never. Ever. And if I do, I can do it with a more ponderous key sequence. But I never do. On the other hand, I need to indent a line to the correct tab stop perhaps a BILLION TIMES A DAY. Emacs has the benefit of decades of Huffman coding for its keystrokes, and I appreciate that.
    - Sirenos 11y ago
      > Emacs has the benefit of decades of Huffman coding for its keystrokes, and I appreciate that. Huffman coding, emacs, keystrokes, ... what?
      - 11y ago

dothething 11y ago

Have they resolved the long-standing performance issues present for the last six months? I've tried using Atom numerous times, but the longer it runs, the less stable it gets.

jdc0589 11y ago
this release includes a lot of performance optimizations. Check out there blog, there have been a couple articles in the past week or two talking about some of them. I haven't been using atom for those exact reasons. Definitely going to give it a shot again now.
freshyill 11y ago
I'm brave/a masochist. I've been using it since the very start. It has come very, very far—performance especially.

joefitzgerald 11y ago

The killer feature of Atom to me is the ease with which it can be extended (via packages) and the openness to community contribution on core features. That's not a knock against any other editor (some of which share similar characteristics in this regard) – it's just what draws me to Atom. It's super easy to hack on and contribute to.

omouse 11y ago
Welcome to what I've felt with Emacs since I first used it. Might be time to work on some tutorials and examples to make Emacs easier to hack on and contribute to...
- kajecounterhack 11y ago
  I've felt largely the same about vim. I think atom is the GUI'ed equivalent of excellent extensible minimalist command line tools.
  - afarrell 11y ago
    You have felt it is easy to install, debug, and write vim plugins? As a vim user, I am super curious how?
    - palmer 11y ago
      Installing and managing plugins at least is pretty easy with pathogen and vundle.
      - kajecounterhack 11y ago
        And for writing: https://github.com/google/vim-maktaba https://github.com/google/vim-maktaba
- jflatow 11y ago
  Yes. I keep trying to like Atom because I want to have native WebView buffers while I'm editing. Every time I try it, I end up wondering how anyone can be comfortable using it. I'm not sure how much of that is due to instability that will be fixed over time, and how much is because I'm coming from Emacs. Have any experienced Emacs users found that Atom makes them more productive in any dimension? I want to like it but I can't see the light at the end of the tunnel.

lpgauth 11y ago

alias mate="atom" - old habits die hard.

rkuykendall-com 11y ago
I still keep TextMate 2 around for simple text processing. Atom treats everything like a project, which is great for projects, I don't mind my project taking 5 seconds to open, since I rarely close it. But for a little note, a copy-paste bin, or a quick regex? Textmate 2 is instant, better at larger files, and has the best find-replace window of all my editors.

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ahoge 11y ago

Eh. Why is 1.0 out already? Keyboard layouts which use AltGr are still broken. E.g. I can't type '@', '\', and 'µ'. Yes, I can't write metadata annotations or escape some characters.

coldtea 11y ago
>Eh. Why is 1.0 out already? Keyboard layouts which use AltGr are still broken. Perhaps such keyboards don't concern that many people?
- ahoge 11y ago
  AltGr is used by many layouts such as German, Turkish, French, Polish, and US International. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AltGr_key https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AltGr_key Also, this was supposed to be fixed in 1.0. I don't know why they decided to release 1.0 prematurely.
  - k__ 11y ago
    Yes, I'm from Germany and had the same problem. LiveScript is a pain with it :\
  - Nadya 11y ago
    Today I learned I can type an acute accent ´ without memorizing the "alt code" by using right alt. Now I can `quote´ in annoying ways or more ‘proper’ ways. This is life changing. It's also nifty to be able to type ¼ and ½
- GolDDranks 11y ago
  That's going to render whole countries worth of developers reconsider using Atom. AltGr is widely used at Nordic countries at least and I wouldn't be surprised if elsewhere too.
  - SamReidHughes 11y ago
    Let them speak English! This'll bring the world closer together.

Mahn 11y ago

I really want to like Atom but it's such a pity that they went for CoffeeScript instead of plain ES5/ES6.

kbd 11y ago
That's something I like about it.
tlrobinson 11y ago
Do you really care that much which dialect of JavaScript your text editor is written in?
- timr 11y ago
  It's a bit like worrying about the brand of gruel you're eating.
geoffharcourt 11y ago
That's really only a problem if you're contributing to the core, right? You can write your own packages in JS, and if you're just a user of the editor I don't see how that matters.
- lojack 11y ago
  Sure, you can write your own packages in vanilla JS. Unfortunately though all of the documentation (and most packages themselves) are all written in coffeescript. Basically, the only way you can write a plugin in Javascript is if you already know Coffeescript (at least enough to read it). It's just one extra barrier of entry for non-coffeescript developers. I personally thought about writing a simple plugin, went to the documentation and realized it was all in coffeescript with no JS option, and gave up. I simply don't have the mental capacity to learn another language that probably won't be around in 10 years.
  - eric_h 11y ago
    I wouldn't even classify CoffeeScript as another language. It's really just javascript with some syntactical sugar. It took me about 20 mins to get comfortable with it.

wodenokoto 11y ago

A lot of people complain about the slowness of the Dom/JavaScript backend, but I see a lot of potential for some really cool things, like integrated juPyter notebooks, semi wysiwyg rendering of latex and markdown and maybe drawing rendering trees or other creative things.

cnp 11y ago
Honestly, its not slow anymore between their React integration and this: http://blog.atom.io/2015/06/16/optimizing-an-important-atom-primitive.html http://blog.atom.io/2015/06/16/optimizing-an-important-atom-.... Feels ~95% native.
- VeejayRampay 11y ago
  Until you search and replace with regex that is. Jest aside, it's a great editor, thanks to everyone involved.
- spleeder 11y ago
  They dropped React a while ago.

deleted 11y ago

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swasheck 11y ago

I so desperately want to like Atom (and Code), but I have a window refresh issue with it (https://discuss.atom.io/t/display-does-not-refresh-when-focus-is-taken-off-of-atom-win7x64/15589 https://discuss.atom.io/t/display-does-not-refresh-when-focu...). This issue is still present in the current release. It seems like a minor annoyance but when it happens it really kills my productivity.

solveforall 11y ago

I was lucky enough to get a key to use Atom when it first came out. I was not very impressed at the time, with its limited capabilities, so I ended up switching to Brackets for a while. Later in my search for an editor that handles EJS, I rediscovered Atom. It really has improved since it first started. AFAIK, Atom and Sublime are the only editors that handle EJS. I also use Atom to edit JS, JSX, gradle, and FTL which work well as well. Still I stick to IntelliJ for most programming languages since I haven't found a way to get code completion, reference jumping, etc to work on Atom. Very impressive work from the Atom team and the contributors!

d0m 11y ago

Is it possible to use atom right in the browser, rather than in a separate app? I know facebook engineers have an in-browser editor.. is this atom or something else?

nulltype 11y ago
Are you talking about http://nuclide.io/ http://nuclide.io/ or some other editor?

joshburgess 11y ago

I've gotta say, honestly, I'm preferring Visual Studio Code over Atom simply due to the fact that it seems MUCH more stable and lightweight. Atom is very visually appealing, and I'm a fan of the project, in general, but it constantly freezes up and crashes on me. I think I'll be sticking with VS Code & Sublime.

euroclydon 11y ago
Visual Studio code needs to let me make CoreCLR executables on OSX and Linux, yesterday.
- ossreality 11y ago
  DNX does. Right now. You just want it to trigger 'dnu package' for you?
yulaow 11y ago
I have the same problem but VS code. I was using it for my node projects because it was very easy to use the debugger tool but it practically crashed (freezing the whole editor) 1/2 of the times so I reverted back to atom (that for me never crashed)... Can it be that we are both using old version of the editors (atom for you and vsCode for me)? Else it seems strange this difference of behaviors
- joshburgess 11y ago
  In the case of Atom, I don't think so, as I just updated to the recent version TODAY and had it freeze literally 3-4 times and fully crash once. I hear many people complain about similar issues with Atom. VSCode is in a much earlier development state (nowhere near Version 1.0 yet), but I've used it on Windows 8, Linux Mint, and Elementary OS without any issues whatsoever. shrug
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bad_user 11y ago

shadowmint 11y ago

woo! awesome work. I use atom for everything now. ...but realizing the full potential of Atom is about more than polish. We're considering questions such as: What does super deep git integration look like? What does "social coding" mean in a text editor? How do we enable package authors to build IDE-level features for their favorite language? O_o you what? Things I'm interested in ---> A hackable, fast, extensible editor. Things I have no interest in at all ---> 'Super Deep' github integration, 'social' coding in my text editor. Dont get me wrong, atoms a great piece of work, and making it extensible for building custom tooling is really great, but what on earth are you talking about? I hope this is just 'and now we're going to make some plugins' talking...

cnp 11y ago

I made the switch yesterday not knowing 1.0 would be released today, and I am seriously psyched. Their Vim bindings are now good enough, and there are tons of tweaks you can do to make them better (which will inspire more people to contribute). I found a few bugs here and there related to installing / removing packages (just checked and 1.0 fixes them), but nothing major, and was able to migrate my mammoth .vimrc configuration file over over the course of an afternoon, with everything I need having already been developed by the community. Super fast, too. Also! I was able to create the colorscheme of my dreams in about 15 minutes, thanks to to the dev tools integration.

jonahx 11y ago
What are the main advantages that atom gives you over native vim?
- cnp 11y ago
  From the perspective of a web app developer it's just so modern. The language of the interface takes all of the (admittedly subjective) best-practice lessons that the web has taught us over the years and embeds them directly in, and then lets you hack them apart however you wish -- simply. Code editing works without a thousand inconsistencies, and then you have things like embedding your terminal directly with ease (its trivial to create a tmux like environment), etc. The limitations feel very few, and as someone who spent a LOT of time getting my Vim environment exactly as I wanted it, switching over to Atom was a breeze as I went through my .vimrc trying to match functionality; most of it was already there. One thing I wish they would implement (and I'm sure it will come with time) is the ability to fully navigate the file tree with the keyboard, similar to NERDTree. All you can do right now is arrow up and down, after toggling over. I've heard its like Emacs -- and now I know what people are talking about!
  - vowelless 11y ago
    I haven't looked at Atom yet, but can it parse the vimrc file to load the right settings?

franciscop 11y ago

I am a paying customer of Sublime Text, but I will give Atom a try. They both seem really similar feature-wise, but Atom is open source, something I care about. Also is based on web technologies, which is really cool (although I've heard it's not so fast).

stared 11y ago
Just recently started switching for ST2 -> Atom. Key things were: - either I am getting slower or Atom is getting much faster, - some things with linting for ES6 don't work in ST2. However, for some tasks I need to open bigger files, and for them I still use ST. It's just sad it didn't go open source... (now it is too late).
serve_yay 11y ago
I would concur with all of that. It's very similar to sublime, to the point that I can't really justify switching. If you care about open source that is a compelling aspect, though. It pains me to say this as a JS dev, but I think basing it on web tech was a mistake. It makes the app slightly, but noticeably, less responsive. Just recently they posted a big long thing about getting scrolling to be fast. I dunno, I feel like if such things are an issue in 2015 you may have made a mistake.
- WaxProlix 11y ago
  What did they get out of that decision anyway? There was a moment in the blurb film where the narrator says, "Atom is based on JavaScript - so it's easy to use!" What? I don't get the value proposition.
  - schneidmaster 11y ago
    The primary purpose was to make it easily hackable - since the whole thing is JS (actually CoffeeScript) and webviews, creating views and stuff is as easy as making a website. That said, I think I care more about performance. Sublime Text is just unbelievably rock solid.

niuzeta 11y ago

I remember when Atom beta came out I was turned off because it (presumably) didn't run on Windows(my workstation at the time). Then I remember trying to give it a try once again a few months ago but gave up because I've heard so many horror story about performance issues. Now I'm willing to give it yet another try because of vim-bindings and performance issue improvements. Is it at workable state?

cgcardona 11y ago
> Is it in a workable state? Yes, I've used atom every single day since it came out to write my daily notes in markdown and then see them rendered as markup in the markdown previewer. However after finding out about the vim bindings I've been using it as my primary text editor for the last month and I really like it. It's got 95% of the `vim` goodness that I use combined w/ the thriving package scene and being able to extend it w/ JS. FWIW here is a list of the packages which I'm currently using: https://gist.github.com/cgcardona/79fa3a6dcd329c60c290 https://gist.github.com/cgcardona/79fa3a6dcd329c60c290 * atom-fuzzy-grep * atom-jshint * color-picker * git-plus * highlight-selected * minimap * minimap-autohide * minimap-bookmarks * minimap-find-and-replace * minimap-git-diff * minimap-highlight-selected * minimap-pigments * minimap-selection * pigments * vim-mode
- crucialfelix 11y ago
  this really enhances writing in markdown: https://atom.io/packages/markdown-writer https://atom.io/packages/markdown-writer I now write up tasks there (ctrl-t) and even switched from using org mode in spacemacs
BinaryIdiot 11y ago
> Is it at workable state? I would say so. I've used it as my primary code editor for several months now and really enjoy it. Yeah occasionally you can tell it's a web app running on the desktop but only because opening projects or large files is kinda slow (also an occasional JavaScript error but I haven't seen those in a least two months) but beyond that it works very well. Very speeding on my MacBook and my HP Spectre. The plugins are the best part and the primary reason I use it.

Yhippa 11y ago

I have this way of picking technologies where I will try a bunch of them at the same time and naturally gravitate to the one that works best for me. After using Notepad++, ST2, and Atom I feel that Atom works best for me. I rarely have to use Google to find out how to use some features and it's reasonably snappy. I do need to give Visual Studio Code a fair shot. Heard a lot of good things about it.

mparramon 11y ago

I wrote a small guide to set up Atom for web development: www.developingandstuff.com/2015/04/setting-up-atom-for-rails-development.html

jokoon 11y ago

Have they fixed the sluggishness ? The installer is almost 10x times as large as the sublime text installer. Please leave "web technologies" where they belong.

amoney 11y ago

So where do I get that nifty terminal they were using in the video?

ChrisArchitect 11y ago
yeah wow, they put some work into building that 'prop' heh. Jetsons? Needed an octocat 'Rosie'
jssjr 11y ago
It's here at CodeConf! https://gist.github.com/jssjr/018717ddcb81b76e1829#file-img_4044-jpg https://gist.github.com/jssjr/018717ddcb81b76e1829#file-img_...

discreditable 11y ago

I find it to be a bit depressing that software bloat has advanced to the point that we have text editors plagued with performance issues.

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lispm 11y ago
Thirty years ago people complained that GNU Emacs needed 8 megabytes of RAM.
- peatmoss 11y ago
  "Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping"--Seems quaint now, doesn't it?
  - TheSoftwareGuy 11y ago
    A little, but at least it could open an 8mb file, not to mention a 2mb file...
- georgemcbay 11y ago
  This is true, but if you gave emacs the 8 megabytes it wanted it ran great even at scale (lots of buffers into lots of giant open files) in my experience. OTOH (also in my experience), Atom is somewhat Eclipse-esque (though admittedly not nearly as bad as Eclipse) in that the performance problems it has at scale cannot really be solved by throwing more hardware at it... whether you are on a relatively low-end laptop or a high end pro workstation with a 3ghz CPU and dozens of gigabytes of memory, if you open just a few big (>2 megabyte) files in Atom you're pretty hosed.
- tbolt 11y ago
  Thirty years ago 1MB of RAM was $800+ ...I would have complained too.
  - 11y ago

smaili 11y ago

Just downloaded and opened Atom for the first time, and I have to admit the look and feel is amazing! Fantastic job to all those involved! However, one thing that stands out to me, the file size of Atom.app is 203MB!! How in the world can a text editor be that large? Compare that with MacVim, which is about 27MB.

mcao 11y ago
It's because the shell (http://electron.atom.io/ http://electron.atom.io/) is based on Chromium, which can be quite large if you include everything. But in the future, the size should get smaller. NWJS, which is also based on Chromium, is already making efforts to significantly shrink the binary size.
guywithabike 11y ago
What problem does the extra 176MB present to you when you likely have 256+GB of disk storage?
- Karunamon 11y ago
  Who said it was a problem? I wonder this too - it's a freakin text editor. A very cool text editor, but hundreds of megabytes?
- harperlee 11y ago
  I only hace 64 in my tablet. Half of which the OS already ate. More to the point it is suspicious that such a basic functionality as a text editor has so much weight without reusing things with other programs. If every program measures itself by the same standards of size, we will all run out of disk...
- paracyst 11y ago
  This kind of reasoning is exactly why we have even more bloated, crap software these days
- jjawssd 11y ago
  Do not write software ever

yummybear 11y ago

Just tried to install Nuclide and Atom complained about atom.io being unavailable. Guess I know why now.

anantzoid 11y ago

https://atom.io/ https://atom.io/ is down, btw.

deleted 11y ago

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isuraed 11y ago

Broke the default font, ugh! Anyone know how to get the old font back?

wisew 11y ago
Just add Inconsolata to your Font Family in Settings. If you want the old font size and line height too, set those to 16px and 1.3, respectively.
- isuraed 11y ago
  thank you!

intrasight 11y ago

I had assumed this was browser-based, but upon visiting the site I see there is an installer. Can this editor run in a browser? If not, what's the point?

xbryanx 11y ago
It does run in a browser of sorts (http://electron.atom.io/ http://electron.atom.io/), just not the browser, you're using to read this.

harperlee 11y ago

Wow... just downloaded the windows installer version and it autoinstalled itself wherever it chose fit, without questioning, it installed shortcuts on the start menu, placed itself on an already bloated contextual menu on several file extensions as an Open option, instead on "Open with...", etc. I usually install software on my user folder on the work laptop, as I don't have enough priviledges. This time the installer worked, but why override the questions to the user, like install location, etc.? There's a standard for Windows installers, why did they ignore it? Not cool.

16bytes 11y ago
To be fair Chrome doesn't ask you either, at least on the storage location. It looks like Atom puts itself in APPDATA, which is the easiest place to install because you have known permissions and update strategies. I actually like this method. I agree that I didn't like the default shortcut and context menu entries, however.
- deleted 11y ago
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- chii 11y ago
  i also hate that part of chrome - i don't have a fast disk on my default C drive, and i want to move my apps to a separate disk. But chrome doesn't let you do that easily...why do product teams think they can make the best choice for the user, without giving a way out? For a normal user, they can just use a default, and it should be fine. But let me choose if i want to, god damn it!
  - hobarrera 11y ago
    Can't you create a symlink to another drive, and keep chrome on the same logical location?
Cthulhu_ 11y ago
It's optimizing the onboarding and install process to its bare minimum. I'm sure they go "Well you don't get a choice for OSX or mobile apps either, so why should you for windows"? Actually they have a point. But Windows and PCs are not as straightforward as that.

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notatoad 11y ago
>Please forgive the approach no. please stop spamming unrelated stuff in the hn comments

lucaspottersky 11y ago

can it handle files larger than 2MB yet? :P Incredible promo video though!!!

dbbolton 11y ago

It's nice that they provide a .deb, but a signed repository/PPA would be really great.

tomc1985 11y ago

I always liked the Winamp approach: ship a core system with a base set of plugins, and implement new functionality via new plugins. The base system almost never changes, and version updates are simply a new payload of plugins. Why do the best plugins need to be added back to base? Why not just keep them separate. Believe it or not Firefox was originally written in this fashion, but right around the time they added built-in spellcheck, new functionality started appearing as additions to the base system as opposed to browser extensions. Why?

misiti3780 11y ago

Off topic Does anyone here use Light Table? If so - what do you think of it compared to atom?

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drvortex 11y ago

I am loathe to install something like Atom with a 4MB limit on file size and 80 MB install size when Sublime Text does the same or better in a 8 MB install package with no limits.

zevyoura 11y ago
Do you really do your work on a computer where an 80MB install is a problem? No argument on the file size limit.
- drvortex 11y ago
  Yes, I program on a netbook. I find the resource limitations useful in writing programs that are very efficient. I do mostly scientific programming, so if it runs on my netbook, it flies on my cluster.

Walkman 11y ago

Atom is the ONLY editor which cannot handle my keyboard layout properly so I can't write brackets :D ([]) I reported it on the first day when the alpha came out, still no fix for this. Let me put it this way: I CAN'T WRITE BRACKETS IN A TEXT EDITOR. LOL

imdsm 11y ago
Link the GH issue please.
- Walkman 11y ago
  https://github.com/atom/atom-keymap/issues/35 https://github.com/atom/atom-keymap/issues/35
  - pacofvf 11y ago
    Have you tried this https://github.com/andischerer/atom-keyboard-localization https://github.com/andischerer/atom-keyboard-localization ? Looks like they almost fixed it.
omegote 11y ago
I can't use half the keybindings in my spanish keyboard lol.
- harperlee 11y ago
  I'm on a spanish keyboard and it works for me {çñ¬#%|ª}, etc. so there might be something that you can do!

mattdeboard 11y ago

For anyone wondering, Python indentation of new lines inside lists, tuples, etc. is still broken (https://github.com/atom/language-python/issues/22 https://github.com/atom/language-python/issues/22). However, it looks like hitting tab at least allows you to manually indent the line, which is a passable bridge until it works properly. Auto-indent will completely remove any manual indentation, however, which seems like something that should be fixed.

sagarun 11y ago

How do anyone run tox from atom editor?

usaphp 11y ago

I tried atom, the only thing I liked about it was design and color scheme, the rest are superior in sublime text, so I just went ahead and created a theme/color scheme for sublime which matches atom (1). Atom is laggy, even basic file navigation using arrows can be slow sometimes (and I have a latest retine macbook pro). But the biggest issue for me is a battery usage, it reduces my battery usage on RMBP15 by 2 hours compared to sublime text, I am mostly working from remote places and having a good battery usage is vital for me. [1] - https://www.evernote.com/shard/s21/sh/cc73487c-08c9-4937-ac69-8070c9b253f5/6b957b0938a218f0/res/3d36bb47-b576-4df4-9f92-2d2e8a696b66/skitch.png https://www.evernote.com/shard/s21/sh/cc73487c-08c9-4937-ac6...

jewbacca 11y ago
> https://goo.gl/tF6M4C https://goo.gl/tF6M4C – this goo.gl shortlink has been disabled. It was found to be violating our Terms of Service. ---- For what an isolated anecdote is worth, I originally switched from Textmate to Sublime because I preferred Sublime's default colour scheme. Not for any trivial reason like features or "being in active development".
- usaphp 11y ago
  First time I tried to use google shortening service and it let me down :) Not sure what kind of violation they've found in a code snipped to showcase a color scheme
theone 11y ago
even this evernote is not working.

therealmarv 11y ago

They should do a LOST remake of that Atom Youtube Video ;)

therealmarv 11y ago

I still cannot search for whole word expressions in directories without using RegEx, bummer.

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merrua 11y ago

I think Atom could still have better performance. It wouldn't hurt to have performance tips for package developers too (maybe it has, and I missed them).

typedweb 11y ago

Both emacs keybinding emulation packages are sub-optimal. One misses C-p, the other misses C-e, both basic editor movement commands. Not impressed.

a1b2c3 11y ago

What is this? I can't even tell. A text editor?

TranquilMarmot 11y ago
Uhh... go to the main page (https://atom.io/ https://atom.io/) and it says right there "A hackable text editor" It's github's text editor. It runs on "electron" which is a framework for making desktop apps. It uses node.js and Chromium.

reledi 11y ago

Congratulations GitHub and Atom team! Atom is my favourite editor for coding in, and it just keeps getting better. I introduced my team to it today (pre 1.0 release, this is a nice surprise) and they were surprised by how pleasant the experience was - just a few minor hiccups. We've tried a bunch of editors and usually stick with Sublime because it's easiest to use while pairing, but I think that will change now. Sorry for the tough HN crowd, you can never please them. Here's to Atom 2.0 <3

techpeace 11y ago
Hear, hear! Well done, GitHub! This will be an invaluable resource for the software development community for years to come. Congrats on 1.0.
BenjiSujang 11y ago
Great job from the Atom team for such an outstanding editor. Our whole company switched over from IntelliJ and never looked back. Everyone is totally thrilled.

sytse 11y ago

I'm surprised that in their vision for Atom GitHub doesn't mention integrating Atom as the webeditor for GitHub.com. I always assumed it used web technology so it could form the foundation of a online IDE integrated closely with GitHub.com It will be interesting to see if this happens and what Koding, Nitrous.io, Cloud9, CodeAnywhere, Codio and CodeEnvy will do. At GitLab we currently have no plans in this direction.

jmtucu 11y ago

I don't know why, but is very slow on my computer and I have 8Gb of RAM / i3 This message appears everytime http://i.imgur.com/hTZixD8.png http://i.imgur.com/hTZixD8.png

mrcwinn 11y ago
Slow on mine too, even scrolling. Sublime, on the other hand, is super fast. However great the community might be, this is a flawed concept. Native apps are better for certain things today. This is one of them.

bdcravens 11y ago

Congrats to the team for reaching this important milestone. I'm a Sublime license holder, but I use Atom as much as I can, because the more open source can win, the better. However, yesterday I was doing some complex regex's (porting a random sql dump file into a seeds.rb), and Atom kept dying, whereas Sublime was pretty much instantaneous. I'm not doing the usual "Atom is slow" drum beating, but saying some undertones of the announcement make me worry a bit. I hear discussion of things like Electron and "social coding" as the future, and I'm hoping that means that no one considers 1.0 to equate to the core editing experience being finished. It's not, and I hope the Atom team continues to iterate before moving on to new features. Being able to open files larger than 2MB isn't sexy, but it's necessary. Having to hard-kill my editor because the save dialog is trapped on my other full screen session that it won't let me get to deserves more than a "but it's open source" response. tl;dr congrats team and your core users want the best editor possible over bells and whistles

arikrak 11y ago
I know it's off-topic, but is regex the best way to convert SQL into seeds.rb? I'm thinking of doing the same thing, but I figured I'd use Ruby or a gem. https://github.com/rroblak/seed_dump https://github.com/rroblak/seed_dump
- bdcravens 11y ago
  This was a data dump from a previous development effort, and the Rails app was no longer connected to that database. Moreover, it was MySQL, not Postgresql, the new target. I probably could have stood up MySQL and used that gem to achieve the same result, but honestly, while the regex is at times a bit complex, it's straight-forward, since an insert's parenthetical list of values is very close to what you pass to Model.create. Thanks for the gem recommendation though, and hopefully it'll be a better solution the next time I encounter a similar situation.
- elinchrome 11y ago
  "...now you have two problems" Seems off base to me too.
11y ago

bitmapbrother 11y ago

The absolute disregard for any thanks for the Chromium team in the announcement is disgusting and a slap in the face to the foundation this editor is based on.

logn 11y ago

With the following Atom community packages, I basically have a Rust IDE: linter, linter-rust, build, language-rust, racer

BenjiSujang 11y ago

It's only fashion. There're no hard facts why someone should prefer it to vim, notepad++ or sublime or even a proper IDE like a Jetbrains product or Visual Studio.

jjawssd 11y ago
Correct

z3t4 11y ago

Cool video and great copy-writing. The editor still seems crude though. The new install used some old packages from a previews install that I though was uninstalled!? It also called home to report a bug without asking for permission. Then it froze after I had uninstalled the old package.

ajryan 11y ago

Is there anyone with a BGR subpixel-order monitor who has been able to configure Atom (or VS code for that matter) to do the right kind of antialiasing?

Dingler 11y ago

Pretty cool intro vid. A breath of fresh air from the typical startup/product videos I encounter everywhere. I'm excited to see how this progresses. The development appears to be extremely active, with frequent + quality updates. Spotted the new-ish Office Code Pro[1] font in use too... [1]https://github.com/nathco/Office-Code-Pro https://github.com/nathco/Office-Code-Pro

thomasrossi 11y ago

Congrats to the Atom team:) what happened to rAtom?

bobbles 11y ago

Maybe something worth pointing out.. I wanted to download this but after clicking every link I still hadn't seen a way to do it anywhere... Obviously if I go to the homepage now the first thing I see is a big download link, which is great. I think a 'download' link on the site though would be good since if anyone links ANYWHERE else it's hard to find.

bobbles 11y ago
Also.. installing on windows, it just says 'installation failed, contact the author'. No idea where I'm supposed to look to find the installation logs, doesn't tell you where they are...
- bobbles 11y ago
  ...defaults to install to AppData?? How do I get rid of this crap now? No entries in the Windows Programs listing. IMO They really need to think if this is a 1.0 ready release for windows...

sagarjauhari 11y ago

Huge milestone! Congrats. And in case you're wondering about the video, well, its this 50 year old documentary "The Home Of The Future: Year 1999 A.D.": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RRxqg4G-G4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RRxqg4G-G4

tomkin 11y ago

I'm sure there's a few problems with this software, just like others. After reading some of these FWP, and the whining...I dunno, man. There are people throwing acid in the face of girls on the other side of the world, and you're all complaining about having to go into the registry and manually remove context menus. I don't know anything about Atom, but I'm willing to bet there's really nothing this software is doing that prevents you from sleeping at night.

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zippy786 11y ago

Seriously, creators of Atom, what feature did you not find in any of the current text editors that you had to built one. Let's have a editor in every language!!!

gaoshan 11y ago

Downloaded it and added Facebook's Nuclide plugin suite but many things seem to not work. the mercurial plugin doesn't appear to function at all and frequently the config section where you list installed plugins just seems to hang, without loading anything. I'll stick with Webstorm (favorite) and Brackets (favorite "Atom like" editor) and vim (favorite command line). Atom seems too buggy to me.

norman784 11y ago

I like Atom, was using for few days and I'm quite happy, also seems much like Sublime Text experience when first launch after Textmate "dies"

JoshMnem 11y ago

I'd rather write vimscript than coffeescript.

naryad 11y ago

Go To Matching Bracket taking almost 2 seconds in atom, happens instantaneously on vim/sublime.

roelvanhintum 11y ago

Nice, this is the first thing i start in the morning, use all day and close at the end of the day. I'm using Atom with monokai and linter and love it. That mid century video is hilarious.

gabeio 11y ago

I have to say amazing job to the team. My reason: last time I looked/was regularly using Atom the generic memory size was around 100mB if I remember correctly. I just checked with 1.0 and the memory size has now dropped below Sublime Text 3.0 (~70mB) to ~60mB. (OS X.10)

tehbeard 11y ago
Seems to still be north of 100mb on Windows machines perhaps? Same project and files open in ST3, 30mb. I may be reading it wrong though; task manager is reporting ~30mb for atom , but there's ~100mb of background processes for atom shown as well.
- gabeio 11y ago
  Interesting, maybe they made the tabs more chrome like breaking each into separate processes.

tehbeard 11y ago

Ok I gotta ask. Is there no recent files menu? Or am I just missing where they placed it? I do like the find/replace UI compared to ST3, but the lack of a recents menu and it choking if I accidentally click a large file just aren't making me feel the need to swap to this.

Betelgeuse90 11y ago

Can anyone explain to me why startup speed is such an important factor for them? I really can't get my head around it. It's such a non-issue for me. I care so much more about general performance post-startup. I wouldn't even bring startup speed up as an issue as long as it's in the few-seconds range, which it always was for me using Atom.