Hacker News Reader

Comment by casperc | Hacker News Reader

I would really like to use it too, but the latency while typing is killing me whenever I try.

I have tried to use it in my projects, but it's so slow that I couldn't go on. The last thing I want is feeling as if I am in a slow motion movie. Maybe I need a very speedy processor.

I agree, it's a neat app, but it's got to be the slowest text editor I have seen in two decades.

I have started using Brackets more and more for HTML and CSS editing, however.

Wow, I kinda thought this was me today. I was doing some Elixir at work; Atom seems to have the best Elixir support currently. I think I was chalking it up to running in a VM, but I run VS Code in the same VM with no lag issues. Hopefully the Elixir plugins will be brought across to VS Code soon-ish.

With a million active users, why wouldn't you hope that the large number of active developers could fix the latency?

"Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow." - Linus Torvalds

At any rate, I downloaded it to try it out for a few days. I didn't notice any initial latency. My current editors are Sublime and Xcode but I still use Emacs and vim on occasion.

Atom is in competition with Brackets (Ace), Visual Studio Code (CodeMirror), Advanced Editor (Ace), to cite only the free software. All the others are quicker. I wonder how they get all these users.

Brackets was first but has gotten inconsistent attention being under adobe's wing. I'm hoping it being taken to use as the code editor in dreamweaver will see even more performance work done on it. But I've not seen any releases since then.

Atom, from github has no "we also make" worries the developers might wedge in there.

VS Code was last to the party.

I still use brackets but I installed Atom last week to have a go with. I was pleased with what comes out of the box. (context): I used to use sublime since (roughly) just before 3.0 builds were announced then used brackets from around 1.0.

sublime and brackets used to really crawl until I excluded things like .git and node_modules form their search tools. Perhaps Atom is similar for people?

The worst is better mantra might have some grains of truth to it.

Small correction: Brackets uses Codemirror, Visual Studio Code uses its own editor called monaco, Advanced Editor (if you mean the wordpress plugin) uses Codemirror as well, Ace is used by c9.io and RStudio for example.

I'd expect some part of their users are people who have it installed, and check from time to time if it became faster or not, but the main thing making it popular is the promise of being easily extensible.

You are right, Adobe Brackets is in the list of CodeMirror users. But I mean Advanced Editor based on Node.js and Ace (https://github.com/Scriptol/Advanced-Editor). VSC uses Electron, hence the confusion, but not Atom and Codemirror.

I'm the type of person who needs 60 FPS in games and don't notice any latency while typing in Atom. The characters appear instantly on keydown.

Are you using the latest version? Performance did increase quite a lot since 1.0.

What latency? I've been using it for months and I've never noticed any lag. Yes, it's bloated compared to Sublime, but it works damn well in my experience.

The very noticeable latency that can be observed between the moment when you press a key and the moment when, far too many milliseconds later, the letter appears on the screen.

I suppose it's subjective/a matter of habit. I have a colleague who uses Atom and I tried it on his workstation, because I desperately wanted to like Atom so that I can finally put Emacs away and leave the 1980s behind. He swears it's fine, but the lag is driving me mad.

I'm not a super fast typist (110-120 wpm on a good keyboard, and I certainly don't type that fast when I'm coding because I don't think that fast). But I don't look at the keyboard when I'm typing and the lag is very triggering.

Ah, that old girlfriend Emacs. You are tired of her and want to leave her for some young one, but she is still the best by a large margin :)

Yes, that is why I switched to VSCode

Reply on news.ycombinator.com