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Comment by thrillgore | Hacker News Reader

I hope they address memory consumption at some point too.

Yep, I was using Atom for 6 months, I wanted to give a solid go. But now I am back to sublime text.

I can't really put my finger on it, but sublime text is just snappy and reliable in ways that Atom isn't. Got really tired of Atom lagging because I'm typing too fast, got tired of lockups and hanging. VS Code has very simillar issues too.

It was a nice experiment (can we do editors in HTML/JS?), but I'm convinced native is the only way to go for proper editing.

Have you tried VS Code? It's very snappy in my experience, much better than atom.

Yep, been using it for a month full time so far. It IS better than Atom, but it still has snappiness problems. The embedded console is great, but not as fast as just using command prompt, it just has weird laggy moments. Using the built-in Git is also laggy, there's a delay when you click to stage a file, really annoying. The search is really laggy too, when you do a search across your app, it locks up the whole window for a second or two.

Microsoft also has this really annoying tendency to use icons for everything, every once in a while I find myself googling wtf these icons are.

neither is even bearable on a Raspberry Pi, or any old laptop of which I have many laying around the house

Sublime Text works as a simple code editor as well, while Atom has start-up times not far from those of Visual Studio.

Opening files in a running instance of ST is virtually instantaneous. Not sure if it is even possible with Atom.

What release of Atom did you use? I'm curious whether newer releases actually feel better.

I'm an emacs user myself, but am looking at whether to recommend Atom to others.

Most of the RAM use comes from its architecture (it basically runs a web browser to display the UI), so this isn't a problem that they can just address. They'd have to rewrite the entire text editor with a different technology.

So why did the developers of a text editor decide on a web browser stack for their project?

Yes, I know that the answer is "electron". They picked the wrong tool for the job.

This is actually backwards: Electron was originally created for the Atom project and even used to be called Atom Shell.

And it was the wrong tool for the job even then. Atom might be Electron's reason for existing, but that just emphasizes that Electron (in its current form) should not exist at all.

I have no problem with the idea of using Javascript for desktop application development. I do have a problem with relying on a memory-hogging framework, which Javascript was originally design to _avoid_ because back in the 90's it was meant to run in the resource-limited web browser. Too bad that Javascript has strayed so far from its roots.

> So why did the developers of a text editor decide on a web browser stack for their project?

When all you have is a hammer...

Read the blog post for Atom 1.19 then. They've been making efforts there and there's been great improvements.

Yes, by dropping into C++.

With enough C++ they might just replicate Sublime Text, vim or Emacs.

Same! This really is the only reason I don't use atom as of now

Yeah, I need to save all my ram for Slack

As good as this comment is, don't reddit on hn please.

He's being unintentionally ironic, Slack is another Electron app that's just terrible about memory.

How much does it use?

A fresh install (no plugins) for me uses about 300Mb. With plugins it can get pretty high

How much you got?

Current available RAM ^ 2

I wish I was joking but that's what it feels like sometimes

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