Wow, the GitHub hype machine is working extra hard these days. I think this is at least the 5th article that hit the front page about Atom in the last couple of days.
Are we still seriously discussing a closed source, non-free, Mac only Sublime Text clone that was written in Javascript and as it turns out, is painfully slow?
Say what you will about Proggit, but at least the discussion there isn't all "OMG I can switch from Sublime now!!!". Jesus Christ.
I prefer to stick with and editor that, for the last several years of using, I completely don't understand, and likely never will.
So I use emacs.
I don't really get all the IDE hype outside of what I consider to be the big 3 required ones (due to vendor restrictions or in AS's case, isn't Eclipse): VS, XCode, and Android Studio.
For the rest, it seems that vi and emacs do what would be needed, and work on everything. Why not just improve on those two products instead of making new ones that are simply short lived fads?
> For the rest, it seems that vi and emacs do what would be needed, and work on everything. Why not just improve on those two products instead of making new ones that are simply short lived fads?
While I get why new editors pop up, and really, I'm glad we have people trying to innovate and introduce new ideas, I'm ultimately more interested in stuff like the Neovim project, for this reason.
I will say it's nice when someone creates a new product that has a killer feature or two, because some form of that seems to make it's way back to vim/emacs pretty often.
I think that those two did things that you could not have hacked into their predecessors without esentially making a whole new editor, so you may as well go ahead and write a whole new editor.
OTOH I don't know if that's the case for vim, which is what people seem to mean these days when they talk about vi.
vim is not vi. vi is actually quite painful to use, especially when you're well versed in vim. when there are almost no features in your editor, those modes are not all that helpful. it's also a fraction of the codebase of vim
vim also has a pretty horrible codebase. horrible not because bad developers are working on it. horrible because of historical reasons. but neovim is actually in the process of doing what everyone said nobody could do.
He specifically said: "...if that's the case for vim, which is what people seem to mean these days when they talk about vi"
He didn't say it was vim. You took it as your opportunity to express your Opinion, since he mentioned something you care about, but just look like the kid in class raising his hand as high as he can yelling "Me! Me! Pick me!".
Did you actually read the article or the HN comments? Both are fairly critical of Atom. "There's no such thing as bad press," maybe, but just talking about something doesn't mean you're trying to hype it up. God forbid we discuss current events on Hacker News.
Yes Proggit instead has a ton of posts about how this is shit and, "Why do I need this when I have [emacs/vim]?" when none of them have tried it.
The general population of HN seems to cares enough to upvote them (original post has 1300pts which is high) so either write an extension to block them or just ignore them and upvote other articles. GitHub has a lot of good will with people who read HN so of course articles about them will be popular. See: whenever GitHub goes down.
Same thing happens with bitcoins and pretty much any other popular topic.
> Yes Proggit instead has a ton of posts about how this is shit and, "Why do I need this when I have [emacs/vim]?"
With the risk of sounding like a prick, I share this sentiment. People who like to hack their editors already use vim/emacs. Those who don't, are happy with whatever they're using.
Sublime Text proved exactly how quick a closed source editor can fall out of favor with people. Its 3rd iteration wasn't even released, and you already hear as much complaint about it as praise.
it's what people are talking about right now. after a while the conversation will move on to something else, and there'll be a bunch of posts about that, and a bunch of people complaining that it's taking up their front page. attention moves in waves across the net; it doesn't need a hype machine to stir it.
It's closed source
It's Mac only
Written in Javascript
Painfully slow (compared to Vim)
probably don't matter much for many HN users. The things that do matter (powerful text manipulation, batch editing, block editing, multi-select, etc) are being handled by this editor. That's fine.
Please don't show up and start saying "STOP LIKING THINGS I DON'T LIKE!!". It's not helping.
Have you read the article you are commenting on? It talks about the exact opposite:
> Compared to Atom the search [in Textmate] is blazing fast.
> Doing regex searches in vim on that file is instant. The memory barely moves. Searching for the character d takes almost 10 seconds in Atom, and significantly increases memory usage. When I say significantly, I'm talking 200 megs.
That doesn't mean powerful anything to me. Especially not text manipulation.
EDIT: Also, I don't care if people actually like things. What bothers me is blind fanboyism/praise for something people used for 2 days at the max.
I'm pretty convinced to stick with vim at this point, myself, and see where the neovim project goes, but I thought I'd throw out that when I think of "powerful text manipulation" I'm not necessarily thinking of how fast it takes to do basic operations.
For instance, I messed around with sublime text and I really dug how it handled multiple cursors. I'd never say something like vim couldn't do that, but sublime (for me) made multiple cursors seem intuitively powerful and useful, in that I could perform quick operations in seconds that I wouldn't have thought to perform in that way before.
I'd say it's similar to me if you were to compare regex find/replace with normal find/replace. It's a more powerful/flexible idea. Whether or not it's a good one is up for grabs.
That said, the speed does sound like it could be a problem. I just don't think power text manipulation is referencing processing efficiency.
I'm wondering how the efficiency of this setup is played out in stuff like Light Table and Brackets, which seem pretty similar (I think the front end on those is just html? I could be totally wrong). And like I said, so far I'm way more interested in neovim than any of the newer other browsers.
CodeMirror has had a ton of work put into it and Light Table mostly rides on that. Opening a 40kloc javascript file and searching in it is totally smooth. Auto-complete, jump-to-definition etc are fast and don't block the UI. We still have performance issues in places (eg watching large directories which change often, serialising large inline results) but we haven't had any problems with the DOM being too slow. CodeMirror deals with all of that for us.
I'm playing around with React (and Om, Quiscient etc) at the moment and it's by far the nicest UI model I've ever encountered. If I could get Cassowary working reasonably fast too it would be miles ahead of anything else.
The only thing that I don't see improving soon is not having shared memory threads (or even zero-copy messaging). Webworkers are all well and good but sometimes the serialisation overhead is still enough to block the UI. thread.
I agree 100% about React - I can't help but think that an editor based upon it could really speed up all the DOM manipulation that holds back every webkit-based desktop app.
Re: Web workers, this probably isn't news to you but you can use transferable objects [1] to eliminate the serialization hiccup. Of course, if you're really trying to share objects across threads in real time, rather than transfer data, parse, and fire events, you may have bigger issues.
Agree, IMHO speed is everything, and the fanboyism of some people about this make me little bit uncomfortable, i was rolling my eyes every time that i read something like "is so pretty, look at that dark colorscheme, i am gonna switch now", sigh -_-.
> Painfully slow (compared to Vim) - don't matter much...
I disagree. Speed is the biggest thing that matters to me, the reason I switched to SublimeText couple years ago and still am using it right now is because it's blazing fast (especially ST3).
Everyone, stop talking about stuff I don't like. Since I'm so self-absorbed that I can't possibly comprehend someone not having the exact same opinions as me, this is obviously some kind of marketing hype machine at work.
Did it ever occur to you that people react to big things from big companies? No, of course it didn't, which is why you came on here and threw a tantrum.
How about this: go back to proggit and stop whining here.
Text editors were a big thing in the 1970's. Forty years on building one in the browser feels like...a text editor in the browser. There's a use case or two for it, but throse are mainly not having ssh and wanting to write extensions in JavaScript.
JavaScript is a great language but it won't get Atom to Emacs for the same reason that SICP in JavaScript peters out in chapter 2. The design tradeoffs in the language come due. What is rather surprising about Atom is that the great advantage of Browser+JavaScript+html, ease of cross platform development, is nowhere to be found in the initial release. What is perhaps more surprising however is that the only version is for Mac rather than that hacker's favorite, Linux.
I don't have anything against Atom, but for me it doesn't inherit Github's awesome sauce.
Are we still seriously discussing a closed source, non-free, Mac only Sublime Text clone that was written in Javascript and as it turns out, is painfully slow?
Say what you will about Proggit, but at least the discussion there isn't all "OMG I can switch from Sublime now!!!". Jesus Christ.