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>Atom takes longer to start up than text editors like Vim and Sublime Text because of the dynamic architecture of the app. The majority of our code is written in JavaScript as opposed to C or C++, which is important for Atom’s extensibility, but makes it more challenging to ensure that the app starts quickly.

Yet Microsoft's VSCode, which is also Electron based, is much faster than Atom. Electron obviously slows it down, but Atom's refusal to admit their performance issues for so long are also to blame


From the atom FAQ in answer to the question "Atom feels slow or is consuming too much CPU or memory"

"Atom isn’t designed to be a tiny native-code editor. If the ultimate in speed is what you’re after, Atom probably isn’t what you’re looking for at least for now … and possibly not ever depending on what you’re expecting."

I tried Atom as an alternative to Eclipse, about 3 months back, as I consider Eclipse to be pretty bloated and slow, but Atom made Eclipse look like a speed demon. I tried running with --safe, removing plugins, but nothing seemed to help, it was still painfully slow. Perhaps it's my machine or some other local issue, but I run Eclipse with lots of plugins and it runs great, in comparison.

After reading the above in the FAQ and many many posts about how Atom was running slow and the responses those issues received, it seemed to me like they actually do admit there are performance problems but have the attitude of "That's just how it works, if you don't like it use something else"


I don't know why you would characterize it that way when they very clearly describe what they've done to improve this and their plans to improve it further. I wish every company would "refuse to admit" the same way!


Because their direct statement, at the end of the day, just unilaterally shifts blame to Electron for something that is partly their fault. So while they do have improvements in 2017, and it's great to see their steps for the future, they still have a fundamental issue in not admitting that they are slower than their direct competitors, who also are burdened by the same issues Atom is saying are the reason for their performance.


I found it strange that they mention Vim and Sublime Text without mentioning VS Code anywhere.


most of their fans will switch to VS Code if they found it, not so for ST and Vim


Vim and sublime aren’t their competitor while vs code is.


Emacs starts reasonably quick and it is written in a very extensible language.


The problem I believe is not with the startup time. If you load bunch of scripts in your emacs, it also gets sluggish at start. The way Emacs people solved this problem was to use a server client architecture and run Emacs as a daemon.

I think the real problem Electron apps face is that rendering everything on the DOM is really expensive. I still remember the VS Code bug that caused a huge battery consumption because the gif they used to display the blinking cursor was in a high resolution.

Emacs was critisized, heck even banned from uni labs back in the day, because it used too much RAM. Now the time has come for us to mock Electron based editors :).


> I still remember the VS Code bug that caused a huge battery consumption because the gif they used to display the blinking cursor was in a high resolution.

I believe that was actually due to a quirk in the way CSS animations worked in Chrome. It was fixed by changing to setInterval which is what was used before. GIF animations were proposed, but AFAIK never actually used.

Here's the GH issue: https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/22900


I don't know if this is still true, but for many years emacs used a horrible hack called "unexec" to obtain this startup performance.

https://lwn.net/Articles/673724/


That sounds similar to the "snapshot" feature Atom is using.


It was only true for glibc as well, and its no longer true as unexec got ripped out of glibc recently as only emacs was using it.


I just started writing a GAE Python app, and I needed a good, free editor for my Mac. I chose vscode, and it's been superb. Hitting shift+cmd+p for any command, the python tooling, and the default keyboard bindings are great.

I wouldn't recommend switching away from Visual Studio to vscode, for .NET work, but for a new language/project, it's a great choice.

So now I started editing an asciidoc file in vscode on windows, since it's a productive text editor, but the back, forward, previous, next, kill, killall key bindings are all Windows-like and not Emacs/Unix like. Fortunately, it's was easy to add the six bindings in their fancy settings cascade text editor.


I know that vscode has a lot of non-electron native code baked in as well, which I'm assuming atom has far less of.


Does it? I've not heard this myself, and the GitHub page says there's no native code in the main repo: https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode


whoops, maybe I've heard wrong then.


Apparently they use a lot of windows apis and dlls -- except that it works on linux and there's no c/++ to generate a dll, and I forget where I read that. (Somewhere on HN.)


Also isn't the majority of Sublime Text written in Python which in my experience is slower than JavaScript.


The majority of Sublime Text is written in C++, it's extensible using Python.


No, common misconception. It just has Python bindings for extensions.


It is not "much faster" at all, both are horribly slow. (I can see how one would be convinced VSCode is fast if they're comparing it to Visual Studio which has absolutely abysmal performance). Though I could be convinced with newer benchmarks. All I could find was this experiment from a year ago that shows Atom and VS Code opening within a fraction of a second of each other, but Sublime and TextEdit beating both of them by an order of magnitude:

https://blog.xinhong.me/post/sublime-text-vs-vscode-vs-atom-...


>if they're comparing it to Visual Studio which has absolutely abysmal performance)

how? it's slow to start, sure, but once it's started it's not noticeably slow.


>Whilst I think you would be an idiot to run unknown software on your home network

Kodi is very well known and respected, it's the new/rebranded version of XBMC (XBox Media Center) - it's been around for quite some time


Asking because I don't know, is it well known outside of tech circles?

I've read about (and seen) Rpis sold as "attach this thing to your TV to watch football". So I wonder if people buy it for that or because they respect XMBC


>On the one hand they are doing all the right things in terms of supporting FOSS

Could always end up as Embrace, extend, extinguish v2.0 - but here's hoping they get it right this time

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish


The best embrace and extend strategy would be to include lots of FOSS software pre-installed, and have an app store with more open source options. Windows could then be sold as a "batteries included" premium product. The average consumer would have no idea that the software was initially developed by someone else, and why would they even care. It would show a clear advantage over IOs and Android. And it is what a lot of customers actually want.


I use Atom over Sublime simply because Sublime doesn't support touch screen scrolling, and it's just second nature for me to touch and drag my screen when scrolling now.

VSCode is apparently faster than Atom, and I sped Atom up considerably by disabling languages that I rarely/never use. Timecop plugin does wonders for tracking down the slow plugins


Man, I'd really like if they'd just add a default hotkey for 'Open Folder'. I know you can custom map hotkeys, but for an editor that's supposed to be 'easy to use out of the box', it's still lacking some basic features.

That being said, it's nice that they're improving it still


Hitting F1 for the command palette tells me that the default shortcut for Open Folder is Ctrl+K Ctrl+O


Even better, Open Recent is Ctrl+R which is handy enough I might remember it.


Huh, I guess it just isn't shown on the file menu then. Thanks!


>This is what happens when major decisions can be determined a simple majority vote. What does 52 to 48 mean? It means UNDECIDED. Half the country feels one way, and the other half feels the other way. For a change this large, it should require at least a 60/40 vote. If the population is undecided

It's important to point out that most of the UK jvoted to leave, where as every province (do they have provinces?) in Scotland voted to remain. It's a tad ironic considering Scotland voted to remain in the UK the other year - but I think they'll be leaving the UK soon.

I don't think the UK should remain because the vote was close, as once the Scottish vote is removed, it's much more than 52/48


> The EU is not only about trade regulations, but about a continent who had a not very peaceful history finally growing together.

I feel like the EU has been becoming more of a ruling political power than just the trade regulator it began as. I think the recent increase in EU laws is what set this into motion. I agree that the EU is beneficial for trade, but I don't understand why they've started trying to make political moves impacting citizens day to day lives


>nothing else I know of has message snoozing. ANY suggestions welcomed.

The new Outlook mobile apps support scheduling for later. I don't think it's as nice as Mailbox was (with multiple choices for when to schedule) but it's the closest thing I know of.


Is there any solid proof that all of the links you shared were actually done by the employee who contacted Cryptome? It seems the pastebin could have been done by anyone, I don't see anything linking these accounts to the individual cited in the Cryptome page.

Edit: Not saying that the Cryptome article is/isn't real, I'm just curious if there's proof of past bad mouthing and mental instability



They fixed the OP issue by now, but this still works..


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