glad that SublimeText is back the day Atom gets opensourced!
Atom is now opensource
Jimbzo
#2
The only reasonable way for ST to survive is going the way of atom.io - opensource it and let donations flow in (today’s situation with ever-lasting trial versions of ST is practically donations anyway)
As good as atom.io is, it will never match ST’s performance, given the technology stack they chose, but they will have a bunch of interesting features is no-time because of the manpower.
Come on jps, let us help you make ST even better! 
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veenified
#3
Excuse my ignorance, but what in the Atom stack limits its performance? Is ST built on python? How is ST better?
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Jimbzo
#5
Just to drive the point home, atom is so slow and bloated that I was unable to open a 5 mb xml file (a fraction of what ST handles without problems.) Yes, I use syntax coloring editors for editing huge xml files at times.
A webkit editor is a highly flexible approach, but it also severely limits performance. Someone gave the analogy of hitting F5 in Chrome everytime you press a key in Atom. Given the rendering stack, that’s actually more true than you want it to be.
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jbrooksuk
#6
I think that Atom has some amazing features that Sublime could benefit from and love using Atom, except… it’s slow. Really slow.
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facelessuser
#7
I thought I would port some plugins to atom to test it out. But it was so slow, I quickly abandoned it. It just ins’t worth my time in its current state.
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mark4
#8
I dont need “the best” editor to create my code in, I just need one that is good enough to do it and which doesnt make my TEETH ITCH every time I have to use it (read eclipse etc). If I decide that editor ‘X’ what ever editor that might be is good enough for my purposes I purchase the license for it and thus encourage it’s developer to continue it’s development.
I could care less about editors A, B or C or wahtever features they do or do not have compared to editor X as I have already picked X.
That being said, I honestly believe that the editor I chose to support IS the best one available
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qgates
#9
On the subject of performance, @Jimbzo, jbrooksuk & facelessuser. I don’t use Macs often so I’ve only had cursory “play” with Atom but it certainly felt much less responsive than sublime, especially with bigger (not massive) files and big multicursor ops. Bearing in mind the Mac in question was a nice £3500 maxxed out i7 with 24G RAM and a 3T hybrid drive. It didn’t feel awful, then again, I didn’t throw anything heavy at it.
However, Sublime seems to run well on just about anything. I have an old kickabout laptop with 1.5G RAM and a celeron chip (yucky) running Linux Mint 13 MATE and Sublime runs just as nicely on there as it does on my Thinkpad T430 and overclocked i7 PC workstation. The above SO post and comments sum it up fairly nicely; Atom’s codebase isn’t even close to native so performance will suffer due to the full-fat middleware of the webkit/browser and other layers. These “problems” are the exact reason for some of Atom’s cool flexibility, and in turn some of Sublime’s lack of flexibility. The difference it that if Jon wants to amp up Sublime with expanded features and api’s he can, whereas Atom will always suffer with its limitations performance-wise.
It’s interesting to speculate on Atom’s open-source announcement today. My take on it is that the Github guys are fully aware that performance is somewhat sub-par and, as such, it’s difficult to make Atom a chargeable product since most of its value-adding will come from plugins. The “Into the Future” section from the blogpost talks about performance enhancements so I suspect that’s been the biggest complaint from users. How much room for improvement there is remains to be seen, because imo these limitations come about from the design and platform choices for Atom itself, but there might be scope for optimisation. I also find it interesting that, in spite of Atom’s software abstraction, it won’t work across all the platforms, suggesting to me that there’s hacky stuff going on under the hood. Lastly - and just a wild opinion - I have a sense that there’s mild disappointment within the Atom team.
Atom feels like a bit of a prototype at the moment; I wouldn’t want to do any heavy development work with it. Sublime is damn stable and handles whatever I throw at it: typically many windows, tabs and long work sessions. Over many months of development I’ve only had one full on crash, although I do have some complaints about performance in edge-cases eg. handling of very long lines and very large files. Such situations could be resolved with some changes to the core editing code and are down to Jon’s choice of algorithms in that regard.
It would be lovely to see the pace of Sublime’s development ramp up a bit, and for Jon & co to be a little more responsive to repeatable bug reports and other little problems. Few are showstopping for most but Sublime has them aplenty. If Atom gets more performant and stable, it could be a useful complementary tool for “on the go” or lightweight editing tasks. But unless there are drastic improvements to performance I’d be surprised if serious programmers would choose it for their daily driver.
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koriolis
#10
Now that it’s totally OpenSource under a very liberal MIT license Atom development will go into high gear.
Performance will be key but I have no doubt at all that it will be sorted.
The real issue is the render - Chromium - not having the necessary performance.
But this is really a native vs web discussion. And who is betting on html5 and web being as performant as native?
Well, Google.
Atom, being built using Chromium it will get some love from Google whose ChromeOS is lacking a decent IDE editor that can sell the OS (and laptops) as the quintessential Dev Machine. I wouldn’t even be surprised if Atom is also packaged as a Chrome App. There’s already a Sublime Text Clone out there packaged as a Chrome desktop app - attention @jps this is PAID! subtexteditor.com/ - so I guess it’s only a matter of time.
You can certainly infer some of this by Addy Osmani and others from Google talking about the Atom IO with high hopes.
And they are heavy users of Sublime and responsible for a big part of it’s popularity boost.
Chromium Apps will get performant because there’s still a lot of options to get there and get there fast! Specially with Google helping along.
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quodlibet
#11
I’ve been feeling a little left out, as I work and play in Win/Lin environments and haven’t had a chance to tinker with Atom.
I’m glad to hear it’s clunky and terrible and not at all worth considering at the moment.
Alex
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