Atom Reaches 1M Active Monthly Users

[grinich]

The most fantastic thing about Atom to me has been the underlying technology-- specifically Electron, which is a novel combination of Chromium and NodeJS.

We at Nylas built an email app that originally was a fork of Atom, and now runs on Electron (which is evolving way faster). http://github.com/nylas/n1

I honestly think that Electron is the future of desktop software, and it all started with Atom. Hats off to those folks for continuing to invest in this project!

(also, zcbenz is a complete badass who doesn't get enough credit)

[sz4kerto]

> I honestly think that Electron is the future of desktop software

I like your software but this statement makes me sad -- it's really not a great situation where a desktop software is written in a language that's not exactly great (to say the least); it runs on the top of countless abstraction layers that make the product comparatively very slow. I have 20 CPU cores and 64G RAM, and Slack starts much slower (!) than MS Word 2016.

[lewisl9029]

As much as I'd love to use something like Nylas, the deal-breaker for me was its sync engine. Having a third party store and index all of my emails just isn't an option for me, and I can't justify jumping through hoops to host it myself when I can just use a client that doesn't require any server-side component.

[samueloph]

[ot] N1 is great, too bad I can't recommend to pretty much anybody because there's no translation support.

The bug is open since October 2015, has 50+ comments and no feedback from devs. https://github.com/nylas/N1/issues/24

IIRC Atom doesn't have translation support either, I wonder if it has something to do with Electron.

[nish1500]

Just switched over from Sublime to Atom yesterday. Couldn't be happier. The community around Atom is active, and exciting, much unlike Sublime Text.

I hope subsequent updates make it faster, since ST still has an edge there.

[wmeredith]

I also made this switch recently. I'm loving it.

[bithush]

How is Atom for non-web languages such as C?

[transcranial]

Congrats! Atom may not be perfect (no editor is), but it's constantly and consistently improving, which is a lot more than one can say about most other editors.

For those who use Jupyter: there's a package called Hydrogen that let's you run your code directly within Atom using Jupyter kernels (not just python!). To me, that's the perfect example of the power of a hackable editor.

[matt4077]

Is there a way to get Jupyter-style layout as well? I'm intrigued by the idea of completely different style of writing code where, essentially, comments become first-class citizen and include markup (markdown rendered immediately when the cursor leaves the comment or even rich-text editing), diagrams, links etc.

I tried to implement it but Atom just wasn't there at the time. The new block-level decorators should make it possible.

[saberworks]

Is anyone else creeped out that this desktop application phones home every time you start it? Is this just the new normal now?

[smarx007]

It checks for updates automatically, so I think that gives them the stats, same should be valid for Sublime.

[bgammon]

I have no idea what the system is, but it could be something as innocuous as automatic updates. In reality, they probably do send some form of diagnostic information, but since the application is open source, it seems unlikely there would be no way to disable that if it exists.

[Atom4966]

I find it really creepy too. I think it's now become a part of the culture of both the Atom and VS Code communities. If you bring it up everyine rushes to tell you about how to disable the metrics package while ignoring the other packages that sends data to bugsnag. In the case of VS Code there are instructions to disable it by editing the code which means that when you update, it'll be reverted. At the same time, automatic updates are enabled by default, so it effectively can't be disabled. There are also several popular plugins for both editors that come with analytics on by default with minimal to no mention of this in their descriptions.

[jsprogrammer]

If that creeps you out, you should probably run a completely closed firewall, where you specifically enable applications' access to the network. I don't know if it is new normal, or old normal, or even normal, but many applications have been doing it for a long time now.

[Igglyboo]

Not really, automatically checking for updates on startup is very commonplace with desktop applications.

[sigzero]

You can turn it off.

[tdicola]

It was the new normal like 15 years ago. Almost every major application phones home to deliver bug reports, telemetry, check for updates, etc. Read the terms and conditions of apps when you install them next time.

[tlrobinson]

Pretty much. Almost everyone does it, if only for software updates. I block the obvious ones like Google Analytics using Little Snitch.

[tacone]

Yes it is. Visual Studio for Linux also does the same thing and, unlike Atom, there's no opt-out.

[bithush]

So does Sublime Text if you have auto-updates enabled.

[amykhar]

This is the first time I've opened a discussion about Atom where all the top posts weren't about how horrible and slow it is. Has it gotten better, or have people who know better just given up on this editor?

[grinich]

It has gotten WAY faster.

[blisterpeanuts]

I'm a confirmed Emacs user since the early 1990s. But when I saw Atom in use on a Youtube tutorial video, I decided to try it. Always interested in finding out what "the young'uns" are using.

It's a pretty nice editor, actually. I like the tabs approach; I like the restore at startup. Colorized text works well and detects file types correctly even without filename extension.

I notice there's an atom-macros module. Nice. For me, nothing replaces Emacs... yet... but one of these new kids might sooner or later fit the bill.

[tombert]

I'm actually kind of happy about this. While I don't personally use Atom at all, I think it's good that an open source editor is getting extremely popular.

Much as I like Sublime Text, the fact that it's proprietary has prevented me from using it.

[shmageggy]

> Much as I like Sublime Text, the fact that it's proprietary has prevented me from using it.

Same here, and when I recently ran into some built in limitations with gvim regarding its inability to easily deal with proportional width fonts, I switched to Atom. I've been really happy so far -- the vim mode plugin is nice. Atom isn't perfect, but it's good enough for now, and the extensibility model makes me confident that it will just keep getting better.

[superplussed]

The only thing that keeps me from using Atom, and I admit that this might seem trivial, is how much I hate the delay before the syntax highlighting loads. Somehow it's an immersion-breaker for me, and a deal breaker. Anyone know if this issue is being worked on?

[vdnkh]

Is it me, or are there horrible stability issues on Windows 10? I cannot have more than one editor open without one of them crashing. This is an issue on 3 of my W10 machines.

[ardzoht]

It is definitely not you, having issues as well, that's what has been keeping me from jumping the ship from Sublime Text.

[tambourine_man]

I just now tweaked my vimrc to be a bit nicer on remote ssh servers. Atom seems to be getting cooler every day, but I just can't see myself parting from Vim. Not yet anyway.

Another thought just stroke me as well: everywhere I look I see Atom, it seems like almost everyone has adopted it. If that everyone is just 1M, our world is very small indeed.

[qz_]

Atom is very nice. The Emacs of 2016.

[dguaraglia]

Except for the whole "run anywhere with a terminal", "high quality packages with decades of bugfixes" and "pretty much extensible in every way".

(I'm a Vim user myself, but I feel like comparing Atom to Emacs is a big... optimistic. People keep complaining about how slow Atom is, how much memory it hogs up, etc. I think it needs at least a few more years of maturation before being able to call it "the Emacs of X")

[wnevets]

The fact that this is still a problem blows my mind.

https://github.com/atom/atom/issues/5901

[PhilipA]

What are the main reasons to choose Atom over e.g. Visual Studio Code?

[adrice727]

I recently switched from Atom to VS Code. Everything in VS Code just seems to work, and I don't have any of the high CPU usage issues I had with Atom.

[grinich]

Atom currently has more plugins, larger community, etc.

Ironically, both are built on ElectronJS: http://electron.atom.io/

[erokar]

Ecosystem, but not much more. Code is faster and has very good intellisense for JS. Though it's still in Beta it's been very stable and a pleasure to use.

[taylorwc]

I use and like both. VS Code is definitely faster, but I love the tabs in Atom. As someone who grew up more in a browser than in a terminal, it just feels very natural. There are also more packages available within the Atom ecosystem, or at least, discovering useful packages and searching through them is better.

[jaxondu]

When you have a faster computer?

[ConAntonakos]

One of the only reasons I haven't fully moved over to Atom is due to its SFTP support. Any recommendations? I'm definitely considering switching from ST.

[vbit]

SSHFS?

[homero]

It's awesome but I just can't give up my pspad

[revelation]

Can you imagine, Notepad celebrating 1 billion monthly users?

[charliedevolve]

A program bundled with every copy of Windows, ever? Yes, that would be silly.