"Hey, let's write an editor for a browser. Oh wait, we need a browser for that editor".
Something good will probably come out of this eventually. I mean if they manage to turn electron into a true native cross platform app framework it's nice.
Yet another post about "technology improvements" that basically is some company (Github) with an axe to grind that wants to reinvent the wheel but has nothing new to offer.
To be more clear, no one is writhing in their sleep, or bemoaning to their team mates, this: "We have no good way to edit text in the 21st century". No one. At best, it's a nice idea to see "what if" we could build an emacs-like text editor using modern day web technologies, just to see what browsers and HTML5, etc, can do these days, and hey, maybe we will learn something and push the browser technology a bit, too. At worst, it's bunch of people with no other interesting ideas and who need to bring attention to their company.
What's next for this Electron crowd? Let's see if we can build a whole operating system into a browser? Oh wait. That's also been done with a lot of noise and no real-world impact. Well then, what about a new kind of spreadsheet? Or maybe we could do some cool photo-processing using only a TI-84 calculator!
Ugh. I'm so tired of this, and this massive post by the dev team at Atom proves the insanity of all this.
They have spent thousands of man-hours "improving" their text editing rendering for their slow text editor (but hey, we saved time by building it on top of Chrome!), and yet they are nowhere near text-rendering speeds of 40 years ago.
But never mind that. They will continue to plug ahead and write more posts about it. Meanwhile, emacs (and Vim) plug along as always.
How bad is it (to me)? I'll tell you. Even though I alter between Sublime (written in real code and not on 'borrowed' code) and BBEdit sometimes, along with Vim (still learning), and even MacVim (the horrors!)... THIS is how bad it is. It's so bad... that I would use TextEdit to edit code before I used Atom. I promise you. I actually like TextEdit and often use it anyway. I sometimes wish Apple would just add a few tiny improvements (but I'm daydreaming) and I would use it for 90% of files and projects.
But Atom? Like a lot of modern day projects (React, Bootstrap, WordPress, Facebook, etc), it's a total step backwards to reinvent what we already had. So that basically "new" people can come along and play - with less understanding, IMHO.
The fact that the only important factor you can think for a text editor to improve on is text rendering speed shows that you're not really on Atom's target demographic.
You'd think that hundreds of thousands of Atom users would convince you that maybe there's something to the editor that works for others if not for you. But nope, all those guys are happy with switching their main IDE to "a total step backwards", for some reason.
I've maintained restrained excitement about Atom for years. A super hackable editor (what more could a tool-obsessed coder want)... but frustratingly laggy. This release finally feels snappy enough that I may switch.
Large files, slowish startup, and the like are all special case problems that I can use Sublime for, but until now, the almost subliminal typing sluggishness always drove me away.
Bravo Atom team for making it fast enough. I look forward to continued improvements in this space.
You may also want to give VSCode a go. I haven't used a Microsoft product (willingly) for decades, but it is a really, really nice and much snappier than Atom in my experience with things like key echos.
Their integration for TypeScript and GoLang are first class as well. Overall though I held the same excitement for Atom as you did (and I used to use Emacs for everything because I wanted an open editor in my tool belt) I've really come to appreciate the approach and polish of VSCode.
An editor that is not "hacked" together on idiotic technologies ("web" "dev"), but a well designed editor, written for performance, on top of the best technology for that specific job.
> One frustrating component of the above breakdown is the time spent recalculating styles. At this point, it looks like the only way to solve this within the current paradigm is to use CSS less and reduce the number of selectors in the application, but that’s going to be a hard fought battle given the huge number of themes in the ecosystem.
This is a perfect example of why we need parallel restyling. :)
Parallel restyling just kicks the can down the road, asking for free perf elsewhere because we still haven't made it fast. What we need is a low-level style interface - .style but for computed, not CSS-integrated, styles - and then to plug into that using CSS where appropriate, or custom JS where appropriate, or even framework JS. Let people control style selection in a real programming language and you've guaranteed that it can now be done in a way that's fast and suitable.
What a waste of time. A text editor where "more responsive typing" is a feature is a joke. These problems were solved decades ago on far more limited hardware.
This post mentions how the text storage has already been moved to C++, and the possibility of moving parts of the rendering to C++ as well. Is this part of a trend for Atom to move at least key components to C++ and away from the web stack? Or am I off base with this thought and it's been lower-level to begin with, but these are just optimizations on that?
Atom has always had some C++ components, but lately we have moved more core data structures to C++. This PR, which re-implements the text-buffer in C++, also landed in the latest beta.
They seem to be adopting a more react native-like mindset of using React to orchestrate what should be happening, but have native code running lower level components. I wouldn't call it "moving away" from the web stack, just having it do more delegating, and less of the nitty-gritty.
Though I use Atom on a daily basis, I maintain the opinion that with software available such as Visual Studio Code, it's painfully obvious that Atom never had performance as a high priority to begin with.
Here I was, hoping for an innovative approach to render glyphs in OpenGL or Vulkan, but they're just dealing with accidental complexity of their platform, as Alan Kay would put it.
Recently I had to edit test data for a grading platform (People upload their programs, the programs get called with the test data and they get feedback if their program works correctly). One test file had 900 000 characters in one line. Almost 1 MB, not a single linebreak. The grading platform is a webpage and you upload things through an online editor, so I pasted the file in Firefox and Firefox crashed.
I thought this was going to be a post about fixing the horrible font rendering. Although I guess that's really a Chromium issue. Still can't switch to Atom to this day because of the font rendering.
So, we're sort of simulating offscreen drawing by using a virtual dom? I mean don't get me wrong it's sort of nice that they did this as it's the only thing they could have done to deal with the issues I wrote in my 2014 blog post, but that also means that with a lot of effort the web is now able to do what quickdraw could almost 20 years ago...
I still really wonder about the approach of using web tech for this editor. But I haven't tried it in a while so I will do that shortly. I have been wanting more Github integration in my editor recently, ever since I saw the Xcode demo.
Comments like this are bannable offences and will eventually get your main account banned as well. If you have a substantive point to make, please make it thoughtfully; otherwise please don't comment until you do.
That’s unfair. It’s hardly “insulting” to talk about the benefits of a new approach. And as I understand it, Stylo will be shipping in Firefox this year.
[+] [-] jtokoph|8 years ago|reply
Seems like Atom will eventually just be a native app.
[+] [-] djfm|8 years ago|reply
"Hey, let's write an editor for a browser. Oh wait, we need a browser for that editor".
Something good will probably come out of this eventually. I mean if they manage to turn electron into a true native cross platform app framework it's nice.
[+] [-] mrmondo|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LorenzoLlamas|8 years ago|reply
To be more clear, no one is writhing in their sleep, or bemoaning to their team mates, this: "We have no good way to edit text in the 21st century". No one. At best, it's a nice idea to see "what if" we could build an emacs-like text editor using modern day web technologies, just to see what browsers and HTML5, etc, can do these days, and hey, maybe we will learn something and push the browser technology a bit, too. At worst, it's bunch of people with no other interesting ideas and who need to bring attention to their company.
What's next for this Electron crowd? Let's see if we can build a whole operating system into a browser? Oh wait. That's also been done with a lot of noise and no real-world impact. Well then, what about a new kind of spreadsheet? Or maybe we could do some cool photo-processing using only a TI-84 calculator!
Ugh. I'm so tired of this, and this massive post by the dev team at Atom proves the insanity of all this.
They have spent thousands of man-hours "improving" their text editing rendering for their slow text editor (but hey, we saved time by building it on top of Chrome!), and yet they are nowhere near text-rendering speeds of 40 years ago.
But never mind that. They will continue to plug ahead and write more posts about it. Meanwhile, emacs (and Vim) plug along as always.
How bad is it (to me)? I'll tell you. Even though I alter between Sublime (written in real code and not on 'borrowed' code) and BBEdit sometimes, along with Vim (still learning), and even MacVim (the horrors!)... THIS is how bad it is. It's so bad... that I would use TextEdit to edit code before I used Atom. I promise you. I actually like TextEdit and often use it anyway. I sometimes wish Apple would just add a few tiny improvements (but I'm daydreaming) and I would use it for 90% of files and projects.
But Atom? Like a lot of modern day projects (React, Bootstrap, WordPress, Facebook, etc), it's a total step backwards to reinvent what we already had. So that basically "new" people can come along and play - with less understanding, IMHO.
[+] [-] johnfn|8 years ago|reply
You'd think that hundreds of thousands of Atom users would convince you that maybe there's something to the editor that works for others if not for you. But nope, all those guys are happy with switching their main IDE to "a total step backwards", for some reason.
[+] [-] pugio|8 years ago|reply
Large files, slowish startup, and the like are all special case problems that I can use Sublime for, but until now, the almost subliminal typing sluggishness always drove me away.
Bravo Atom team for making it fast enough. I look forward to continued improvements in this space.
[+] [-] nicpottier|8 years ago|reply
Their integration for TypeScript and GoLang are first class as well. Overall though I held the same excitement for Atom as you did (and I used to use Emacs for everything because I wanted an open editor in my tool belt) I've really come to appreciate the approach and polish of VSCode.
[+] [-] eddyg|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LeoNatan25|8 years ago|reply
An editor that is not "hacked" together on idiotic technologies ("web" "dev"), but a well designed editor, written for performance, on top of the best technology for that specific job.
[+] [-] torrent-of-ions|8 years ago|reply
That's why emacs has existed for decades now.
[+] [-] eddyg|8 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] pcwalton|8 years ago|reply
This is a perfect example of why we need parallel restyling. :)
[+] [-] panic|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pjmlp|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] twhb|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Xeoncross|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] torrent-of-ions|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] OberstKrueger|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maxbrunsfeld|8 years ago|reply
https://github.com/atom/atom/pull/14435
[+] [-] wbobeirne|8 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] dang|8 years ago|reply
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14615504 and marked it off-topic.
[+] [-] matthewmacleod|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] detaro|8 years ago|reply