Atom now available on Windows

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in code on (#3QB)
If you haven't heard of Atom already, now's a good chance to get acquainted. It's GitHub's open source editor, and it's pretty awesome. The developers behind it write:
At GitHub, we're building the text editor we've always wanted. A tool you can customize to do anything, but also use productively on the first day without ever touching a config file. Atom is modern, approachable, and hackable to the core. We can't wait to see what you build with it.
It's different from traditional text editors in a couple of important ways, including a web-based core and Node.js integration. Atom is "A hackable text editor for the 21st Century." It is built on node and chromium and is very easy to extend and customize. Best of all, it is now available on Windows.

I have been using it on OS X for several months and like it a lot. It is great for ruby, python, html, etc. One of its few shortcomings is that it really isn't great for editing very large text files - megabytes of logs, for example. It's been available for Mac OSX for a while already. And for those linux users who do not want to wait for an official release, there is a build howto here.

Curious, or ready to start coding? Here are five tips for getting started.
Reply 9 comments

i don't understand (Score: 3, Insightful)

by pete@pipedot.org on 2014-07-11 00:35 (#2ER)

I don't understand how these projects balloon to such sizes - 169M extracted...its just a fancy text editor. and while only a poor comparison, (due to no windowed gui) VIM is 2.1M, and asfaik does way more, learning-curves aside. Or how just opening it with no files, it spawns 6 processes consuming ~35-40M each. I know its alpha, but i doubt you'll see it shrink considerable in size, if not grow larger. I've been seeing more and more of this lately, ginormous programs that offer little in proportion.

its just a text editor. that kind of size says to me that something went wrong in the design process. Have I just missed out too much on modern development realities? or is this just another convoluted/lazy coding project? (no offense to any developers, its not personal - groupthink has its ways....)

Re: i don't understand (Score: 1)

by pete@pipedot.org on 2014-07-11 00:38 (#2ES)

as a note, no harsh tone was intended, although as i read now, i may have come across as such...mostly inquisitive

Re: i don't understand (Score: 1)

by kwerle@pipedot.org on 2014-07-11 01:02 (#2ET)

I figure that almost all of that is the chromium base. nodejs is in there, too - but it can't be all that big.

So I guess I'd chalk it up to "lazy" - but I figure that once you cover the stuff you want to show, you probably don't want to go trying to tear out all the stuff you don't need.

As always, if you're worried about memory on your development machine, you're doing something wrong - gigs are practically free. I don't think I'd try to deploy Atom to an embedded system :-)

Re: i don't understand (Score: 1)

by pete@pipedot.org on 2014-07-11 01:21 (#2EV)

not so worried, although i've never appreciated any noticeable delay in launching an editor for quick edits (laptop). im just intrigued of the laxing of what one subjectively argue should be good programming practices, just due to vast availability of hardware. I guess this has always happened to some extent, but even today people write small code that follows the unix's 'do one thing and do it well', in console and gui space. I am just getting old haha

Oh, I had almost forgot, i've been dabbling with Textadept - http://foicica.com/textadept/ which is similar in concept (weighing in at 27M on windows) multiplatform gtk2 & ncurses enabled, and uses lua... but certainly an upgrade from notepad++, and i was never a fan of sublime. I'll have to give Atom a fair shot, although i have the sneaking suspicion it was developed for a different audience than I.

Re: i don't understand (Score: 5, Insightful)

by genx@pipedot.org on 2014-07-11 09:56 (#2EX)

This kind of reasoning has been flourishing during the last years, and it would be very fine if one were only using one program. But it does not scale. I have perhaps 30 programs running at the same time: many terminals, many PDF viewers, several text editors, 1 IDE, 1 web browser, 1 mail agent, 1 music player and many more. Just imagine when each of these 30 pieces of software starts requiring 10 or 20 times the memory and power that they should need.

And I do not want to pay n x 20$ to add memory modules, supposing my motherboard supports it, and I do not want to buy a new computer (or MB+proc+new kind of RAM), just to achieve roughly the same functionnalities I could achieve before (sometimes a bit more, sometimes a bit less, generally little more than a fashionable change of appearance or engine, not an astounding improvement). All right, it works fine on the developper's machine which he upgraded, but because of his laziness / lack of care, it will be millions of users that will have to buy more RAM, millions of $ spent for this.

One a side note, I do agree that having a good computers is a lot of comfort for development work, but there is a huge drawback: then developpers totally lose contact with reality, the reality of computers users will (try to) run this program on. If they had average computers, they would be aware, care a bit more about what they do. I do not mean they should ultra-optimise everything; just avoiding bloat would be a start. You cannot produce good quality software if you have a bleeding edge setup, you will not see or feel many of the problems; and a 1 hours test on a small computer at release time is not enough to experience them. The laziness and convenience of the developper is quite opposed to the convenience of the end user.

I had to use recently a program by a major chipmaker that was hardly doing more than just displaying folding lists with checkboxes. The thing took several hundred Mo when lauched and was as slow as can be imagined (click on a checkbox -> wait 3 seconds before the box is checked)! And, to add insult to injury, with such "good" programming, it started leaking memory like hell. I was not a memory leak, it was a memory flood: after 2 hours, it would eat an extra Go of RAM. Oh, on a powerful computer, it could be run. The programmer likely had such a computer and did not even notice these major troubles.

Re: i don't understand (Score: 2, Interesting)

by kwerle@pipedot.org on 2014-07-11 15:52 (#2F4)

Your developers should be mindful of the target systems. If they're not, they're doing it wrong. Your testers should have systems with the target specs. If they don't, they're doing it wrong.

Even if you have all those programs running, most of 'em should be [mostly] swapped out while not being actively used. If they're not, you're running the wrong OS.

Computers are so powerful that I do all my development work on a laptop - and it runs like a dream. Even if I had 100 windows open and they all took 50MB of memory and were all fully active all the time, I'd still have several GIGABYTES to do real work in. I mean - just typing that shit blows my mind, because a decade ago that was hard to imagine, and two decades ago it was unfathomable.

When I started in college, emacs was still jokingly said to stand for Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping. Because 8 meg could easily cause you to swap - and because emacs was so HUGE!

Those days are gone.

Re: i don't understand (Score: 0)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-07-11 16:08 (#2F5)

So much agreement. I recently considered downloading Calibre to manage some audiobooks, but the damned thing is 50-100 MB ! That's as much as full office suites and programming environments.

I just can't imaging how it takes 100 MB (COMPILED/COMPRESSED) of code to manage mostly-text files that are a few hundred KB in size.

I can only guess it's because of packaged libraries and DRM (but this size was BEFORE any Calibre plugins).

In the end I just used Kindle's send-by-mail feature.

looks interesting (Score: 1)

by rocks@pipedot.org on 2014-07-11 12:09 (#2F0)

but since I've already learned and use vim, I'm not sure the "new" features with atom are sufficient to get me to try it out -- at least not yet... inertia is a powerful thing methinks...

like ChromeOS (Score: 1)

by zafiro17@pipedot.org on 2014-07-11 12:24 (#2F1)

I'm not a programmer, so can only venture a guess, but is the idea of having a chromium+node.js system under your fingers the next step in blurring the line between what's a local app and what's a web app? This would seem like a clever step in that direction, although I agree the memory requirements are high. But I'm a console/CLI curmudgeon - a dying breed, I think.

I just bought a Chromebook intending to wipe it and install Linux. I left ChromeOS on for a couple weeks to give it a fair shake and conclude it's cool and useful, but not useful enough for me. Linux will be hitting that hard drive this week, probably. I'm not a web-app fan.

Does this editor require a full-time internet connection, by the way?