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)
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.
If there's one thing consistent about software, it's that things always get faster. People had a similar sentiment about Java (sloowwwwww), and yet now the JVM is pretty amazing and powers a huge part of the world.
We know N1 isn't as fast as something written in C++, but we're not super worried about it because this is likely the slowest that N1 will ever be-- and yet lots of people are still using it every day! V8 and CPUs will continue to get faster and faster each year, and we'll also improve the codebase.
Our main objective was to make N1 easy to extend by today's developers. And (whether you agree with it philosophically or not) JavaScript is leading the way for the future of programming. So it's the right choice to use in this regard.
For reference, check out the NPM growth: http://imgur.com/R8UjESZ
(Also, I think React might be the biggest UI programming paradigm shift in like 15 years. Not specific to JavaScript, but we're also betting a huge amount around that vs. traditional MVC architecture.)
Full ElectronJS apps can use something called ASAR which effectively creates a super efficient bundle for loading application code at launch. More here: https://github.com/atom/electron/blob/master/docs/tutorial/a...
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.
It's definitely on our roadmap though! (For people who want to help... https://jobs.lever.co/nylas/3c688d62-4985-4224-b59f-ab0a4f48... ;)
I hope subsequent updates make it faster, since ST still has an edge there.
I watch all the new Atom packages as they are released, which is taking more and more of my time, and I have been shocked at how many languages there are. There are many many weird languages I've never heard of.
You might have to add some of the syntax highlighting etc, but there are packages for most languages available directly in the built in package manager.
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.
I tried to implement it but Atom just wasn't there at the time. The new block-level decorators should make it possible.
Metrics collection can be disabled by the user, and this option is also presented to the user on first load of Atom.
I bet the core Atom team would agree with you. :) You should join the Slack channel and dive in. Pretty smart+driven group of people working on it. http://atom-slack.herokuapp.com/
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.
But that's OK. There's room in the universe for more than one editor. I use vi all the time from the command line for quick edits, and Atom is earning a place in my toolbox as well.
As Walt Whitman said: I am large, I contain multitudes.
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.
I'm sure this will get ironed out more, and maybe it has been in later iterations.
Have you managed to get good performance out of it?
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.
(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")
Which is exactly what people have been saying decades ago about Emacs, aka "Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping".
Ironically, both are built on ElectronJS: http://electron.atom.io/
