Products · Product
Atom
Raised as a usability problem by 273 people on Hacker News over 11 years (2014–2024), in 143 threads.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads this year.
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Every issue, all time, most people first
Slow to start, slow with large files, and laggy when typingUnreviewed
20142026- Many users found Atom slow and buggy, with conflicting tooltip plugins2022-12-10
- Atom was too slow and laggy to use2022-06-08
- Atom felt sluggish because plugins depended on each other and fought over hover-over frameworks2022-06-08
Takes about 30 seconds to start and scrolls slowly through large filesUnreviewed
20142026- Opening a 2GB log file takes about 10 minutes before crashing2022-12-16
- Editor is slow and runs out of memory opening large log files2018-12-01
- Interface feels laggy, scrolling is very slow in large files2018-08-01
Every new window or opened file lags about five secondsUnreviewed
20142026- Opening a file has a clunky 2-3 second lag2019-04-11
- Waits a couple of seconds every time switching files, slowing workflow2016-11-10
- Opening the command panel and switching panels is noticeably slow and laggy2016-06-07
Becomes slow to interact with when loaded with many pluginsUnreviewed
20142026- Installing extensions breaks the editor, making it unusable2024-06-29
- Becomes slow to interact with when loaded with many plugins2022-12-16
- Extensions are slow, buggy and hard to configure, with conflicting overlapping extensions2022-12-10
Project search lags several seconds per character typedUnreviewed
20142026- Typing lags and tabbing through find results is painfully slow2017-03-22
- Search-in-project UI lags several seconds per character typed into the search string2016-11-12
- Search box lags so a paste gets overwritten by a previous search2016-08-31
Editing a token with many multiple cursors is painfully slowUnreviewed
20142026- Multi-cursor editing is very slow on large documents2019-06-13
- Very slow at selecting and editing many text selections at once2018-08-01
- Searching for a common letter freezes the editor while updating thousands of markers on each keystroke2015-06-17
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 50 complaints
- Installing extensions breaks the editor, making it unusable2024-06-29
- Becomes slow to interact with when loaded with many plugins2022-12-16
- Opening a 2GB log file takes about 10 minutes before crashing2022-12-16
- Too many plugins make it hard to know which to pick for a given technology2022-12-16
- Open tab stops updating after other editors save; follows renamed temp file instead2022-12-16
- Editor is slow to launch and has noticeable input latency2022-12-16
- Users must sift through long JSON text to find and change settings2022-12-16
- Editor gets gradually slower to interact with as plugins are added2022-12-10
- Many users found Atom slow and buggy, with conflicting tooltip plugins2022-12-10
- Extensions are slow, buggy and hard to configure, with conflicting overlapping extensions2022-12-10
- Sluggish performance and non-native, generic UI make it unpleasant to use2022-08-20
- Slow to start, laggy text editing, and hard to find things in the UI2022-06-09
- Configuring extensions takes an hour and remains clunky2022-06-08
- Editor stutters for a while after an externally changed file is reopened2022-06-08
- Search results open in the main view, covering the editor and feeling intrusive2022-06-08
- Atom felt sluggish because plugins depended on each other and fought over hover-over frameworks2022-06-08
- Atom was too slow and laggy to use2022-06-08
- After installing extensions, it can't figure out how to run the project or understand the code2022-06-08
- Atom chokes and becomes unusable when opening multi-megabyte JSON files2022-05-24
- Editor slowed to a crawl when opening a 4kloc C file2021-09-29
- Typing in Atom feels unbearably slow and laggy2021-04-01
- Editor becomes sluggish once a few plugins are running2020-11-24
- Typing has noticeable lag on every keypress, a daily frustration2020-09-16
- Typing in Atom shows several times more visual lag than other editors2020-07-25
- Editor chokes and is slow when handling large amounts of text2020-05-17
- Editor is too slow to use, so the commenter gave up on it2020-04-15
- A buggy plugin randomly resets all settings to default, losing configuration2020-03-17
- Atom is so laggy for near-instant actions that it causes frustration2020-01-02
- Editor's multi-line regex search stayed broken for years, making the editor a pain to use2019-10-03
- Atom is too slow to load, open large files, and run global find/replace2019-09-15
- Loads so slowly that people avoid using the editor2019-09-15
- Multi-cursor editing is very slow on large documents2019-06-13
- Editor becomes sluggish and unresponsive after adding plugins2019-04-17
- Editor slows and freezes more often with a huge folder tree2019-04-12
- Editor was sluggish on Linux and only became ok-ish on Windows recently2019-04-11
- Opening a file has a clunky 2-3 second lag2019-04-11
- Random lagging and crashes, and files can't be deleted2019-03-02
- Navigation grinds to a halt on large files when the wordcount plugin is enabled2019-02-12
- Maxes CPU usage until the user closes and reopens it2019-01-20
- Editor is slow and runs out of memory opening large log files2018-12-01
- Auto-update on macOS fails, forcing users to manually replace the app2018-11-30
- REPL is so laggy and slow that copying code to a terminal is easier2018-10-30
- Editor drops to about 1fps when opening large minified files with syntax highlighting2018-08-01
- Interface feels laggy, scrolling is very slow in large files2018-08-01
- Very slow at selecting and editing many text selections at once2018-08-01
- Jumping between files and code completion break when project files are only on the server2018-06-22
- Jumping around a 1GB file takes about 5-30 seconds per jump with choppy behavior2018-06-22
- Atom slows down and chokes when opening large files2018-06-21
- Atom is noticeably slower and laggier than VS Code on the same Mac2018-06-07
- Atom is too slow and uses too much memory for the commenter2018-06-01