UI elements are all custom-styled, often behave differently than they do in the rest of the system, and just aren't as responsive.Īll in all, Atom is a disappointment, particularly coming from the same company that made the fully native and very nice Github for Mac git client. Of course, the other big side effect of being a web app is that it doesn't *feel* native. RAM consumption stats tell the same story: Atom gobbles up an unreasonable 225MB of RAM after a cold launch while TextMate and Sublime only take up 20MB-35MB of RAM doing the same. To find a native editor that heavy, one has to download a full-blown IDE with everything but the kitchen sink like Coda. Two of the most popular Mac programming text editors, TextMate 2 and Sublime Text 3, weigh in at 32MB and 28MB respectively while Atom is an unnecessarily hefty 219MB - a full 7x more bulk. Atom is a web application (HTML, CSS, JS) masquerading as a desktop application and true to apps of that nature, it's heavy, slow, and resource hungry compared to its proper native counterparts.įile sizes do a great job at highlighting this difference.
