Atom editor running slowly in all new projects

user_8405656 0
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Has anyone had issues recently with Atom slowing down? Mine has become unusably slow, but only for projects that I've created in the last few days. I can edit older projects with no issue, however there's a 5 - 10 second lag when typing and navigating between files in all new projects. The Activity Monitor shows that Atom Helper is often using 100% CPU.

Steps so far:

  • Uninstalling and reinstalling Atom
  • Testing whether opening projects using different languages (Ruby vs Javascript) makes any difference (it doesn't)

Other notes:

  • I have the most recent version of Atom installed (1.18.0) I've been using Atom for a month without issues
  • I haven't changed any of the settings or packages or plugins
  • The first project affected was one using Javascript and Jasmine for testing (all previous projects were in Ruby using Rspec)
atom-editor
4 Answers

I was having similar issues with lag because I accidentally initialized a GitHub repo on my desktop (Mac OS 10.13).

Whenever I opened a project with many files, the lag would increase. The constant change of file names from grey to green was a clue, I was working on a personal project that was not supposed to be linked to Github so that should not have been happening.

Eventually, I stumbled upon the following link, which helped solve the problem.

How to remove git repository created on desktop

Remove the .git file from your desktop

  1. In the main bar navigate to Go -> Home

  2. View hidden files using the shortcut SHIFT + COMMAND + PERIOD (.)

  3. Find and delete the file ".git"

A Word of Warning

Do not do this if your desktop is your active Github repository.

For me, I accidentally made my desktop a repository when I started using Github. It is easy to make the mistake of initializing a git repo from the wrong folder, so this may have happened to you as well.

user_95663030

Issues after each typing in the editor:

  • high RAM usage
  • high CPU usage
  • slow response

With the safe mode - it was running fine, so it helped to narrow down the issue to the Community packages.

This was the cause of the issue in my case:

  • package called "Pigments":

enter image description here

user_68978760

My issue was that Atom was utilizing my machine's gpu which was causing major slowdowns. If your machine has a gpu, consider disabling Atom's usage of it with: atom --disable-gpu

For further reading on how to profile Atom, give this doc a read.

user_105219590
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