Atom 0.193.0 is out, and it's better than ever. There are three big improvements in this release to get excited about.

Pane Resizing

Resizing panes was one of our most heavily requested features. Community member @liuxiong332 stepped up to the plate and got it done. Thanks @liuxiong332!

Saving Application State

Launch Atom, open some windows, quit Atom, re-launch Atom, where are my windows!?! That was the experience before @maxbrunsfeld got his hands on it. Now when you launch Atom from the Dock or file browser, it will restart in the last-quit state.

Improved startup time

@kevinsawicki has been working hard driving startup time down. It is getting better and better with each release.

The speedup in 0.193.0 is due to packaging Atom's source code with asar. Asar allows the app's bootstrap process to read only one file into memory, rather than thousands of small files. On my 2 year old 15" Macbook Pro, the startup time difference between 0.192.0 and 0.193.0 is over 100ms — a 15% speedup:

0.192.0

0.193.0

Atom started in 1.0 Preview mode via atom --one is even faster — under 500ms on my machine.

Bonus: Improved installation and update time

Using asar and a couple packaging optimizations reduced Atom's bundled files by 85%, and shrunk the release payload by 10%. As a result, installing and updating Atom is now over 50% faster.

Until next time

More improvements are on the way including handling larger-than-2-megabyte files, much better autocomplete, and further startup time optimizations.

Stay tuned for a blog post on how we use asar and the effect it has on Atom.