The World’s Largest Text Editor

One of my Macs was screaming that it was running out of disk space so I pulled up a report of the largest files on the system. Since the system contains several virtual machines, those files were at the top as expected. However, as I scrolled through the list of files something jumped out at me. At some point I had installed the Atom text editor on the system. I don’t remember why I did that but it was probably because I wanted to test it for something. Regardless according to the report the Atom text editor was over 800MB in size. Just for fun I decided to download a copy of the latest version of Atom on another system. The downloaded file decompressed to 822.7MB.

I get that disk space is more or less plentiful and cheap but 822.7MB for a text editor is a bit excessive. I’m actually kind of impressed that a development team managed to bloat a text editor to such an enormous size (but not the good kind of impressed).