Well, I kept digging and ultimately found a very long running issue thread[1] that mentioned having a .git directory in your home directory can cause high CPU.
Removing the three year old and accidentally created ~/.git directory and restarting Atom fixed the problem.
So now I will give Atom a deep new look.
Still, I am a bit perplexed, this is an issue that has been reported for nearly two years, and has not been fixed. I am not sure about the technical nature of the problem, but I think Atom, is trying to digest my entire 340GB home directory. Assuming that this is desired behavior, there should be at least a warning at launch about the issue. I am sure that MANY people have accidental ~/.git folders, and have a bad experience with Atom. At the vary least, it should not have taken me a couple hours of digging to find a solution buried in a GitHub issue.
While this fixes the issue on my MacBook, I am not sure about the Mac Mini, which I don't think will have a .git directory, but I will check later tonight.
That's surprising and sort of disappointing to me. I _just_ (within the last week or 2) was setting up my $HOME to be .git controlled...and was thinking "Maybe I should give Atom another shot"
That's good to know, next time I'm evaluating whether to switch text editors (which happens plenty) - I'll have to keep that in mind (or more importantly try and not discount Atom immediately because 'Oh yeah, doesn't it have a problem with $HOME/.git?')
Well, I kept digging and ultimately found a very long running issue thread[1] that mentioned having a .git directory in your home directory can cause high CPU.
Removing the three year old and accidentally created ~/.git directory and restarting Atom fixed the problem.
So now I will give Atom a deep new look.
Still, I am a bit perplexed, this is an issue that has been reported for nearly two years, and has not been fixed. I am not sure about the technical nature of the problem, but I think Atom, is trying to digest my entire 340GB home directory. Assuming that this is desired behavior, there should be at least a warning at launch about the issue. I am sure that MANY people have accidental ~/.git folders, and have a bad experience with Atom. At the vary least, it should not have taken me a couple hours of digging to find a solution buried in a GitHub issue.
While this fixes the issue on my MacBook, I am not sure about the Mac Mini, which I don't think will have a .git directory, but I will check later tonight.
[1] https://github.com/atom/atom/issues/3426#issuecomment-119780...