Interesting; there have been so many comments or threads on HN lately about the problems with Atom, it is refreshing to hear someone say something positive about it.

I used LT when learning Clojure but once you graduate to doing major production work, it's not really the best tool, too limiting.

Atom is a slow, bulky, often difficult to manage editor.

It's also the easiest to extend, modify, and generally make into the perfect(if slow) editor.

Also, it has the prettiest themes. But I'd be fooling myself if I didn't say I'm keeping a serious eye on NeoVIM to possibly alleviate me.

I agree, I gave Atom a try and it was not acceptable after using emacs and seeing how fast ordinary coding editing can be. Atom felt like I was running a 15-year old computer. Not sure why in today's age with all the great UI kits out there for stuff like that, that there would be a slow text-editor, of all applications.

For what it's worth, I use Atom on a daily basis. In the end, outside of editing git messages, it just isn't that important that my editor be that fast- and for the average bit of web development during the day, it's more than up to the task after the initial folder load.

Did I have to adjust my workflow a bit for it? Sure. But honestly, the dividends its paid in terms of making it easy to create snippets, easy to fork and extend addons, and in just making me smile through dumb pretty UI things is totally enough. And the vim folks that use it and keep pushing it further and further are having a good time, 'cause aside from a few buggy commands it's a joy to vi around Atom.

Like I said in my original post- it's slow, but you can make it the perfect(if slow) editor if you want to, and that's pretty well.

It's so funny to read these concerns, especially with mention of Emacs being the faster alternative... ("Eight Megs and Constantly Swapping", "Emacs Makes a Computer Slow", ...)

It's funny you say that and don't realize 8 megs nowadays is close to nothing

I believe recent releases have improved performance a lot. Have you tried any of them?

It helped a bit, but I'm uncomfortable with the idea when a text editor uses up almost 90MB just to open a text file when Sublime Text opens much more in 25MB. Especially since the benefits of Atom just don't seem to be much more than ST in most, if any, people's use cases. Just seems like inefficient technologies off by a magnitude.

atom is FOSS though...

basically everything that is wrong with Atom is wrong with Light Table, which also now just uses the Atom backend.

I really enjoyed using light table for a few years but not working in clojure, the integrations were never really something i explored to make the weight worth it, and it often had issues with freezing for fairly simple operations.

I've switched 100% to neovim. Is pretty nice! No real GUI though.

What are the perceived advantages over the standard VIM? I understand that the core is simpler, the plugin API is better, but what would make one switch as a user?