Haven't tried Atom for about one and half years; at that time it was a performance trainwreck. Is it better?

Atom still sometimes freezes for me (on computer with high-end specs). Opening large text files also makes Atom freeze. The built in spotlight thing is slow for bigger projects (expected). The overall performance has definitely improved though.

I personally use Atom for lighter development and enjoy how easily accessible plugins are. Very easy to install support for lint tools/editorconfig/snippets/&tc.

It's better, but it's still not useable at a professional level. For example, a simple task such as CMD-D to create multiple cursors in a file. Sublime text screams through the file creating the cursors. Atom is like swimming in syrup. I wish Atom well, it's an amazing piece of software. But the developers chose a dev-stack that suited them instead of one that suited the end users of the software. So it will never take over the world as it could have. See also Discourse.

> Is it better?

Absolutely, yes.

I found it a little "bouncy" on first pass. It felt like there was an edge-of-perceptible lag when updating the display in response to keypresses. I tried switching to it again recently, and that's completely gone now. I guess it's just a tad on the slow side starting up, but everything else is really great, and I'm definitely sticking with it this time.

I've been using it as my main editor for a couple years now, and yes, it's getting better with every release.

Yes, it is quite a lot better. I just restarted using after two years pause.

Now I find that I open half my sessions in Atom, half in sublime.

My only frame of reference is visual studio... Atom is darn fast.

To start maybe?

I use Sublime Text 3 90% of the time and GVim the rest. I don't have any complaints about either editor.

What are the primary reasons that drive people to Atom (or Visual Studio Code for that matter)? Is there some great feature that I'm missing out on?

Note that Atom doesn't seem to preserve session through restart. I'm quite used to use sublime as notepad without actually saving anything. Maybe there's an option for that though.

That appears to be one of the changes in 1.4.0:

https://github.com/atom/atom/pull/9968

I've simply used https://github.com/mpeterson2/save-session.

Looks like they added just that on this release:

>Untitled documents in a project are now serialized and restored.

Well, I tried it with this version and it didn't work. It might be optional (though I haven't found any setting with quick search).

Your editor session need to be associated with a project/workspace. Works well in that case. Restart via atom /path

Probably. It has been preserving my sessions for a while.