With Atom, packages can manipulate the editor. For example, the Atom linter shows errors on the line where it occurs. It can do this because packages are allowed to hijack the editor's rendering, something Sublime packages can't do. (The only thing you can do in Sublime is to mark areas for colorization, and there are some things you can do with the gutter.)
There's also a neat package that turns Git's textual conflict markers into live markers [1] allowing you pick which side to use. It also displays a list of pending project-wide conflicts while you're working — also not something Sublime plugins can do.
The Markdown Preview package is also very nice [2]. It displays a preview window inside Atom. Not possible with Sublime's API.
With Atom, I can have the sidebar colorized based on Git status, for example (it's a built-in package), and the icons can be themed [2]. Sublime plugins can't modify the file sidebar other than add context menus.
In short, Sublime really needs to up its API game in order to compete with Atom.
I completely agree with you about the plugin APIs. Writing a collaborative editing plugin for Sublime Text was a slog. Not only were we limited by the plugin API, but we ran into show-stopper bugs.[1] SSL didn't work on some platforms.[2] ST2 shipped with a broken select() module broke on Windows. In contrast, Atom provided almost everything we wanted. And while we ran into more bugs, they were annoyances, not show-stoppers.[3]
1. https://news.floobits.com/2015/08/17/sublime-text-plugin-api...
2. https://github.com/SublimeTextIssues/Core/issues/177
3. https://news.floobits.com/2015/10/14/developing-atom-plugins...
Let's also not forget:
o Brackets (which I do prefer over ST for Javascript and CSS),
o Visual Studio Code
o EditPlus (not so great with plug ins, but it's such a solid editor that this was my favourite for years before ST)
o Notepad++ (very popular text editor)
o Kate (KDE)
o Emacs (which has long since also had a GUI)
o Plus lots of environment specific editors and micro-IDE's such as:
. Aracnophilia (I used to swear by this in the 90s),
. Bluefish,
. LiteIDE,
I'm no doubt missing off dozens of popular editors, but bar VSC, all of the above have been around for longer than Atom has and many have been around even longer than ST. So it's been a crowded market for quite some time. Which often leaves me wondering why people make such noise about Atom when it always feels somewhat immature compared to any of the above (or at least has done for me whenever I've pulled an ArchLinux AUR package for Atom)
As a side note, it's a pity HN doesn't support an easier method for posting bullet points.
I don't use it any more, but a few years ago I did everything, from writing a paper in latex to webdev to C, in Sublime. It was by far the king to my toolbelt.
* Brackets was only good for web (wasn't it?)
* Visual Studio Code is newer than Atom
* Notepad++ is, I think, quite outdated, and windows only
* I like Kate, but not so much out of KDE, that is very niche compared to Windows, OSX, and the wider Linux world
* Emacs (and Vim!) are hard to learn and slowly dying off[1]
* Other specific editors are... specific, and thus not direct competition to ST
[1] Might be my perception. I hope they'll never really die; I use both (Emacs+Evil and GVim), and learned in the last 2 years, but I'm the only one I know.
I've been a die hard Emacs/Vi(m) user for over a decade, and my colleagues impressions went from "What's your config like?" to "Ah yeah, I'd like to learn that for quick edits but never made the switch" to "Still using that?" to "Emacs? What the hell is that?"
It's never been easier to get into those as today, with multiple community driven starter kits and package managers available for both Vim and Emacs. Yet people don't seem to want to put in the effort.
So today I'm labelled among my peers as the Emacs nerd, as if I'm some kind of elitist software archaeologist even though I'm mostly minding my own business without evangelizing and I'm as happy to use the IDE of choice as anyone else in the team.
> Brackets was only good for web (wasn't it?)
That's certainly where it excels at, but there are plugins for other languages (eg I did write Go code in Brackets, albeit only for a brief period).
> Notepad++ is, I think, quite outdated
It's not the prettiest editor in the world, but it's a little unfair calling it "outdated" when it releases updates more frequent than Sublime Text does.
> Emacs (and Vim!) are hard to learn and slowly dying off
They're no harder to learn than any other IDE. But it's definitely fair to say that there's a steeper initial curve than something that's largely point-and-click; and that they're not as trendy nor pretty so most users (understandably) aren't interested in familiarising themselves with the basics.
> Other specific editors are... specific, and thus not direct competition to ST
That's not entirely fair as a lot of peoples ST use will be for specific things.
In fact I often find myself using about half a dozen different general purpose text editors for specific things: vi for when I need to edit root owned files; Kate for general config files / text files; ST for Go; Brackets for JS and CSS; Notepad++ for editing Windows scripts; and POSIX tools (echo, tee, sed, awk, grep, etc) for automation in editing text documents.
For me, ST could easily be replaced by any of the other editors I use or some of the specific ones (eg LiteIDE). I pretty much only use ST for Go because of habit and I'm sure in 6 months time I'd have gotten bored and switched again.
My point is that not everyones usage for ST to be as diverse as you suggest. So Sublime Text is still having to compete with other tailored editors as well as the general purpose ones.
> windows only ... KDE, that is very niche compared to Windows, OSX
I don't think that many people switch between Windows, OS X and Linux enough that they need a single cross-platform editor. For most people, an editor that "just works" on their preferred platform is all they need. So in that regard, Kate and Notepad++ are just as viable competitors to Sublime Text as Atom is; albeit the former two are only competitors on specific platforms.
I think it would be interesting to see statistics on the typical usage of any specific text editor (Atom, ST, whatever) as well as market penetration as most surveys I've seen only log which editor is preferred and don't account for users of multiple editors nor what those editors are used for.
It's quite possible that my usage patterns are the smallest of minorities, but it's the only datapoint I have at my disposal. :)
It's true that the development progress has been really slow/halted this last year, but it seems to have gotten back on track in the last month.
And sublime is FAST.
I agree with the parent in the sense that with Atom's resources and more extensible, modern design they will eventually have a superior product - but right now I keep finding reasons not to use it.
Or he's getting paid to manage packages. Your point makes assumptions not backed up by evidence.
Electron and other Chromium wrappers are the new client-side JVM.
Visual Studio Code is based on JavaScript too and it's very fast. They even both use Electron, the JS-desktop-app core that the Atom guys open sourced separately.
Loading a 100MB text file is not really common, even among developers. Only logs and DB dumps are really that big.
Atom is the third in a succession of hipster text editors. It'll be interesting to see if it ever gets performant enough to use primarily and if its open nature enables it to perch on the roost a bit longer.
Atom is the third in a succession of hipster text editors
(Went textmate -> sublime -> atom -> spacemacs by myself)
The difference in staffing is the main reason I worry. I use Sublime Text far more than Atom, but the trend is unmistakable: Atom is improving faster than Sublime. The most recent stable release of Sublime Text is from 30 months ago. Atom was announced 22 months ago, and v1.0 was released 9 months ago. In those same 22 months, there have been zero updates to Sublime Text 2 and only four updates to Sublime Text 3 beta. That's some abysmally slow development. If these trends continue, there's simply no way that Sublime Text can stay in the lead.