I am an avid Atom user who acknowledges how slow the thing can be. None of the slowness on my end approaches any of the horror stores in these threads, but for me, opening the program from a cold boot takes long enough for the wait to irritate me, the first time I save any file after opening the program takes a second or two, and opening a new window takes a second or two.

However, I stick with Atom for a few reasons.

First, Atom is like Sublime Text, but nicer. It has real settings pages! It has a built-in package manager! And although you might consider the fact that it's written in what is essentially a web browser to be a downside, there is a huge upside in that packages can create interfaces with that flexibility that Sublime Text simply can't match - compare something like this https://atom.io/packages/php-debug with Sublime Text's best-effort https://github.com/martomo/SublimeTextXdebug . Not only is trying to assemble an interface out of text buffers not as flexible as a webpage, they also tend to be brittle and break in odd ways if you do any window manipulation on your own - this is actually a complaint I have about Emacs and Vim as well. Also, it just feels like Atom's plugin API is more complete in general - I remember there being a Sublime Text package that required making a copy of your theme so it could add its own styles, and I haven't seen anything similarly hacky in Atom yet.

Second, Atom is open source. I had bought both Textmate and Sublime Text and both of those editors had updates slow to an absolute crawl to the point where it felt like the developer had abandoned them. I feel like Atom being open source makes it less likely to be abandoned completely, especially considering how vibrant the community that has sprung up around the editor.

I tried to switch back to Sublime after being annoyed with the performance of Atom but kept running into configuration issues and really really disliked having to read documentation on how to configure the damned thing.

How this isn't considered a horror story is beyond me. I'd consider that sort of latency over a the network to be awful, let alone for a local editor.

Because I generally open Atom once every morning on login, at the same time that there's so much disk thrashing that pretty much everything else is loading slowly too, and leave it open the entire day. Not a huge deal.

Granted, I also don't use Atom for non-programming tasks. If I need to edit a configuration file, or browse a huge XML dump or log file, I use Vim.

I understand the question about "why use atom when st3 is perfectly fine?" (or for that matter, vim, emacs, etc). For me, it's primarily the plugin ecosystem. ST3's is good, atom's is better (and feels like it's growing faster but that's anecdotal, not data-based).

Also, in my situation (plugin-wise), atom is super-fast. My source files are usually less than 100kb, usually significantly so, though.

Build 3103: February 2016

Build 3080/3083: March 2015

Build 3065: August 2014

Build 3059: December 2013

Atom:

1.6: March 2016

1.5: February 2016

1.4: January 2016

1.3: December 2015

User experience-wise, I don't find a large difference between the two editors. Some things are better in ST3, some are better in Atom, but these are very minor things and they're more about my personal preferences rather than the operation of either editor.

The fact that Atom is actively developed however, is a major boon in my eyes. I am confident that whatever bug pops up in Atom will be seen to within a reasonable timeframe. I have no such confidence regarding bugs and issues in ST3.

    > Sublime Text 3:
    >
    > Build 3103: February 2016

Build 3109

Release Date: 18 March 2016

https://www.sublimetext.com/3dev