I have been a Sublime 2 user for 4 years now and have always been content with the experience. When I first used Atom because it was the only browser supported by Hacklang's tooling. What I noticed was how slow Atom was, startup, large files, and typing in text. It is something I have been so used to in Sublime and I could not give that up for unless there is a tool I really need on Atom.

"Content" describes me perfectly too when people ask "have you tried {Atom,Pycharm,Vim,etc}?"

Nothing in ST3 annoys me enough to push me away. Nothing elsewhere looks good enough to pull me in.

I agree with this. I think the only thing that has slightly annoyed me in Sublime has been that some plugins can be slow, especially if they're not Python based (e.g. Node plugins can be slow), but that's not really an editor issue, and I haven't really noticed any other issues.

I haven't used Atom much, so I can't make a truly educated comparison, but from what I remember the speed difference was staggering when typing. At the time I used vim, and now primarily use Sublime, both of which I almost never have slowdown with (the only time I ever recall having Sublime crawl was when I was compiling a massive program that ate my entire CPU). Atom didn't lag horribly but it was noticeable.

I've been somewhat curious about Atom lately, especially when I dealt with how slow stylelint was when linting through Sublime (1s+...), whereas Atom doesn't have this problem because it already runs a Node process, but really there haven't been any real impetuses to switch to another editor.

If I were deciding between the two without owning Sublime, I'd probably go with Atom first because it's free, then if I found it to be lacking, be it through customization, plugins (if I liked Python over Node for plugin writing, for example), or speed, I would probably go with Sublime.

Honestly, I've tried to switch to Atom in the past and I have found that it was slow.

Sublime has what I need and it's quicker to start. I don't need something that I can customise with CSS, I need a fast text editor with syntax-highlighting.

On a plus-note, I have just convinced myself to use Vim with the following options: set number, set mouse=a, set colorscheme evening and syntax enable

Been using ST2 for many years, then ST3 till last year. Tried out Atom but it was slow and sluggish. Out of sheer curiosity, learned myself some vi from scratch and switched to Spacemacs, haven't looked back since :)

I'll have to check out spacemacs. I've always been a vim person in that eternal war, but spacemacs looks doable for a vi user and interesting.

Proper native application without the performance issues of a browser?

The issues that people have with speed when handling large files are a deal breaker for me.

I frequently look at trace files that are sometimes 100MB+ in size. Of course, I don't read all 100MB+ of the file, but that's where I have to start. Normally you'd use a viewer, not an editor, for this, but I also like to annotate the trace files as I work through them.

ST3 works decently with these files, so I keep sticking with it.

I didn't like Atom because of speed and GUI settings (got used to text settings after sublime or vim). And there are migration issues - I have a lot of plugins, settings, project files and knowledge so migration process will take too much effort.

Also, I don't think that it is a good idea to implement CPU intensive real-time applications in javascript (e.g. code parsing or syntax highlighting). There are plenty of languages/tools that suit well for it, there was no reason to pick a javascript as the primary language for a editor.

I am a user of both. At this time, I'd have to say the only reason I use Atom is because its markdown support is better (nicer code highlighting right out of the box and a real nice side-by-side live preview plug-in[1]).

Away from the speed thing (which is definitely noticeable on my two year old box), and from non power user perspective, I'd say they are pretty close to equivalent.

[1] https://github.com/atom/markdown-preview

The massive performance hit, memory hogging, and that input lag that just does not go away even in high end machines is enough to make me never consider Atom at all.

I made switch from Sublime to Atom few months back mainly because of the thriving community. I'm pretty happy with the stability. They're doing fantastic job on improvising the speed, plugins and other tools. I agree Atom's boot time is relatively slow but I believe it will eventually catch up.

This. Whatever Atom's flaws are, the fact that it's not just one developer releasing updates once a year gives it an edge in my book.

I use both on a daily basis. Sublime is incredibly fast, and I constantly find myself switching from Atom to Sublime for various reasons (big files to edit or big JSONs to format, search and replace across a big project...). Atom's UI is really great though, I wish Sublime came close as for the user-friendliness of the configuration. Also Atom now has better plugins than Sublime.

Note I also use VS Code a lot because its Git Diff view is awesome and its debugger is a rock too. The extensions are generally not great though.

And I use vim when I need to edit a single file quickly.

I used Sublime for a couple years before switching to Atom. As a disclaimer, I just do HTML/CSS/JavaScript so I'm rarely working with massive files. That's where I hear most complaints. However, I have yet to come across a problem with Atom that really gets my goat. There are occasional flukes - that is to say it feels like a fairly-early-on open-source piece of software - but nothing that prevents me from using it in a professional capacity.

For me there are some issues that prevent me from switching such as opening large text files (>100 Mb), international keyboard layout problems (Atom doesn't honor some keybindings when they are typed differently than in US keyboards) and problems returning focus after compiling LaTeX documents. So for the time being I'll stick with ST3 which doesn't have these issues.

Speed

I wanted to like Atom but when I was trying it out it was awfully slow and additionally it was a real energy hog, draining my battery unacceptably quickly.

Add to that the fact that I often need to edit text on remote machines via ssh and it just wasn't worth it to me to keep using it when Vim was (and still is) perfectly satisfactory.

Lack of incremental search is kind of a deal breaker for me. Does Atom have it now?

Actually, the only thing I really want from Atom in sublime is to provide a pane that can embed Chromium.

That will give me pretty much all I want to write useful extensions.