Can't say I agree. Markdown looks positively beautiful on atom. Out of the box. Plus you can tweak it, without wanting to kill yourself, to show images in markdown too. Even syntax highlighting. And real time rendering. All this means that I use it as my coding logbook, and it works better than anything else out there at that.

> I need something that takes three hours to configure out of the box because I'm more interested in being an uber-geek than actually getting work done."

Actually, that's what I thought when I tried using Sublime Text for a while. It took me hours of editing the JSON file to get it do look and behave like I wanted, while Atom has a very convenient GUI to change settings and install plugins and themes.

When I was finally done, I realized that the project tree view—if that's how it's called—sorts files with folders first like on Windows, and being on macOS it was too confusing for me since that was the only place throughout the OS where that happened.

To me, Atom is the solution to Eclipse's stagnation, Sublime Text's somewhat high price tag (I know we can afford it, I'm just saying), and personal preference, plus really good GitHub integration which for me is paramount.

I wouldn't define myself a uber-geek.

I’d actually suggest the opposite. It’s much less nerdy than say VIM or emacs, and is easy enough to use. I don’t know of any text editor that doesn’t require hours of investment (or a slow trickle over months/years), and I don’t think it’s even really possible unless you use something like Xcode that is just so constrained (and even then you’ll remap keyboard shortcuts, etc). Text editors are a key part of people’s workflow, and everyone will have different needs or have been “brought up” in a certain style/configuration. Some are more mouse based, others are more keyboard driven, some require a certain toolbox, others are more basic in needs. Then add in different languages, project complexity, version control, project management software and styles... there’s too much diversity out there to have a one-size-fits-all approach.