Sublime took off cause it just works and it has a nice default color scheme and just enough batteries included to make it a functional programming environment for the 80% of programming situations. And it now has enough addons to increase quality of life in many areas and or solve the other 20% in many cases.

If I install emacs it is just okay. It probably has syntax highlighting, depending on the Linux distribution. It probably doesn't have any quality of life improvements for language X. I can drop in a theme and colorize it pretty quickly to my liking. From there, emacs is still very powerful, but there are a lot of things I really love for long and deep editing sessions when I am going through a lot of files on a code review or what not.