I would love for Atom to make some progress. The last time I tried it I really liked it, however it was way too slow to be useful to me. There was a perceivable delay between when I typed a character and when it showed up on screen.

This is a deal breaker for an IDE, IMHO. Then again, it is a really young editor and has a lot of room to grow and mature. So, here's to both Lime Text & Atom. May our text processing future be bright!

If you liked what you saw, you should try it again soon. There core editor components were rewritten in React, which lead to some noticeable performance gains:

http://blog.atom.io/2014/07/02/moving-atom-to-react.html

Beyond that, there are also more performance optimizations coming:

https://github.com/atom/atom/pull/3154

The only two things I miss from Sublime are "find in project" and "go to symbol in project". Atom's implementations of those need some work. But everything else is as good or better than Sublime. And it's really easy to contribute and get pull requests merged.

As far as I can tell from watching development, GitHub has at least 4 full-time engineers working on Atom.

A dom object for every character probably makes it forever an uphill battle.

Indeed. Atom will never be fast enough. Because of the "cool" underlying tech chosen.

To be honest, as a ST plugin developer, the underlying tech is very cool, except for JS/Coffee maybe.

You can do pretty much any UI you can imagine using a website in some way and Atom allows you to do exactly that. You can modify the entire UI and this is what I was always missing in ST: The ability to modify the UI more extensivly.

Sadly, this all leads to the very downside that everyone knows: Performance. Computers will eventually get to the point where Atom feels as fast as Sublime, because 1) the coding was improved and more significantly, and 2) CPUs will get good enough for Atom that a human can't see differences between Atom and ST's performance, despite ST being way faster still. It's always been like that.

Given 640K is enough for anyone?

Atom has some performance issues, but they are mostly on opening windows (this is compounded by the fact that Atom really likes to open new editor windows, e.g., for "Open File"). I don't notice the actual editor itself lagging.

Yes, me too. The last time I looked it was only for Mac users, which is totally wrong for a HTML based editor. Didn't mind looking a second time (until I hear some great buzz, I guess).

I'm also curious about this vim reimplementation some guys are working on. I'll go and check that out right now!

There is a build for Windows now. I've started using Atom along with Sublime and Atom is a lot more stable now.

You can use it the ppa and it's on AUR too. I use it on windows and on arch and it's fairly stable for something in alpha.

You can use it on linux! It's really fine on my setup.

Atom might not be up to Sublime Text levels of quality, but I find it much nicer than the defaults gedit and kate.

No, me too wondered.