>But, please, face the reality - many have moved over to Atom already and are not looking back.

I seriously doubt it.

First, people kept using TextMate when it was dead for 3 years or so. The most ST3 has been idle was 6-7 months, and before and after that the update pace (for dev releases) was great.

Second, it's not like anything major was missing from the editor even 2 years ago, or that it stopped working or anything. People use Vim which is a 30 years old codebase that hasn't had major updates in a great while, so not sure were the pressure for ST is.

Third, I doubt Atom has that much adoption. For one, it is and will always be slower, due to the language and rendering model (custom C++ vs Javascript and ultimately, the DOM).

As an anecdotal point, most people at work use either Vim or ST3. Nobody uses Atom.

>* Remember TextMate? It had a huge loyal user base, but who is using it now?*

You'd be surprised.

Atom may always be slower, but the speed difference could eventually become negligible. If ST3, in it's current form, existed 20 years ago, people would have been making the same argument about Vim vs. ST3.

Actually, rendering is often faster in Sublime Text than in vim. I am a vim user and use the 'cursorline' and 'relativenumber' options and until recently I could notice rendering slowness on OS X and Linux. Things seem to have gotten better recently (either in vim or due to hardware advancing), but I never saw such slowness in Sublime text.

(I wanted to like Sublime and have a license, but Vintage mode is a too leaky abstraction/emulation for me ;).)

https://github.com/sublimehq/Vintage ;)

Not s solution, the things I use in vim is not in Vintage. hjkl navigation and yy is not enough for me.

Vintageous has tons of options on top of "hjkl navigation and yy". All kinds of Vim-y stuff is there.

I hope so, but it'll require significant improvement. From the command line, "subl ." loads almost immediately, whereas "atom" can take 10+ seconds. (on a MBP with 16gb + SSD)

Ten or twenty years is a long time to wait for the hardware to improve so your editor is performant.

Atom is not that slow in practice... except the slow startup, for daily business it's fine - I'm using it with a full suite of linters and autocomplete plugins on the older MacBook Air and it's not laggy.

I've made a few attempts to use Atom on a daily basis. Unfortunately, I continued to experience crashes with the linter, autocomplete, and Haskell-related plugins--or the plugins would work, only to break during the next Atom update. It also wasn't possible to use my favorite ligature-based font without breaking the cursor position. Not to mention the rendering/performance issues.

There's a lot to admire about Atom. But Sublime is stable and silky smooth. And I continue to use Vim happily every day without issue, despite its ~25 year age.

If you're that interested to try the atom browser might I suggest having a look at Brackets[1]? It was out before atom and I have been using it to replace ST3 just because I liked the idea of it.

I haven't tried atom it didn't initially release with windows support so I just stayed on brackets.

[1]: http://brackets.io/

There seem to be a lot of performance related issues:

https://github.com/atom/atom/search?q=performance&state=open...

If it works for you, great. Hope you contribute and it becomes a great editor someday.

It does some weird things in full screen, especially if you have multiple windows going. I've closed one window, but the save dialog pops up on another... but when I swipe over, that dialog goes away, and the modal that I can't click on blocks the rest of the UI. Nothing but a force kill can resolve it. I've been using it 4-12 hours a day for several months, so I'm rooting for it, but losing work will always trump whatever OSS cred it has.

My impression when looking at HN is that people are not that impressed with Atom. Nobody I know in the real world uses atom, but I'm a poor data point.

The reason why everybody is up in arms about every minor update is that a lot of people see every little peep from the dev as (hopeful) proof that the project isn't dead.

It's been more active than you think, but most of the builds have been on the dev channel, available only to licensed ST2 users.

I like Atom's plugin ecosystem, and am rooting for the open source option, but it really is quite slow and buggy.

People here still get excited about LISP, too. I can understand Clojure, but Lisp, come on! It was in the 80s and 90s when I used LISP for AI and my favorite muLISP, but it's 2015 already! So, this is a boutique community, don't make generalization from it. Atom is doing pretty well for its infancy!

I was super excited about Intype in the past - much more excited about anybody could be about Sublime. After many, many years and ruined potential, I gave up. Just recently found that it's still alive. I remember e as well. It got open-sourced... and what? There are many editors, but Atom has all indications that's it's here to stay! I'm not so sure about Sublime given the patterns. A loyal community is not enough - a dedicated development team is what's most important!

People got excited about Richard III (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-leicestershire-32014296) and he's from the 1400's. I can understand Prince George, but Richard, come on!

Didn't know HN means Historian News. People just are so excited about LISP here, because of some loyalty to Paul Graham. Smalltalk and Forth get a lot less attention than LISP although they share a lot of its beauty - simple yet powerful syntax. Well, sometimes I also wonder if this is Haskell News, too. :)

I just looked more deeply into the update cycle of Sublime and apparently the dev channel has weekly updates.

I guess that they haven't been good at communicating that they are not in hiatus!

The activity is recent. There was a 6-month gap with nothing being done at all. Pretty much during this gap Atom got born.

I have tried Atom, many many times.

But i always get annoyed by how SLOW it is.

I'm kind of glad that Atom is written in a language I seriously dislike, otherwise I might have spent a lot of time trying to help them improve it.

I tried it once and had the same experience. I'm really just waiting to meet even a single person who uses it as their daily IDE in a work environment (or even at home - I still haven't seen that.) At that point I'll consider trying it again.

I love the concept. Just not enamoured with the execution.

I use it daily as my IDE. I find that startup time is indeed slow as a dog, but once it is up and running (and it's typically open all of the time, so startup time isn't a real issue) it runs fast enough. At certain times I notice small delays on more complex ops compared to sublime, but nothing significant. The main pro's for Atom, for me, are the way the eco-system is developing, the open-source nature of it, and I'm slightly more happy with the interface. If push came to shove though, I could be happy in either sublime or atom.

The difference in speed in these editors is so small that, if you find it's having a measurable effect on your productivity when coding, you may want to re-look at how you measure productivity or indeed how much time you're churning out code versus other development activities (thinking, planning, testing, talking).

The issue with speed in an editor isn't so much that if your editor is slow that it makes you code faster, but that if your editor pauses, it interrupts your thinking and prevents it becoming very natural and quick to use, like an extension of your mind.

So it's not so much '60 seconds of waiting for the editor in a day', as '2s delay opening that file so my brain switched to thinking about something else, slowing me down for 10+ mins'

I do use it as my daily IDE. It is MUCH slower than Sublime, but I'm trying to ride with it through its bugs and builds. I occasionally use Sublime still, and go through periods of time where I use RubyMine.

I am using Atom daily and I'm super happy. It's missing a thing or two from ST 3, but I got more than I had taken away, honestly. I have paid for Sublime unlike most here who gang up to silence me. I've bought a bunch of plugins for Sublime, too, so, I've invested more than $100 in the ecosystem.

I like Atom too, but the startup time between the 2 is night and day. I also get really odd Atom behavior, especially on full screen.

I think startup time is a non-issue given how you can just leave it running in the background.

I use my text editor for a bunch of ad-hoc edits, not just working on projects, but you are right. Speed is less important than buggy behavior (I say this not as a hater, but as someone who is working in Atom all day)

I've only experienced bugs in the early days where you couldn't precisely select a character with the mouse and everything else I've experienced is usually third-party plugins. At least Atom does a great job identifying with plugins are causing issues and collects deprecations and exceptions, and those can be reported by one click. That's why I think Atom brings unique solutions to common problems and, yes, it's a bit slower, but if it becomes popular, maybe it can get a native renderer - who knows. It's too early to predict its fate! So far, given it's infancy age, I think it's done a great job!

My Atom is up and running all the time until there are new app updates, which require restarts.

Have you tried Adobe Brackets? IMO it's a lot faster + you get CSS hints from .psd files. Also you have inline editor, which is super useful.

It's still a lot slower than Sublime, but it's fine for me. (im not primarily a developer tho)

I guess I don't really really notice it being slow (I'm on a new mb air nothing fancy), I've been using atom for 6 months now without any problems. I hear people often speak about it being slow and buggy, when specifically is it running slow so I can compare it to my own environment?

I love using atom, and sublime is nice but I haven't found a reason to purchase it and switch over yet.

Over the years I've gone back and forth between Sublime, vim and emacs. Atom is the first editor I really love. I've been using is for about a month now for serious haskell development. Yes it's still a bit slow to start up and a little buggy but it's not even at version 1.0 yet. I just really like the UI and the simplicity of installing and configuring packages.

Imho slow is one thing (I could probably even live with the performance) - the other thing is that font rendering in Atom is horrible. At least for me on Windows the text is blurry as hell. No comparison to the clearness in Sublime Text or other native editors (Visual Studio, Eclipse, Notepad, ...).

Brackets is better in that regard. Both brackets and Atom provide better extensability APIs than Sublime - but that doesn't help when the performance is worse than complete IDEs.

It's slow with huge source files, agreed, but you shouldn't have huge source files anyway.

You've never wanted to open a multi-megabyte data file in a text editor before?

"You shouldn't be opening large files in it anyhow" is a cop-out. My text editor needs to edit whatever text files I throw at it. Choking on too-large a file is a showstopper.

Atom has a 2MB file limitation. That's why I wouldn't use it professionally yet.

I'm not sure that's even 'large', let alone 'huge'.

For real. I think I've had to open multi-GB files in Sublime a few times. (And if not that, then certainly hundreds of MB.) Worked like a charm.

Automatic code generators have a nasty habit of spitting out huge source and header files, I'm routinely digging around in such files (ASN.1 to C++, multiple files 10MB and up) and switching editors to do that would be completely unacceptable. It would be more of a hassle if the compiler split up the output.

That might be true but my tools should never dictate how I work.

Tell that to the vendors and various api-s that love to produce 20-50 MB xmls

That sucks, but it's not the common case. I personally wouldn't use even Sublime for these either as you can't do anything productive with a 30MB XML document in a text editor anyway.

I need to view and edit CSV files which are consistently hundreds of MB, sometimes a couple of GB. It's the way it is, I can't help the format in which vendors send us files...

Sublime could possibly choke on these file as well. I've had issues with larger files with it.

Yeah, don't get me wrong, a few times Sublime has crashed, but then it's usually syntax highlighting, I turn it off and it works a treat.

True. You have to agree though that this is unfair to Atom. It's new, yes, it uses WebKit now, but it may have native rendering tomorrow. To shoot it down in the early beginning given it's doing many things right (like native package management) - it's not the right thing to do in this forum!

I tried Atom and to me, the editor just feels slow. I've been using Sublime Text for a long while now and last week I decided to "bite the bullet" and buy a license. It's just too nice of an editor for languages like Ruby, Markdown and even C# (with the OmniSharp plugin).

Atom is slow and will stay slow, due to the architectural choice. DOM rendering is too complex to become blazingly fast.

Atom is terrible to the point of being almost unusable compared to ST. It needs a ton of work.