
Sublime VS. Atom: Will GitHub's Text Editor Beat the Standing Champion? - joeyespo
http://blog.takipi.com/sublime-vs-atom-text-editor-battles/
======
jessaustin
_Sublime has been the undisputed text editing champion for a while now._

That's a bold statement. Of ignorance.

~~~
ravitation
Speaking with genuine interest... What would you expect the top (i.e. most
popular) text editors to be?

~~~
CmonDev
On Windows (which is most of developers):

1\. Visual Studio.

2\. Everything else.

~~~
atmosx
I don't know of any developer that developed using non-microsoft technologies
that uses MS Windows.

I understand that there are huge software houses that develop using MS
Technologies, but I'm certain that it is not the _majority_.

~~~
blumkvist
So, according to you, if you don't develop for .NET, you don't use Windows.
Nice. Such certainty. Many wow.

~~~
atmosx
Yes[1].

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.NET_Framework](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.NET_Framework)

~~~
blumkvist
I would suggest reading and thinking harder. It would make for a better
commenting history.

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mikecmpbll
Atom runs like a dog. If ever there was an argument for native apps, Atom
makes it. The one thing you want, nay .. expect, from a simple text editor is
that it doesn't LAG.

The git source tree highlighting and the image previews are the only two
things I liked about it.

~~~
delsalk
Its quite embarrassing how badly Atom performs, how many subprocesses it opens
and how much memory it will happily leak during the X hours its in use. I
really wouldn't consider using anything NW/node-webkit or the like for all but
the most trivial of applications.

There are definitely ways to incorporate Javascript into "native" programming.
In Yosemite you can write Javascript that directly loads and calls native
frameworks (like you can with Python/ Ruby). If you wanted you could write an
entire application in Javascript, but taking shortcuts and trying to use HTML
and the DOM for your interface only leads to these sorts of severe issues when
doing anything nontrivial.

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noelwelsh
I just skimmed the title, missing the Sublime part, so naturally I thought
they would be comparing Atom to Spacemacs. Imagine my surprise!

Putting aside trolling, it's hard to see the value in a blog post like this.
It's the same tired Emacs vs Vim arguments warmed over. Emacs / Vim / Sublime
/ whatever are all basically the same. It just doesn't really matter.

P.S. Get off my lawn.

~~~
evv
People care about their development environment- that's why this is on the
front page. GitHub has put a lot of work into Atom and it is rapidly becoming
a compelling IDE for web development.

If you don't care about improving developer experience, then get off MY lawn.

------
one-more-minute
Does anyone know why the Atom developers opted to make their own editing
component, as opposed to going with CodeMirror?

For one thing, CodeMirror is a hell of a lot snappier, especially for larger
files. I use Light Table a lot (which does use CM) and while Atom is miles
ahead UI-wise, LT is just so much smoother.

On top of that, with CodeMirror Atom could support some of LT's more
interesting features, like interactive eval and inline results. Could've been
such a great combination. (Though maybe their editor could support some of
this – is there an API reference somewhere?)

~~~
chr1
According to [https://discuss.atom.io/t/why-
coffeescript/131/46?u=nightwin...](https://discuss.atom.io/t/why-
coffeescript/131/46?u=nightwing) Atom Development started 6 years ago, but
Both Ace (from cloud9) and CodeMirror became really good only in last 1-2
years.

For api docs see
[https://atom.io/docs/api/v0.175.0/TextEditor](https://atom.io/docs/api/v0.175.0/TextEditor)

~~~
one-more-minute
Atom itself maybe, but they've recently rewritten the editor component with
React.js for performance (that could only have started relatively recently)
and it's _still_ slower than CM. Maybe there's a reason for that, but if it's
just NIH syndrome that's a real shame.

Thanks for the link, btw.

------
erikb
I really want to see more articles like this one to get a feel for both
editors. But I think the author doesn't know text editors all too well. Fast
search&replace is a quite old feature. You could do that with line editors
already, meaning you could do that _before_ there even were text editors. Also
it's quite clear that Sublime is not the champion of text editors, but one of
the several competitors, which the author might not know about?

What I take from it is that Atom has improved a lot since the last report I
have been reading, e.g. you can now compile it on Linux, the speed is still
slow but it seems to be usable now, it takes reasonable features from other
tools like Sublime, and the plugin idea seems to be working quite well. And I
am quite surprised that the git support does not seem perfect yet. I would
expect a team at Github to have an editor integrate especially well with git.

The community argument from the article is a good one. While Sub has a big
community now, because of its closed source nature the community is not free
to grow as it likes. A free, plugin focussed editor might be able to take its
place.

~~~
dagw
_Fast search &replace is a quite old feature_

But also one that seems to have been forgotten for a while. I've used many
text editors that where much much slower at search&replace than the trusty
Unix tools of old. If a modern text editor comes along and rediscovers those
old tricks again then that is definitely worth mentioning.

~~~
erikb
What kind of text editors do you use? Notepad? I have never used a text editor
without that feature (for more than 20 minutes).

------
davej
I've been alternating between these two editors for the past number of months.
Atom's plugin architecture is the big selling point, it's pretty
straightforward to create a plugin and leverage the huge number of libs on
NPM.

Using APM and stars, I can also keep my Atom plugins in sync across different
computers on different platforms (mac/ubuntu) running Atom.

There are still a number of annoyances though.

Something that immediately comes to mind: I'm using Polymer.js at the moment
and I have a lot of inline CSS/JS in my HTML Components, when I comment out
some CSS/JS (using cmd + /) it always uses a <!-- HTML comment -->. I've now
learned this behaviour but it's still a pain in the ass. Lots of little issues
like this.

Performance of Atom is decent enough on my new MBP and it hasn't been a big
issue for me. I'm not working with large documents though.

------
eklavya
I would like Atom to be it but it's just not there yet. Takes a long time to
start, something really really important for a text editor. Also not really
responsive (as compared to sublime).

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virtualwhys
@6 months ago I tried Atom for a few days -- too much lag, bye bye.

I tried Sublime shortly thereafter -- too much nag (buy, buy, buy popups
starting within hours of install), bye bye.

Settled on VIM, split buffers and a few handy plugins: CtrlSpace, Golden Rule,
Neocomplete, etc. This ancient editor packs a punch, it's my go-to for client-
side development, well happy.

------
AliAdams
This is quite an old article and I don't think I've seen Sublime updated since
then.

Could Atom have moved into the lead?

~~~
slowmovintarget
Atom now has its own installer (no more Chocolatey on Windows for example),
has an update manager for itself and its themes and plugins, and has gotten
more stable as of late.

However... It is slower than SublimeText 3, noticeably slower. I tend to keep
applications open for weeks, using "sleep" mode overnight, and Atom still
tends to crash after several hours. This means I don't use it for real work,
yet.

While Atom does indeed keep getting better, ST3 is becoming more and more
frustrating as package updates now have a tendency to vomit errors when ST3
starts up. It complains about not being able to load a config file for the
package (like Rust mode or the Cobalt theme). When this happens, ST3 disables
the package, but a restart will clear the hiccups.

SublimeText is clearly the better editor, yet there has been no progress on
the beta. Worse, this has caused a division of effort among third party
providers who have to support ST2 and ST3, with no clear end in sight for an
ST3 stable release.

------
aplummer
I'm sure atom will be fantastic for some people but I found it really started
to chug when opening some of my larger files (as you would expect with a giant
DOM). Hopefully performance improves as I liked the UI a _lot_.

Still, back to sublime for now...

------
_cipher_
I'd like more to see how these editors are handling big files (>1G) and
performing substitutions.

I feel editors are taking a step backwards recycling and repackaging the same
ideas many previous editors had before plus eye candy.

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k__
Do they have Atoms performance issues under control now?

I always read Python is much slower than JavaScript, but Sublime just is an
instant experience and Atom feels like starting WebStorm, just with lesser
features...

------
hollerith
In a recent poll here on HN, Sublime had about 7 times as many votes as Atom:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8678339](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8678339).

------
CmonDev
Isn't it just a bunch of packaged JS scripts with some GUI slapped on top?

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gonewest
too bad Github didn't acquihire the SublimeText and Package Control developers
and re-release those tools with free licensing and direct integration to
Github.

------
arthurfm
_One more downfall is that Atom can’t currently handle file sizes larger than
2Mb._

2 Megabits (0.25 MB) sounds like an incredibly small file size limit for any
modern text editor. Is that actually true?

~~~
FireBeyond
You've posted things like this multiple times. I realize that, to be pedantic,
you're correct. But in every instance I've seen it's plain from context what
is meant - I haven't heard file sizes referenced in bits in, I was going to
say a long time, but ever.

Similarly with a comment on downloads on cellular networks and caps - again,
if someone says "I have a plan that limits me to 4Gb", who actually, sincerely
thinks that that means "four gigabits, i.e. 500 megabytes" as opposed to 4
gigabytes?

I guess I fail to see what value you're adding to the conversation,
particularly given the tone. It's clear you know exactly what the poster
meant, but rather than acknowledging it, you've offered some fairly unhelpful,
sarcastic remark instead.

~~~
arthurfm
> if someone says "I have a plan that limits me to 4Gb", who actually,
> sincerely thinks that that means "four gigabits, i.e. 500 megabytes" as
> opposed to 4 gigabytes?

While usage caps are typically in MB, GB or "Unlimited", bandwidth is usually
measured in Megabits and Gigabits. It might seem pedantic, but why not use the
correct units in the first place to avoid potential confusion?

> It's clear you know exactly what the poster meant, but rather than
> acknowledging it, you've offered some fairly unhelpful, sarcastic remark
> instead.

I didn't mean for my comment to come across as sarcastic. I haven't tried Atom
myself so I don't know if the limit is actually 2Mb or 2MB. Even the latter is
a very small limit for any text editor. Would you not agree?

------
blumkvist
Brackets by Adobe is written in javascript,html, css and is a lot faster than
Atom. Also has more extensions.

Also has things like in-line editor (super useful!) and you can open .psd
files and get CSS hints from it.

~~~
yAnonymous
Opening .psd files also requires you to sign up and upload the files to Adobe©
Cloud©. Other than that, Brackets has a ton of usability issues and bugs.

~~~
blumkvist
Haven't encountered that many bugs. Usability issues only with large
files/projects.

Don't know what's your problem with Creative Cloud©. If you want to use the
CSS hinting you don't need to pay for it, just to sign up and upload the .psd.

~~~
yAnonymous
Sorry for the late reply. My problem with the Adobe cloud integration in
Brackets is that

1) it requires you to be online and on a very fast connection (psd files are
huge)

2) it's absolutely unnecessary for this feature and doesn't provide an
advantage for the user

I was wondering where the catch is with Brackets and it seems like it's only
meant to get people to use the Adobe cloud. Reading psd files from the text
editor is great for web developers and Adobe knows that.

I hope other editors will implement this without the cloud requirement. When
they do, Brackets will be cancelled in no time.

