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Comment by moonlighter | Hacker News Reader

Sublime Text user here, who switched to Atom a year ago and never looked back. Never had any of the issues others described having with Atom such as slowness, etc. What I love about Atom is that it's under active, fast-paced development, that it's super-easy to customize (first thing was to increase the font-size of the left-hand folder pane), and the available plugins are fantastic. It probably also helps that extending Atom is much more approachable given that it's all Javascript, rather than Python with ST. Furthermore, as others commented, the plugins have much more reach into the editor and can do a lot more.

For example, the new block decorations coming in 1.6 are going to be an awesome API for plugin authors! http://blog.atom.io/2016/02/03/introducing-block-decorations...

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> It probably also helps that extending Atom is much more approachable given that it's all Javascript...

I've heard this said before, I've had the opposite experience. ST offers a small api and it was easy for me to make something work with a single .py file. I gave up trying the same thing in Atom; the api is larger and lower-level. Admission: I don't know coffeescript.

ST of course isn't nearly as flexible, there are many things you just can't do.

What are the things you can't do with ST? You can actually use the C bindings of python and do anything C can do... which is pretty much anything.

It's not about the limits of the language but the limits of the ST API itself. However, given Will Bond's background, this might just change for the better now that he's officially working for ST, so this is good news for all ST users obviously.

Just chiming in to say that this agrees with my experience completely. I also shifted from Sublime to Atom about 18 months ago, and have no regrets. Atom improves at a steady clip, and the package ecosystem is great. Despite the sniffy negativity here on HN, I've never had trouble with Atom performance or stability. I do still use Vim on the console for some things, and that will probably never change, but Atom is has become my "daily driver" code editor.

I do kind of wonder if nearly all of the people using Atom are primarily web developers, and are already familiar with JavaScript and Atom's environment.

I totally agree with you. I switched to atom 4 weeks ago and have used it full time since. I love it, it works great.

The community, plugins available and ease of making plugins is phenomenal. Add to that its open source.

In my opinion as a sublime license holder who have used it for years, atom has defintely over taken it without doubt.

And yes, sublime is the new textmate :-)

One thing for sure is, with Atom around, if you do not already have a sublime license it certainly is not worth paying $70 for it today.

If u insist on paying for an editor or IDE at least go for a Jetbrains IDE.

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