can you tell me what exactly in Atom or vscode is worth switching from ST?
A concrete example would be VSC's git support; out-of-the-box, it's a full-featured git client, and even if you prefer the git cli for most operations like I do, VSC automatically reads the .git directory and then creates a tab that shows your current changelist (modified, staged) with a visual diff of the files. Also allows you to easily do the common stuff like checkout a branch, commit, push, etc.
If you're a big fan of ST, you probably won't like the alternatives unless you have some frustrations with ST, because ST is probably more powerful overall, but compared to Atom & VSC, the learning curve is also quite a bit higher.
Snark aside, VSC has grown up quite a lot, very quickly. If you like Sublime, good for you, stick with it. But it looks like VSC is going to pick up support for more new things, faster. Personal favorite: support exists to plug in third-party debuggers and get debug tools/build errors inside VSC.
So, it's not as mature enough and still adds things regularly, including still struggling with speed issues?
How often does Vim have updates released? Who even cares for most of them?
React was 0.15 until recently, and Node was adopted by major companies like Microsoft at 0.xx versions.
I agree with you on the stability of Sublime Text, but the label beta has, on the opposite of version numbers, a consistent meaning: it's not finished.
Reality appears to disagree with you on this point.
That means a lot to me, but I understand that some people won't really care.
The other benefit is that if the company dies you know you wont have wasted all that effort with the editor because open source editors don't live and die at the behest of the company that started them.
Think of it as insurance for one of you most important tools.
[1] For example the find-replace dialog closes itself when I press "Replace All", as opposed to other editors I've used where it doesn't. It's annoying to have to reopen the dialog after every different search.
I haven't changed anything in core, but having the ability to walk through all the code is super useful in debugging.
More than 1144: http://blog.atom.io/2016/05/06/two-years-open-source.html
You care about the utility of your editor, and that's fine. Several other comments here try to highlight ways in which open source projects are more pragmatic, like the ability to make modifications yourself or take advantage of community contributions.
All of that is just arguing about utility, though. For many people open source is a moral issue. RMS is a notable example here. And I prefer open source tools for this reason.
If you believe open source software is morally superior to closed source software then the utility considerations are of secondary, or perhaps even zero, importance.
To get the same functionality in Sublime, AFAIK, you have to create a couple of project files first and add folders into it. Then, if you later make a new folder via the terminal you have to edit your project file to include it.
That's been my biggest headache around Sublime vs. Atom. It's the smallest thing but it's like sand in my shoe.
For me, it's nice to have a separate way to tell Sublime what to hide.