When my laptop is booting I'm usually fetching coffee. Most of the time I just crack the lid, it wakes up, and all my editors are still running anyway. I probably boot an app like Atom once or twice a week. Plenty of tools I use (PHPStorm, vagrant boxes, VMware) all take way longer than 5 seconds to load and that has no noticeable impact on my productivity or happiness.

It seems silly to me for someone to adopt a strategy of opening/closing Atom (instead of reusing an open instance) and then complain about how long it takes to boot. You don't park your car at red lights and turn off the engine, then complain about how long it takes to pull away when the lights turn green.

> Plus, the slugginess extends beyond startup time, into working with large files (were large = puny for other editors' standard) and other activities.

This I totally get. If this is someone's use case, they probably shouldn't be using Atom.

I don't mean to rail on you in particular, I just always found the "oh it takes so long to start" complaint to be a silly one. It's such a minor thing. Atom is really good for a bunch of use cases, it's a shame that people write it off for this stupid reason.