Personally, I found Crane for VSC [1] as a very limited tool for autocompletion. It works really bad with frameworks like Laravel or Symfony where developers use various design patterns which implements a lot of abstraction difficult to index (facades, factory, repositories, service providers, @inheritdoc). Using Sublime you may probably use SublimeCodeIntel [2] with PHPIntel [3], as their best feature is I would mention that they work very fast for large codebase and also gives great suggestions for code i.e. suggests paramters or next objects in namespaces (when you are typing backslashes (\) code intel will start guessing what objects are under specified path and it works flawlessly just like in vim or bash when you are pressing tab after `cd`). Atom is not bad either, the atom-autocomplete-php [4] package is really great to improve autocompletion for PHP Code. When I have been using it recently I was really enjoying how many decent features PHPStorm has been implemented in open-source Atom, e.g. if you add a class from not imported namespace it will be automatically added. Such a simple operation, but it is interesting how many editors does not support that.
Hopefully, php devs have some awesome tools to annoy them a whole 9-to-5 which are: `phpcs` (obviously), `php -l` (popular), phpmd (rarely used) and phpcpd (well, most php devs haven't heard about that tool). Since, aforementioned linters are binaries their implementation in editors like VSC, Sublime or Atom is not a problem. There are few differences between editor and their linters - they are mostly the same but each editor have another way to display problems in your code. It is rather matter of taste I would say. Well, I really miss "unused use-namespaces" in phpmd.
Personally, I dislike XDebug. VSC gives a nice user experience when debugging code with it. But all three editors supports XDebug somehow. Maybe Sublime puts a whole stacktrace, breakpoints, local variable into editor viewport as "plain text" but you may got used to like in Atom, where there are additional panes to see Xdebug output. Personally, I would go with Backfire if we speak about profiling, which is very painful in XDebug.
[1]: https://github.com/HvyIndustries/crane
[2]: https://packagecontrol.io/packages/SublimeCodeIntel