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Comment by Syntaf | Hacker News Reader

How great is sublime compared to Atom? I'm at my wits end with Atom but feel like I have no other windows text editor that can compete (even though I detest atoms interface and how buggy it is).

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Every time someone is frustrated with Atom, we are obligated to suggest VS Code, because VS Code is actually pretty awesome.

I keep Sublime Text around for ephemeral scratch space, for quickly opening and then closing files, and for browsing through large files. Otherwise VS Code for my editing.

I've tried Atom repeatedly and found its key input performance and overall bloat to be far and above the worst thing about it. Sublime Text (2 or 3 for that matter) does an excellent job in the performance department, and that's where I consider it to "count" as far as a developer app goes.

(I'm talking about latency on each key input. Pressing a key results in a character appearing on the screen faster in Sublime Text than in Atom.)

I've observed the same about performance, slight key input latency. On my home workstation (beast) it's unnoticeable, but it's an issue on less-snappy systems like many laptops out there.

For the life of me I can't understand how the core function of displaying text in a freaking text editor isn't optimized to hell and back. And I love Atom, but I don't get why the latency. It's like the most core of core functions... There's no excuse in my book, like cold french fries, or dirty restrooms. (Other editors are plagued by this too btw, it's a not an Atom-specific issue.)

I really hope this gets optimized eventually, because otherwise the whole JavaScript and CSS frontend (CoffeScript) is an awesome paradigm (I actually think this should be the way to make whole OS GUI moving forward, in a bid to make it easier to unify an app's appearance regardless of the platform. But I'm digressing).

Visual studio code: https://code.visualstudio.com/

I use vim for general purpose, but I do all JS dev in vscode now and recommend it.

I'm partial to Emacs on Windows. Install a few extra GNU utilities and for the most part you won't even be able to tell you are on Windows. :) (It's really only a few: I just use aspell, diff, grep and find.)

Atom is based on sublime text. They are quite similar anyway. The differences are that sublime text is faster, less buggy, almost never crashes, can open large files without freezing, and costs 70 dollars or you get an annoying popup every half hour or so.

Atom is great for small files. Sublime is super fast and can open much larger files.

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