I understand people who need/want it because it's snappier and handles large files great. I am however not really one of those people. But I am happy to see development on it.
Plus, the Latexing plugin has mendeley support and really, that's _so good_ that I am willing to pay for it and stay and be happy. You have not known latex joy until you have created a bibfile using intellisense-like reference searching and nothing else..
Nowadays I'm using Neovim very comfortably.
If ST3 had the same features (basically, more support for friendlier plugin integration) it would totally devastate those, apart from in price (which should be irrelevant for professional developers anyway).
But even as it is now, it's way handier (due to the snappiness) for everyday coding than VS Code (Atom is so slow it doesn't even qualify).
How big is your project that you find atom slow? I have gone back and forth between atom and sublime 10 times in the last 10 minutes and I have not found a single reason why anyone would notice a lag in a project of just a shade over 10,000 files. The difference in speed is completely imperceptible.
Not saying I love atom more than any other editor (I typically use terminal vim) but in my experience over the last week, any complaints about atom's sluggishness seems either outdated or wrong to the point of absurdity.
Different guy here, but I don't thing project size has much to do with it. For me it's UI for the most part. Most of the time I can see, how the moment text goes from "simple text" to the "highlighed text" (and all of the formatting too). I simply can't stand this. Same happens when searching a large file (I do work with logs pretty often). But this problem is solved in Atom for the most part - you still can't open files larger than 10Mb...
And as a separate issue - the latest update made it impossible to update Packages for some reason. All I'm getting is "undefined" error.
Thank you, random citizen.
It's perceptible to me, even in VSC (which runs circles around Atom).
All that said, Sublime is not my daily driver. I use JetBrains products for that. I mostly use it to jot down notes that will eventually be transferred somewhere more permanent, temp access tokens for APIs, small snippets, JSON files, Mardown files, etc. If my main use with ST3 wasn't frequently opening and closing it, relying on its great performance when opened with my actual IDE(s), and abusing its second-to-none ability to keep files saved without actually saving them to disk, I may feel differently.
And perhaps Visual Studio Code, although I would consider that an IDE (not a big fan of IDE's)
Before we had:
1. Delphi
2. Visual Studio
3. Eclipse
1. Sublime Text
2. Visual Studio Code
3. Atom
For the most part, the Electron UIs use a ton more RAM and are much laggier. They do not tend to handle large files well. However, in exchange for that, they offer rich features. Plugins are way better - since obviously they have HTML/CSS at their disposal.
Also, VS Code's community is very active - same for Atom - and it leads to quite high quality plugins. The plugin for Go, for example, is quite great. I've been hoping for first-class Go support in Sublime just so I'd have a direct comparison, but in comparison to the VS Code plugins for Go, Sublime feels outright clunky and hard to configure.
I'd say give it a shot. If you can get past the fact that it's undoutably slower, and some of the semantics are different, it's really nice having full code intelligence and rich plugins.
Still glad that there's an alternative available to VSCode also. :)
Atom, while also not an IDE, is way heavier, to the point of being slower than actual full fledged IDEs.
Sublime Text:
* Faster, performs better which is especially visible on budget computers or when handling larger files. Sublime is really, really good in handling large files while Atom or VS Code really stinks when it comes to that.
* A lot of plugins because it was "first" of these new, great text editors. Many plugins varies in quality but they exist.
* Very easy to configure and make the editor a perfect fit for you. Atom and VS Code has the same configurability, but they simply copied Sublime on this part.
Atom:
* A LOT of plugins and extensions. Seriously. It feels like there is an extension for everything already.
* Snappy enough, easy to search and find stuff in your code.
* Great, simply great UI and font rendering. With some theming this editor is by far the most beautiful one.
VS Code:
* Snappier than Atom, but with deeper features in the box. Got stuff like git tools, intellisense and other goodies that is just missing in Atom.
* Insane support for Typescript (and perhaps other languages as well). There is simply no other editor you want to develop Typescript in. Also good for compiling .NET Core (these are the ones I've tried).
* A lot of great quality extensions from Microsoft and others. While Atom might have more extensions, I find those for VS Code often to be more quality ones and I have yet to uninstall a extension because it doesn't work or is buggy.
Personally, I prefer VS Code because it feels more snappy than Atom, has intellisense and good support for compilers like .NET and Typescript.
Sublime is better when working with structureless files (plain text logs etc.).
edit: Whoops, didn't see a couple comments already saying this. My bad.. consider it an echo then.