I've tried both.

Atom is a slow, hog, non-starter.

VS Code is almost comfortable to work with, and has more plugin polish, but it's in this "slow enough to be annoying and will never be fixed as long as its based on Electron" plateau for me too.

Stupid little things mostly (I've not tried Atom but used VS Code for a while):

- sublime allows projects to have multiple different folders of files, vs code forces you to use a single folder

- large file support is unparalleled (excluding less etc)

- reliability, in nearly a decade(?) of using sublime I've never lost edits in a file or corrupted one

- it's general purpose so I can open anything, whereas vs code/atom seem more IDE-like (I know they can open anything, it's just my impression)

In my experience having switched from using one IDE to another a few times, the difficulty for me is usually that both IDEs do 90% of what I need perfectly (after a few days of tweaking), but the other 10% feels is missing and feels critical, and in particular, neither have the same 10% missing. So I kind of have to ask myself, "which critical features am I okay with giving up?" and I can't decide so I just stick with what I know and have muscle-memory for.

The Electron runtime (JavaScript). I work on projects that load files that are tens/hundreds of thousands of lines. No Electron based apps can handle that without choking and crashing. Electron is decent for smaller files and it's got a great ecosystem, but they are definitely not optimized for performance.

If they're frustrated with Sublime with practical reasons (i.e. performance, plugins, extensibility), I don't think Code or Atom would satisfy them any better. You could make the argument for vim or emacs there, but those have been around much longer than Sublime, I doubt Sublime's eating much into those users in the first place.

If they're frustrated with Sublime due to not being FOSS, nothing I guess. But again, those people would have largely switched over already.

Probably Electron. Even on VS Code (which is a fantastic Electron program), the Electron framework has it's limits.

One huge irk I have with Electron is the amount of bloat it gives to even the most well written programs. With the VS Code example from before, no matter how well it performs, I always feel like I'm eating a stuffed crust pizza when I use it. Electron gives it much more cruft than needed.

I am currently debating on whether or not to switch back to Sublime since I'm getting sick of people using Electron as an easy way of building "quality" software.

I like how visually look VS Code, not only the app but the syntax.

But in fact, I use both. I always use 2-3 different editors. Mainly because using 2 monitors is easier to switch between apps than between tabs/windows of a app! So I use sublime to code and VS Code to visually something else. Or to write random stuff.

I have the same setup before with TextMate + Sublime.

Latency and speed probably. VS Code and Atom are awesome editors in their own respect, but not quite as snappy... yet.

Atom is terribly slow and they just don't know about VS Code.