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Comment by mercer | Hacker News Reader

My rationale for stay with Sublime Text is that it's still a lot faster than Atom, and I've found it to generally be more stable. But I'll probably switch to Atom once it has a significant number of features or plugins that make it worth the 'cost' in performance.

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I'd recommend Visual studio code as an alternative.

It is great.

https://code.visualstudio.com/

Isn't Visual Studio Code just Microsoft's fork of Atom?

It is considerably faster,so I don't think so.

It's based on Electron but it is not using Atom no

It is a completely different editor/debugger, it just uses the same Chromium wrapper, Electron, which was developed by the Atom team for Atom.

They use the underlying core, but the code is their own. One benefit I see is that Microsoft gets to provide bugfixes to Electron that Github may find useful. As well as Microsoft may just end up porting some of their products (Office) based on their experience learned by developing for multiple platforms.

Visual Studio Code is extremely promising, and at some point may become my primary editor. However, it is still VERY early in the preview stage. There's no plugin system yet (so no Vim mode, or other things that people often find essential).

Also, while free-as-in-beer, its licensing status is currently proprietary... a significant turn-off for the audience that Microsoft is targeting with this. Every rumor suggests that they'll be open-sourcing it eventually, and that the process just takes awhile to work its way through legal, since Visual Studio Code borrows its editor code from their commercial Visual Studio Online product. But it's still an open question.

Overall, I am "intrigued-and-cautiously-optimistic" right now (its startup time and responsiveness are MUCH faster than Atom's!), but I'm not ready to switch over full time just yet. I'm looking forward to seeing where they are with it by early next year, when all of the other cross-platform .NET stuff is ready for general availability.

Vim mode is pretty much a requirement for me at this point, but I'll check it out.

I know many people reason like this, but I simply can't understand it. I can't claim to work on huge projects, but even when working on quite big ones the only "slowness" i notice is the launch time.

Surely launch time is basically insignificant for a text editor which you might only launch a few times in a day?

It is significant when I want to lookup a single file. So one good thing about ST is that it can serve both as IDE and as a quick and simple editor.

I'm sure it depends on the computer.

Back when I had a mid-2010 mac mini, there was a noticeable lag between resizing an Atom window and the contents redrawing - when sublime and gedit were fine with the same files.

That was a comparatively slow computer; someone with a higher performance computer probably wouldn't think the performance was all that poor. I can only assume the Atom developers find the performance tolerable.

Still, it reminded me of the old joke [1] that the speed of software halves every 18 months.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law

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