Sublime Forum

Sublime and Atom in 2016 - (love them both, not promoting either)

#1

I know there is an exorbitant amount of threads, typically from the same IP,
that have given their opinions. I have some to share and also am curious to hear
from others.

I first used Atom when it came out and hated it immediately. I waited a few
months and no change. Recently, I believe just a few months ago, I gave it
another shot. I have to say I am shocked at the progress made.

A bit about me being my first post:

  • I program in many languages https://www.codeeval.com/profile/jvardanian/
  • I work as a Web Developer for the State of Texas (Programmer IV)
  • I am predominantly a web developer and as many have noted Atom tends to cater
    to this demographic.
  • I do not consider myself a “Sublime Fanboy” but frequently make jokes in my
    office such as “Sublime Text is the cure to Diabetes”, or “Your code is nice
    but the only thing its missing is Sublime Text”

I am at the point where I use both of them and have them mounted on my dock
(OS X) right next to each other.

I don’t think I’ll ever stop using Sublime if not only because of it’s ability
to load large files that other editors (BBEdit, Notepad++, Brackets, and so on)
simply cannot handle. Sublime handles it like a champ and if it does crash
its maybe 1/100 times on files over 50MB

It seems now to me that as long as you aren’t handling a full fledged project
that Atom has a number of advantages. Frankly when I handle a full fledged
project I use PhpStorm even if not coding in PHP. They might as well take PHP
out of it’s name as is. Anyway:

Is Atom still slow as hell for most? (not talking about initial opening). I have
a 1TB ssd and 16GB of RAM so the speed increase cannot be fully on the part of
Atom.

I’ve had mixed results with the CTags plug-in in Sublime. It cannot find
declarations of variables but does fine with methods. I know I can toss an @
in the goto anywhere feature but that simply isn’t the same. Any guidance
on this would be appreciated.

I do not believe that Atom is only good for “Web Development”, as I regularly
write Python, Ruby, and C using it. I can debug and run a program in C
all inside of Atom. I can toss a terminal next to sublime text and accomplish
the same exact thing and often do. Wondering if there is a more elegant solution
already in place or in the works.

Project management Sublime Text is leaps and bounds above still IMO.

I will think of more things later as I would like this thread to be thought of
as more of a constructive way to actually hit on points vs merely pushing one’s
preference onto others. I will myself take a more active role in contributing
to the Sublime Text community as this editor is my swiss army knife that I never
wish to stop using. Hell I even wrote this post in Sublime Text…

Feedback on plug-ins to accomplish some of the listed above is much appreciated.

Thanks all!

-John

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#2

I should also mention that I do have terminality and clang working both for linting and building. I suppose splitting the terminality tab horizontally can create a similar experience, though it does seem a bit crude and from what I recall only vertical splits can have their size adjusted. Correct me if I am wrong or if there is a way to change that. Thanks

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#3

 
That’s the first thing I noticed when trying out, just working with basic stuff like multiple selections.

I found it to be unusable at the time ( performance-wise ) compared to SublimeText for that reason.
 



 
It does have some pretty cool features though, and I hope that the peformance improves over time.

I’m especially interested in the ability to create custom UI elements, that would add tons of functionality to plugin development.  EG: user input forms, info panels, command panels, etc.

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#4

@fico curious, when was the last time you used Atom? A bit faster with each release except when it has to index quite a bit as it crashes almost any time I open a full project as opposed to a sub directory to work on a specific portion. I can now scroll over 1000 lines in a second without a hiccup but I don’t think many others are having that experience. What OS do you use?

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#5

@importThis

 
It was more than a few months ago, but probably less than a year. I’m on Windows 10.

 
How’s your performance with say, 5-10k selections?  Thats around where it really starts to lag in ST ( although it’s still usable ), taking 1-3 seconds per command ( move to BOL, select by word, etc. ).

I remember trying the same thing in Atom & not being able to get anywhere close to the same number of selections while still being usable.

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#6

I must say I use Atom now.
In difference to Sublime I feel like it is bit heavier, and have some issues with RTL text that I need to use from time to time.
So I ended up pasting RTL text to Sublime and then copy to Atom.
Sadly Atom have some features I need, and must say latest version of ST does not work so well on linux.
If ST would get some features I need I would return at once.

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#7

@dakiriki I find myself using them in parallel. When I need to get something done quick or refactor across a full project sublime does an epic job. For general development I have been using Atom as of recent. This has mostly been a result of superior plugins coming about. CTags works great in Atom, Scripts, Terminal-Plus, the SFTP deployment plugin is great for mapping projects from dev to prod. Curious which features of Atom are you looking for that aren’t in Sublime?

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#8

Well I wasn’t sure since my goto editor for that many selections is Sublime. So I gave it a try, It hasn’t “crashed” but I’m not sure it’s doing anything and all the editor is not currently responding no matter how passionately I click the mouse… Ok during typing this it just came back. So really really long.

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#9

I have Atom installed to monitor their progress but the real game changer is Microsofts Visual Studio Code in my opinion.
It is way faster than Atom even though both build on electron and offers intelligent autocompletion and features like inline function definition peeking. Easy to use Git support is also an out of the box feature.

I use Sublime (browsing source code, sometimes golang), Brackets (html + css) and VSCode (golang) and like them all.
Only Atom is nowhere best of breed as far as I can tell.

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#10

@importThis: What I need most is proper FTP, I bought FTP plugin together with ST years ago, but it is just pain to use it.
And, yes, I to use it in parallel, for most I use Atom, but for something quick when I just need to jump - I chained ST to Filezilla. I must say I used ST with Filezilla quite a long time before I made a move to Atom.
Now, the last version has some lag, like you wrote, sometimes will just not open file, etc.
But still I feel ST better than Atom, somehow feels lighter to me and easier. Maybe its just me.
I would surely get back if I could work with FTP files like in Atom.
Sadly seem that will not happen soon.

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#11

I agree, VSCode is great and become better at each iteration.

I think the only thing that is not “good enough” to replace ST is the Goto Anything (CTRL+P) feature that is very slow, probably because the result is not persistently cached like in ST.

And the main drawback is the switch from Python to JavaScript for plugins :slightly_smiling:

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#12

I will say VSCode looks very promising. It is already solid as is and I like that they are taking a meticulous approach. Linting works great. I go back and forth on the desire to have a minimap but ultimately prefer it as it’s the same thing as a scroll bar but with more information. That being said sacrificing this feature for speed purposes is a noble cause for the time being. Though Visual Studio has the feature without a plugin. I am sure it is coming I make sure to check in on VSCode about once a week as it seems to only be getting better.

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#13

I feel like this is the same thing that has brought me around to Atom. When I first used it I would simply hit enter and it would lag. Now I can use ‘infinite scroll’ on my mouse up and down a 1000 line file, as well as other non pointless tasks and experience no lag or visual anomalies.

But the feature set now with Atom… to have such simple deployment options, honestly easy to configure than PhpStorms (or any Jetbrains IDE, yes I love everything JetBrains except maybe datagrip). I mean it is almost like the never ending argument of iPhone vs Android (hear me out) in the sense that everyone has a preference but usually the Apps are what make the experience great. In this situation, as Atom increases in speed and that argument becomes less relevant, plugins will determine much of what remains. Without the plugins we are left with very little for both. Sublime has a host of wonderful plugins without question, at this stage Atom has fully caught up and the innovation is rapid. With Timecop it’s easy to ditch the ones that slow it down.

I still maintain I will keep the two next to each other as one thing Sublime has that is invaluable is its speed is simply amazing. There are times when that speed and stability, especially when deadlines are a factor, that I turn to Sublime because I know I can open it 10 times before the rest of my software loads during right after bootup

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#14

Atom is way too slow… my workplace PC is slow which makes atom slower.
Sublime works really great. it is my go-to editor.
VSCode is promising though, and it can also debug directly in the editor.

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#15

I found Atom to have bad performance issues with C++ code highlighting and multi-selections. Sublime is just much more usable in that regard. However, I still use Atom sometimes because of one handy feature: I can open a folder in Atom through the OS right-click menu and it loads the entire contents of the folder as a new project. I can then browse the files and do find-in-files searches. This is a very handy for code I don’t need to create a whole project in Sublime for. It’s just one click.

Atom also has very nice auto-complete support and the ability for addons to modify the work area is pretty amazing. I wish Sublime had some of the same ability.

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#16

If that is your only reason, you can easily add this for Sublime Text too. It just depends on your OS.

Personally, I added a keybinding to my file manager of choice (Total Commander) that just opens the directory I’m currently in in Sublime Text.

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#17

On OS X here, but opening a folder in Sublime and then having the option to save it as a project is a pretty short process. I can see why less steps may be preferred though, everyone has their preferred and thus ideal workflow for productivity relative to them.

I prefer the option of being able to save as a project, as often times especially given the ease: implicitly creating a project is not something I’m looking for. Also I still find the project management system in ST to be superior to Atom even after installing Package Generator.

As per autocomplete I feel this is something that recently Sublime has quickly caught up to, but yes you are absolutely correct. The first time I saw Atom’s I was blown away. That being said for what I am developing in Sublime surely we will have different experiences. Are you predominantly coding in C++?

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#18

I still use sublime, and performance is the main reason.

Tried the others, Atom, Brackets, VSCode and they’re all great editors, without doubt. Brackets is awesome for web developers, Atom is a good general purpose editor, VSCode is already an excellent editor and looks very promising. Out of these three (Brackets, Atom, VSCode), Microsoft’s product is the one that works best on weaker hardware.

My focus is a bit different though with C/C++ and Python being my most frequently used languages, which is clearly not the focus for these as they’re more targeted towards web development. Sublime with Anaconda or CodeLinter is excellent for Python and the Ctags or Clang plugins give decent basic support for C/C++.

As for performance: Depends on the hardware. On a powerful desktop with a fast CPU and tons of RAM, Atom or Brackets are perfectly usable even with larger files and/or projects, a bit of lag every now and then can happen, but basically, it’s acceptable.

Stepping down to weaker hardware is when problems occur. I travel a lot and when I do, I prefer compact and lightweight hardware like my HP surface-syle tablet which offers just medium-range hardware. While Atom will work on it fairly well most of the time, significant lag is common when working with larger files and memory consumption can get insanely high. With only 8GB of RAM on my tablet, this can quickly become an issue when some other memory hungry things, like virtual machines, are running in the background.

Sublime is clearly the best in the performance and resource efficiency departments. It’s also very stable.

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#19

I try Atom every couple of months fully anticipating a switch from ST3, which I have used (and loved) for a couple of years now, or so. The thing with Atom is that it has this awful “project folders” functionality. I judge very harshly on one point, and that is the ability to drop whatever I’m doing, reboot my machine, and start the editor back up and carry on exactly where I left off. This includes covering down on crashes, and does not exclude unsaved file buffers. This has to work flawlessly or I won’t use an editor. Atom had some pretty big problems with this recently. One guy in #atom on Freenode suggested that I put the laptop to sleep instead of rebooting! He was totally serious. It was completely stupid. Even now the functionality is limited to only working within the confines of “project folders” instead of universally. I don’t care which folder I started an editor in, because I don’t want to have to remember where to start it when I want to pick up where I left off. Most probably I won’t be able to remember, and I think it’s ridiculous to require a user to think about it. Atom has shoe-horned into project folders exactly the functionality I am looking for. But I won’t switch to Atom until the project folders thing is gone, or at least the unsaved session works completely separately from project folders.

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#20

Here’s a simple test.

Fire up Atom on a reasonably sized file and search for a single Space.

From that moment on, nothing will be the same. So in addition to being much slower to find and highlight all those spaces, the performance of the editor in general, will suck from that moment on. In particular, if you just drag out a selection, it will be slower and jerkier. And it never improves and it gets worse if you keep searching for things which have loads of matches.

If you dig deeper you can see that the inefficiencies of using HTML and CSS for your text editor, with all the huge nesting, overlays for selection, and so, you are just never going to perform anything close to Sublime’s native speed. And Sublime’s native speed was one of the main reasons I switched to it after 30 years of using Emacs even though Emacs has better implementations of language modes (indenting especially).

Python as a scripting language is a great idea as well. JS is great - yawn - but so what. WebKit is too inefficient in too many ways.

Just my opinion! :wink:

Oh - and I have 16Gb RAM on a year old 15" MacBook Pro.

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