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 
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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++?
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.
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.
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! 
Oh - and I have 16Gb RAM on a year old 15" MacBook Pro.
Interesting we have the same specs but such a different experience. For the longest time I have roundly rejected Atom. I can do a regex search for \s , indent, highlight each individual line and then duplicate them and the lag is present but completely acceptable. Nice to hear you have the same specs as I was curious as to the boost in performance I have seen. Before the program was unusable.
IMO like most languages, javascript is as good as the person behind the keyboard using it. Prior to Ajax/Google Maps it was considered mostly a novelty. I hate to bring up the Big-O but the concepts do apply here as hardware continues to advance - or one would think. Are you i5 of i7?
Though I doubt it will solve your problem to a satisfactory level, Project manager does alleviate some of the annoyances. I will agree, one thing that bothers me about Atom is you open a folder and its deemed a “project folder”. This doesn’t bother me as much as it used to but the existence of a project shouldn’t be implicit upon first open IMO
I have the i7 processor.
I must admit, I just fired up Atom again and it’s improved. I fire it up once a quarter and it always downloads a new version, and I give it a go, and it was definitely better this time. I performed my “go to experiment” and was impressed.
Still dragging out a selection is not as nice, not even close, to the perfect crispness of Sublime.
But yes, substantially improved from all the other times I have made the exact same test.
The last time I updated was around a month ago and was probably the 10th time I had done so over the course of the last year or two.
I do this too, checking out Atom every few months. I love how easy it is to create plugins and tweak the UI in Atom. You always run into performance snags though. I work with pretty large files and search results, folding multiple sections, etc., it all lags. In Sublime nothing ever lags (on my machine at least). Web tech is pretty awesome in many ways, but high performance applications is not one of them.
I wanted to say exactly that, too, but forgot: the web technology (browsers, etc) is utterly amazing.
I am just not sure I want something I use all day, ever day, to lag when there’s an alternative that doesn’t. Sublime Text is truly sublime in that respect.
The slowest part of Atom tends to be initial load, but that is tolerable and Time Cop helps find problem packages.
No denying though I could have opened a massive project in Sublime 3 and go to any file and syntax highlighting / linting will already be complete no matter how fast I move. I haven’t really had Atom crash on me much at all. I still think there will be improvements in speed but not to the level Sublime Text which opens around as fast as terminal.
I think my biggest desire for improvement in ST right now is the goto declaration from the CTags plugin(s) etc, at least with PHP (complying with PSR1/2) doesn’t work with variable declarations. Atom and, while not a fair comparison, PhpStorm, both do this very well. Is there a plugin to augment CTags in ST3 one would suggest to improve go to declaration functionality?
Also on the minimap is there a way to not have the syntax highlighting present? In Atom it can be turned off to be just black and white. I love Tomorrow Night Eighties but in the minimap it’s a bit much.
Late to the post but I have noticed with the recent release they have sped up the software. Some post I read said they are moving away from web technologies in their build. That being said the loading times with no file open shortened but with a file open the times stayed the same. There has not been a fix to the emmet expand on elements with classes aside from making custom keymappings that hijack the tab key.
VSCode is too slow. I have it installed on a macOS and Windows, but I mostly use Sublime.
I was told by a co-worker that Atom is also slow, so I won’t even try it.
AFAIK, Atom is still using web technologies everywhere, with the virtues and vices that brings along. And the Emmet key hijacking drives me bananas. I didn’t know how much some of the basic Emacs keystrokes like ^A/^E were ingrained in me until they were taken away. (Ironically, I’ve never been much of an Emacs user, but those two keys and a few others are actually built into macOS’s text fields, and so are pretty much universal across the system!)
Personally, I’ve found myself going back to Sublime Text 3 after dallying with Atom for a while. I’m more of a technical writer than a coder, and with a 1500-line Markdown file with embedded code blocks, Atom will just stop responding while I’m editing the middle of the file. For seconds. It won’t lose keystrokes, but you can tell it’s really struggling. ST3 doesn’t. (For the record, neither does BBEdit, which is actually the fastest text editor I’ve ever worked with in some respects, although I suspect that’s in part because its syntax highlighting engine is comparatively limited. Despite being the “old dog” on the Mac, there are a few cues I wish the new puppies would pick up from it, though.)
Ultimately, for me, I’m looking for some assurance that the editor I’m using is going to have indefinite ongoing development – as a former TextMate user, this is something I get a little paranoid about. 
For a while I think we were all concerned Sublime really wasn’t showing that, but I’m less worried about that now; development seems to be happening, communication seems to be happening, and the community appears to still be active (maybe a little more so again now!). I think Atom has a bright future and a good chance of being the leading open source text editor with a few more years of baking – but for me, it’s time for me to dust off my muscle memory from Sublime and get back to it.
I beg to disagree.
VSCode on Windows is not slow, not at all.
CTRL+P is almost as fast as ST, opening a code source file with 12000 lines and starting editing in less than 1 s (with syntax coloring and all).
I must admit I have a middle/high-end computer (i7, 32GB, SSD).
My experience with it is simply great. A few glitches but nothing serious.
And a lot of great features not found in ST.
And each month a new build with new features.
This is the first time an editor impress me so much since ST.
