Sublime VS. Atom: Will GitHub's Text Editor Beat the Standing Champion?

http://blog.takipi.com/sublime-vs-atom-text-editor-battles/

by joeyespo • 11 years ago

51 70 11 years ago

blog.takipi.com

jessaustin• 11 years ago

Sublime has been the undisputed text editing champion for a while now.

That's a bold statement. Of ignorance.

colinbartlett• 11 years ago

Big huge [Citation Needed] there. Is there seriously any evidence presented to support this?

Nobody I know personally or work with daily uses Sublime Text. Therefore I could just as easily declare Sublime Text a "unknown and unused text editor relegated to obscurity".

mercurial• 11 years ago

Being a "text editing champion" doesn't mean anything anyway. Are we talking number of users? Features? Number of blog posts mentioning it with clickbait titles?

ravitation4• 11 years ago

Speaking with genuine interest... What would you expect the top (i.e. most popular) text editors to be?

atmosx4• 11 years ago

1. VIM 2. Emacs 3. TextMate (free) 4. Sublime

That's most probably the correct list. But again that's a perception. At least in the 'ruby' community 'vim' reigns supreme. Of course VIM and Emacs have ~20+ years of life, might not be exactly 'fair' for other editors.

Now a dispute could be made about JavaScript developers, since you need really tons of plugins to make vim (jslint, syntax, etc.) and you always need a browser to test your code (most dev are interested in client-side JS development).

blueskin_4• 11 years ago

1. Vim

2. Emacs/Nano

3. Notepad++

CmonDev2• 11 years ago

On Windows (which is most of developers):

1. Visual Studio.

2. Everything else.

alandarev• 11 years ago

Let's use search queries statistics instead of using flawed perception of ours:

1. Notepad++

2. Vim

3. Sublime

4. Emacs

Haha, nobody might have guessed Notepad++ is the leader. Of course, we all are the Windows haters, and my post is so going to be downvoted for pointing this out.

P.S. Its maximum of 5 search terms, but I tried different variations. Play around, google trends has many gems to be uncovered.

(Thanks to @necrodawg for the google trends idea)

Goolge Trends - http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=%2Fm%2F01yp0m%2C%20%2...

Zardoz84• 11 years ago

VIM/neoVIM & Emacs

blueskin_4• 11 years ago

Agreed. The author obviously didn't do research, 10 seconds will show it's Vim.

delsalk3• 11 years ago

Especially since it seems to have been abandoned for a while now according to their website. The last beta build was 5 months ago, and the one before that over a year. (Obviously your editor doesn't need to be updated regularly, but it seems to be history repeating itself a la Textmate.)

toadi• 11 years ago

Well as you say an editor doesn't need updating that much. I used VIM for ages but had an hiatus in programming and when I came back I start using sublime. And now I switched back to textmate. Like textmate it's simple sufficient bundles. Looks pretty.

And with getting older. It's just an editor that makes me type text. Yeah yeah productivity but as I think more than I type it's not such an issue as long as I can do most of the basic editting ;)

yAnonymous5• 11 years ago

I don't know about Windows editors, but for web development in Linux that statement is absolutely true. Both Atom and Brackets don't even come close to SublimeText, at least yet.

Vim is nice, but some things are better done with the mouse. Selecting and moving text down a few lines is so much faster in ST. And there's a Vim plugin for it anyway, so you can have the benefits of both Vim controls and a good interface. ST really is a great editor and to get Vim even close in terms of functionality, it takes way too much time configuring it.

awjr• 11 years ago

I have to say I was of the opinion that Sublime was pretty much as good as it gets, but I've recently started using Webstorm and I am definitely impressed. I do think it is probably one of the best for JavaScript development IMHO.

realusername2• 11 years ago

Every web developer I know is using Sublime and all the videos you see on Youtube about frameworks are also using Sublime. So it's clearly one of the favorite text editor here.

realusername2• 11 years ago

You can downvote me if you want, just have a look on youtube tutorials on web/javascript frameworks and see for yourself.

jwarren• 11 years ago

It's enormously popular in web development, especially front-end development. It's probably the most popular with modern web developers who don't use Vim/Emacs. It certainly appears to have long overtaken Textmate, which I only rarely see referenced.

Of course, this is all anecdotal. It's likely that the vast majority of working developers never post screencasts or really discuss their editor of choice, and just get on with their work. So in terms of code actually created, it's a very poor assessment.

AliAdams• 11 years ago

This is quite an old article and I don't think I've seen Sublime updated since then.

Could Atom have moved into the lead?

slowmovintarget• 11 years ago

Atom now has its own installer (no more Chocolatey on Windows for example), has an update manager for itself and its themes and plugins, and has gotten more stable as of late.

However... It is slower than SublimeText 3, noticeably slower. I tend to keep applications open for weeks, using "sleep" mode overnight, and Atom still tends to crash after several hours. This means I don't use it for real work, yet.

While Atom does indeed keep getting better, ST3 is becoming more and more frustrating as package updates now have a tendency to vomit errors when ST3 starts up. It complains about not being able to load a config file for the package (like Rust mode or the Cobalt theme). When this happens, ST3 disables the package, but a restart will clear the hiccups.

SublimeText is clearly the better editor, yet there has been no progress on the beta. Worse, this has caused a division of effort among third party providers who have to support ST2 and ST3, with no clear end in sight for an ST3 stable release.

noelwelsh• 11 years ago

I just skimmed the title, missing the Sublime part, so naturally I thought they would be comparing Atom to Spacemacs. Imagine my surprise!

Putting aside trolling, it's hard to see the value in a blog post like this. It's the same tired Emacs vs Vim arguments warmed over. Emacs / Vim / Sublime / whatever are all basically the same. It just doesn't really matter.

P.S. Get off my lawn.

evv• 11 years ago

People care about their development environment- that's why this is on the front page. GitHub has put a lot of work into Atom and it is rapidly becoming a compelling IDE for web development.

If you don't care about improving developer experience, then get off MY lawn.

aplummer• 11 years ago

I'm sure atom will be fantastic for some people but I found it really started to chug when opening some of my larger files (as you would expect with a giant DOM). Hopefully performance improves as I liked the UI a lot.

Still, back to sublime for now...

mikecmpbll• 11 years ago

Atom runs like a dog. If ever there was an argument for native apps, Atom makes it. The one thing you want, nay .. expect, from a simple text editor is that it doesn't LAG.

The git source tree highlighting and the image previews are the only two things I liked about it.

Fuxy• 11 years ago

Agreed atom looks good I especially like the fact that it is MIT licensed but the fact that it is non native makes me very reluctant to use it.

I always thought browsers and development for the web is more complicated then it should be so bringing that mess over to the desktop is just a bad idea.

I really wish Sublime would be Open Sourced already the developer should have gotten its moneys worth by now and is clearly not investing much time into it so let the community take over.

This coming from someone who actually payed for Sublime since i considered i got enough value from it.

jbrooksuk• 11 years ago

Sublime Text 3 has image previews too, you can open the image and it'll display in the middle of the view with transparency.

delsalk3• 11 years ago

Its quite embarrassing how badly Atom performs, how many subprocesses it opens and how much memory it will happily leak during the X hours its in use. I really wouldn't consider using anything NW/node-webkit or the like for all but the most trivial of applications.

There are definitely ways to incorporate Javascript into "native" programming. In Yosemite you can write Javascript that directly loads and calls native frameworks (like you can with Python/ Ruby). If you wanted you could write an entire application in Javascript, but taking shortcuts and trying to use HTML and the DOM for your interface only leads to these sorts of severe issues when doing anything nontrivial.

blueskin_4• 11 years ago

It's a self-contained website. Browsers these days are so bloated that I would be surprised if it didn't lag.

CmonDev2• 11 years ago

Isn't it just a bunch of packaged JS scripts with some GUI slapped on top?

eklavya• 11 years ago

I would like Atom to be it but it's just not there yet. Takes a long time to start, something really really important for a text editor. Also not really responsive (as compared to sublime).

_cipher_• 11 years ago

I'd like more to see how these editors are handling big files (>1G) and performing substitutions.

I feel editors are taking a step backwards recycling and repackaging the same ideas many previous editors had before plus eye candy.

one-more-minute2• 11 years ago

Does anyone know why the Atom developers opted to make their own editing component, as opposed to going with CodeMirror?

For one thing, CodeMirror is a hell of a lot snappier, especially for larger files. I use Light Table a lot (which does use CM) and while Atom is miles ahead UI-wise, LT is just so much smoother.

On top of that, with CodeMirror Atom could support some of LT's more interesting features, like interactive eval and inline results. Could've been such a great combination. (Though maybe their editor could support some of this – is there an API reference somewhere?)

chr1• 11 years ago

According to https://discuss.atom.io/t/why-coffeescript/131/46?u=nightwin... Atom Development started 6 years ago, but Both Ace (from cloud9) and CodeMirror became really good only in last 1-2 years.

For api docs see https://atom.io/docs/api/v0.175.0/TextEditor

one-more-minute2• 11 years ago

Atom itself maybe, but they've recently rewritten the editor component with React.js for performance (that could only have started relatively recently) and it's still slower than CM. Maybe there's a reason for that, but if it's just NIH syndrome that's a real shame.

Thanks for the link, btw.

blumkvist4• 11 years ago

Brackets by Adobe is written in javascript,html, css and is a lot faster than Atom. Also has more extensions.

Also has things like in-line editor (super useful!) and you can open .psd files and get CSS hints from it.

yAnonymous5• 11 years ago

Opening .psd files also requires you to sign up and upload the files to Adobe© Cloud©. Other than that, Brackets has a ton of usability issues and bugs.

blumkvist4• 11 years ago

Haven't encountered that many bugs. Usability issues only with large files/projects.

Don't know what's your problem with Creative Cloud©. If you want to use the CSS hinting you don't need to pay for it, just to sign up and upload the .psd.

davej• 11 years ago

I've been alternating between these two editors for the past number of months. Atom's plugin architecture is the big selling point, it's pretty straightforward to create a plugin and leverage the huge number of libs on NPM.

Using APM and stars, I can also keep my Atom plugins in sync across different computers on different platforms (mac/ubuntu) running Atom.

There are still a number of annoyances though.

Something that immediately comes to mind: I'm using Polymer.js at the moment and I have a lot of inline CSS/JS in my HTML Components, when I comment out some CSS/JS (using cmd + /) it always uses a . I've now learned this behaviour but it's still a pain in the ass. Lots of little issues like this.

Performance of Atom is decent enough on my new MBP and it hasn't been a big issue for me. I'm not working with large documents though.

virtualwhys• 11 years ago

@6 months ago I tried Atom for a few days -- too much lag, bye bye.

I tried Sublime shortly thereafter -- too much nag (buy, buy, buy popups starting within hours of install), bye bye.

Settled on VIM, split buffers and a few handy plugins: CtrlSpace, Golden Rule, Neocomplete, etc. This ancient editor packs a punch, it's my go-to for client-side development, well happy.

erikb2• 11 years ago

I really want to see more articles like this one to get a feel for both editors. But I think the author doesn't know text editors all too well. Fast search&replace is a quite old feature. You could do that with line editors already, meaning you could do that _before_ there even were text editors. Also it's quite clear that Sublime is not the champion of text editors, but one of the several competitors, which the author might not know about?

What I take from it is that Atom has improved a lot since the last report I have been reading, e.g. you can now compile it on Linux, the speed is still slow but it seems to be usable now, it takes reasonable features from other tools like Sublime, and the plugin idea seems to be working quite well. And I am quite surprised that the git support does not seem perfect yet. I would expect a team at Github to have an editor integrate especially well with git.

The community argument from the article is a good one. While Sub has a big community now, because of its closed source nature the community is not free to grow as it likes. A free, plugin focussed editor might be able to take its place.

dagw2• 11 years ago

Fast search&replace is a quite old feature

But also one that seems to have been forgotten for a while. I've used many text editors that where much much slower at search&replace than the trusty Unix tools of old. If a modern text editor comes along and rediscovers those old tricks again then that is definitely worth mentioning.

erikb2• 11 years ago

What kind of text editors do you use? Notepad? I have never used a text editor without that feature (for more than 20 minutes).

gonewest• 11 years ago

too bad Github didn't acquihire the SublimeText and Package Control developers and re-release those tools with free licensing and direct integration to Github.

arthurfm2• 11 years ago

One more downfall is that Atom can’t currently handle file sizes larger than 2Mb.

2 Megabits (0.25 MB) sounds like an incredibly small file size limit for any modern text editor. Is that actually true?

FireBeyond• 11 years ago

You've posted things like this multiple times. I realize that, to be pedantic, you're correct. But in every instance I've seen it's plain from context what is meant - I haven't heard file sizes referenced in bits in, I was going to say a long time, but ever.

Similarly with a comment on downloads on cellular networks and caps - again, if someone says "I have a plan that limits me to 4Gb", who actually, sincerely thinks that that means "four gigabits, i.e. 500 megabytes" as opposed to 4 gigabytes?

I guess I fail to see what value you're adding to the conversation, particularly given the tone. It's clear you know exactly what the poster meant, but rather than acknowledging it, you've offered some fairly unhelpful, sarcastic remark instead.

arthurfm2• 11 years ago

if someone says "I have a plan that limits me to 4Gb", who actually, sincerely thinks that that means "four gigabits, i.e. 500 megabytes" as opposed to 4 gigabytes?

While usage caps are typically in MB, GB or "Unlimited", bandwidth is usually measured in Megabits and Gigabits. It might seem pedantic, but why not use the correct units in the first place to avoid potential confusion?

It's clear you know exactly what the poster meant, but rather than acknowledging it, you've offered some fairly unhelpful, sarcastic remark instead.

I didn't mean for my comment to come across as sarcastic. I haven't tried Atom myself so I don't know if the limit is actually 2Mb or 2MB. Even the latter is a very small limit for any text editor. Would you not agree?

k__• 11 years ago

Do they have Atoms performance issues under control now?

I always read Python is much slower than JavaScript, but Sublime just is an instant experience and Atom feels like starting WebStorm, just with lesser features...

hollerith• 11 years ago

In a recent poll here on HN, Sublime had about 7 times as many votes as Atom:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8678339.

Sublime VS. Atom: Will GitHub's Text Editor Beat the Standing Champion?

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