I see no need to switch to Atom since Sublime is faster, has a more established plugin base, and can open large files. Sublime ain't broke, so why fix it?
Same for me at the moment. I've heard a lot of complaints that it cannot open large files and it can be sluggish; I don't regularly need to open large files (I'd rather process large log files from a terminal for instance) and the performance is fine for me. I like that Atom is open source, plugins are written in JavaScript and the rate at which new plugins are coming out is impressive.
I tried Atom for a week. The little half-second delays start to bite after a few days, and after a week you want to throw your computer out the window.
Think about it. It's 2015. My PC has 8 cores running at unimaginable speeds. It has 16 GB of memory. And my text editor couldn't open files over 2097152 bytes.
Am I living on a different planet from everyone else? How can people accept this as a normal situation?
Your remark about modern computers being really fast and software still managing to be slow doesn't just apply to Atom, really lots of software is frustrating in that way. Maybe that's why people accept this as normal: because sadly it is. Try opening an "Open file" dialog on basically any modern desktop...
More and more I tend to use software that is either minimalistic or started in another era (Emacs + command line tools). The one exception is the web browser which has to be modern or a bunch of websites won't work.
I agree the 2MB limit is weird but, like I said, it rarely impacts me. I use Atom for coding and don't think 2MB source code files should be a normal situation.
I don't notice any half second delays though. I used to be an Eclipse user and recall it being much more sluggish.
whilst not perfect is far better than anything else out there. It doesn't struggle with these files either
Except on Windows it does struggle, a lot, and others like Notepad++ open large files way faster.
Just checked it again: a 20MB matlab m-file opens instantly in NPP however it takes ST3 about half a minute. Half a minute, seriously? After renaming it to txt to get rid of syntax parsing it takes like a second. Which is still longer than NPP and starts to get seriously annoying with files of hundreds of MB.
vim would open multi-hundred megabyte files in seconds, if only you can invest in learning its modal editing mechanism (which, to be fair, is fairly arcane, and is proven to be a worse UI than free form editing).
No, it isn't acceptable. That's why I use tools like vi/m, ed, and sam to open gigabyte sized files. On my intel dual core laptop with 3GB of RAM (yes 3GB, it is weird).