[mildbow]

I gave atom a shot ~6months back (ooh pretty), but gave up due to just how slow it was. I just downloaded it and it's still much slower than sublime text3.

SublimeText3 works great, so why are people willing to jump that ship onto this? Surely paying ~$70 is ok, laudable even, for a daily tool (notwithstanding the fact that it's supporting a indie dev).

Do people use this for day-to-day coding or is this like installing linux back in the day?

Maybe my coding style (bunch of microservices projects open in multiple windows at the same time with multiple tabs) just doesn't work with atom yet?

[moey]

"SublimeText3 works great, so why are people willing to jump that ship onto this? Surely paying ~$70 is ok, laudable even, for a daily tool (notwithstanding the fact that it's supporting a indie dev)."

So because something works great and is 'only' $70 you get confused why people choose other tools?

1. Open source is always the first answer for a lot of people (myself included). Atom is new and is constantly being worked on. The package manager is really nice, and great new packages come out everyday.

2. 'Slow' is subjective. I have Atom, and I love it. I have Sublime too, and to be honest in my opinion the difference is not noticeable.

3. Open source again. This time for security reasons.

4. Most people would rather not pay $70 if they don't have to.

Sublime is a great program. But that doesn't mean it has to be the only program.

Note: I also have multiple tabs and multiple windows. Running stable and responsive. Most of the time when I have issues with Atom it's due to outdated/incompatible packages.

Note 2: IMO I strongly prefer dev tools to be open source. We're developers, what better way to show we care about the open source community than to use open source software for our daily tasks. A lot of people working with the application can also work on the application. It just makes sense.

[tosh]

* Atom is open source, Sublime is not

* Startup is still slow for a lightweight text editor but it is faster than for IDEs and it is improving (see: https://github.com/atom/atom/issues/2654)

* Package management is easier

* Following releases/announcements Atom (http://blog.atom.io/) instills more confidence compared to Sublime (http://www.sublimetext.com/blog/) [also if Atom should be disbanded it is Open Source, if Sublime development stops, it stops]

[zyxley]

> so why are people willing to jump that ship onto this

Highly active development and broadly extensible APIs allowing for straightforward community modification of core features. The very article linked to here is one example.

[mkawia]

Not a big fan of proprietary software especially software development tools .Imagine if Apache was proprietary, the internet wouldn't be the same.

[gkoberger]

Apache (a server, huge lock in) and a text editor (no lock in) are not comparable.

Open Source is driven by paid competition, and vice versa. Linux wouldn't exist without Windows, and Firefox wouldn't exist without Internet Explorer. And Linux and Firefox both in turn pushed their close-source competitors forward, too.

I love open source (I used to work at Mozilla), but some of my favorite tools only exist because someone is getting paid to work on them full time.

[tosh]

There are people who are paid to work on open source full time or part time.

I don't see how server software has inherently more vendor-lock-in than a text editor.

[kentt]

Switching costs is a lot lower for a text editor.

[tosh]

I switched from lighttpd to nginx without any problems but going from textmate to vim took a while :)

[tacone]

Sublime development has not been much active lately. You can see it on their blog: http://www.sublimetext.com/blog/ Months between the second and the third post. Good to see they came back, but users have been left on uncertainty for pretty long.

[JonnieCache]

The dev builds come out every few days here: https://www.sublimetext.com/3dev

[tacone]

Take a look at the dates. Also give a read to their forum. I'm sincerely happy they started development again, but still last year has not been pretty.