| Honestly, what made me switch to Atom from Sublime was how easy making a package is compared to Sublime. For years I used Sublime with a customized fork of some emacs-like package that mimicked emacs' open-file behavior. However, because Sublime seems to limit how you can show things to the user and the documentation for making packages is mediocre, I was stuck with showing a list of filenames in the status bar, which scales to like 10 filenames at most. When I finally decided I was going to Atom full time, I decided to take a stab at making my own package for opening files as I couldn't find anything that did quite what I wanted. Within hours I had forked and adapted an existing package to do exactly what I wanted[0]. It's shocking to me just how easy it is to make a package, especially if you're already familiar with web development. Within the past month and a half I've published 4 different packages[0], probably only spending about two weeks total time working on them. I'm confident that, as the performance issues that some people hit are ironed out, this flexibility will make Atom hugely popular. [0] https://atom.io/users/Osmose |
It's a DOM based editor -- and they already did 2 rounds of optimizing the rendering. The performance issues wont be ironed out in the foreseeable future.