You’ve probably heard of Atom, Github’s new text editor. Read these checklists to help you decide whether it’s an editor worth switching to.
General Pros
- Open Source
- High-quality extension and enhancement infrastructure
- View is programmable using good old HTML DOM and CSS
- Well-known API model (NodeJS)
- Built-in Github integration
- Built-in, light Git integration
- Realtime Markdown preview
- Seamlessly tracks external file renames while the file is open
- Browse archive files, like zip or tar.gz, like Emacs does.
- UI and editing features basically a clone of Sublime Text
- Free, while in Beta.
General Cons
- In Beta. Some rough UX details.
- No keyboard macros
- No command documentation
- Difficult to discover available commands
- Currently only works on OS X (Windows and Linux planned)
For Sublime Users
Pros
- Package manager is built in
- Deep customization API
- Fine-grained commands
- Complete pane splitting and pane navigation
- Smarter indentation of pasted text
Cons
- 2-3x slower, 2-3x more memory than ST3 (realistically, it’s not as bad as it sounds)
- No “Jump Back” feature, as found in ST3
- No auto-highlighting matching strings of selected string
- Can’t open file in existing window, unless it lives within the window’s directory
- Missing key bindings for many search & replace operations
For Vim and Emacs Users
Pros
- Modern Application and UI, contemporary key bindings
- Easy to learn
- Built in Package manager, and standard package formats
- View is good old HTML DOM, CSS
- CoffeeScript is arguably better than eLisp and Vimscript
- Editor API reaches deep into the editor
- Project-wide fuzzy file finder, built in, fuss-free
- Buffer-wide fuzzy symbol finder, built in, fuss-free
- Project-wide string search
- Large number of homerow-close key bindings (many of them are Emacs compatible)
- Pane splitting on par with Vim and Emacs
- Multi selections
- Code Snippets
Cons
- Editor API doesn’t go as deep as Emacs. Lacks rich callback API that Emacs has.
- No cursor history, so no command for going back to the last location without using bookmarks
- No cursor navigation around, or editing operations on, symbol definitions (e.g., methods)
- Unlike Emacs, no built-in shell console (package under development)
- Keyboard navigation of file tree is cumbersome, but will likely improve over time.
- Missing a lot of the cool text navigation and editing commands available to Vim and Emacs