A year with Atom

After switching from Sublime Text to Atom I share my thoughts and conclusions a year on.

Personal Preference

While it wasn’t exactly a heated debate between the developers in the office, everyone has their own preference when it comes to text editors (whether it’s Sublime Text, Atom or Brackets). I did a quick poll and found the majority of us in the office are using Sublime with just a couple using Atom.

Side note: Jason uses Sublime but wanted to mention that he felt Brackets was ’pretty’, which is a strange word coming from a developer ;)

Background

While I’ve been a Sublime Text user since its Windows exclusive days, for the best part of the last year I’ve been using Atom. I had tried to move to Atom when it was first released but never treated it that seriously. Sadly in Atom’s infancy it was very raw. It was severely lacking features I had become accustomed to in Sublime, so quickly I reverted back and never thought more of it.

When Adam (Gilleard) joined Engage a year ago, he came with Atom as his preference. So once again decided to take the plunge into the world of Atom, knowing that right next to me I had someone who I could ask any (dumb) questions I needed to, taking the fear away from moving between editors to try and make it as seamless as possible.

Pro tip: I even went to the extent of changing Atom’s icon into Sublime’s to ease the transition.

Conclusion

I’ve now used Atom exclusively for a whole year, and while it has it’s strengths and some nice features which Sublime doesn’t, I’ve decided to go back to using Sublime.

The only feature I really miss from Atom is the git status highlighting of files in the tree view. This gives you a great overview of the files you’re currently working on, hopefully someone comes along and makes a plug-in for this in Sublime.

The main reason I moved was that I find that it’s much slower, the simple things like opening a new window for a project should be instantaneous and sadly it’s far from it. As I've said before it's all about personal preference, I've gone back to Sublime but Adam for example is sticking with it...

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“I use Atom because it’s not 2012”

– Adam Gilleard