What is the difference between Sublime text and Github s Atom

Question

Github announced Atom which is very similar to Sublime  Even some keyboard shortcuts like     P      Shift   P etc  are same      How is Atom different from Sublime    Does it include IDE features like build tools  function definition jumps  documentations  etc   Has anyone using Sublime got a Beta invitation to point out the differences  Can I use the themes  schemes and packages from Sublime as is  like Sublime could do with text mate    1  PS  Open image in new tab for bigger resolution

User · Answer

I m working in little extreme environment  edit files on remote filesystem  external network  surely  that is mounted on my Laptop thru ssh aka  sshfs   Regardless why I m doing like this  also though its cumbersome responsiveness  it s fairly edible when I m using Sublime Text 2   I tried on Atom after reading this post  but it turned out to be somewhat painful to me  Atom seems that it doesn t cache directory structure so efficiently  Every time I expand a folder on Tree View  the UI froze for a short time  2 3 seconds  maybe fetching file system info  Yes  it s because I m using remote filesystem  But Sublime handles this more efficient  at least it doesn t freeze every time I expand a folder  so less painful   I think Atom is hell nice for free  and my story is trivial that might be enhanced someday  but it would be helpful to someone at this time   --  added on 8 26 2014  Recently  I changed my laptop from Macbook Air 2010 late to Macbook Pro 13  2013 late  It has likely 4 times faster CPU and much enhancements in performance  I want to mention my opinion is about in the case WHEN YOU MOUNT REMOTE FILE SYSTEM   using OS X Mavericks  most recent version of Atom  FUSE 2 7 3   OSXFUSE 2 6 4   sshfs 2 5 0  and remote system is Ubuntu server  Eventually  UI freeze gets pretty shorter  but it is still there  Specifically  to open a folder with many folder files in it and index it is requires certain amount of time  Also  if you expand a folder full of files  it just falters   when collapsing the folder  it doesn t   According to  EliDuenisch   it seems not happen on Linux Mint  I m not sure but it might be from difference between OSes  Surely  if you work on local file system  you don t have to care about this issue at all

User · Answer

I just got my beta invitation today and tried Atom right away  The GUI feels like Sublime  and yes  there some shortcuts adopted from Sublime   Besides everything mentioned above  here are some differences I have noticed so far    Vim mode is not as good as the Vintage mode on Sublime  which is not a fully featured vim either  because the vim package is in an early stage of development  See https   atom io packages vim-mode for detail  As James mention  Atom is written using web tools  so you have access to the stylesheet of the text editor  styles less  to do whatever appearance changes you want using CSS  There is also an option to change the startup CoffeeScript  Again  because Atom is still in the beta stage  Sublime has much more native plugin packages  However  since Atom is written in Node js  the Atom official site said you can  choose from over 50 thousand in Node s package repository    Because I am not a Node js pro  I haven t look into this feature though  Atom has better Github support out of the box  but Sublime has a several Git packages  Sublime is a paid application unlimited evaluation period  Atom is free at the beta stage but we don t know whether Github wants to charge it or not     So the bottom line is Atom is a text editor built with web technology at beta stage  By contrast  Sublime has evolved through many different iterations  Atom is still missing a lot of packages that Sublime supports  so the question is will Atom catch up with Sublime or become some better  Github seems to be confident about the future of this text edit because of its popular underlying technologies  and Atom is probably going to be a good alternative to Sublime in the long run

User · Answer

Here are some differences between the two    Atom is open source  MIT License  A single user license for Sublime Text costs  70       Atom is written in Node js  CoffeeScript  HTML and LESS  Sublime Text is written in C    Python for plugins  and Objective-C for Cocoa integration      Atom has a built-in package manager  Sublime Text depends on a third-party solution for package management  Wbond Package Control       At the time of writing this  05 20 2014   there are Atom binaries only for Mac OS X  10 8 or later   If you want to use it under Windows or Linux  you ll have to build it  Update  Nowadays  there are Atom binaries for Mac OS X  10 8 or later  Windows and Linux  Sublime Text binaries are available for Mac OS X  Windows  installable or portable  and Linux  as a  deb or tarball       Atom settings can be configured either through a user-friendly interface or directly by editing configuration files  Sublime Text only allows you to change settings through configuration files       Though APM is a separated tool  it s bundled and installed automatically with Atom

User · Answer

In addition to the points from prior answers  it s worth clarifying the differences between these two products from the perspective of choices made in their development   Sublime is binary compiled for the platform  Its core is written in C C   and a number of its features are implemented in Python  which is also the language used for extending it  Atom is written in Node js Coffeescript and runs under webkit  with Coffeescript being the extension language  Though similar in UI and UX  Sublime performs significantly better than Atom especially in  heavy lifting  like working with large files  complex SnR or plugins that do heavy processing on files buffers  Though I expect improvements in Atom as it matures  design  amp  platform choices limit performance   The  closed  part of Sublime includes the API and UI  Apart from skins themes and colourisers  the API currently makes it difficult to modify other aspects of the UI  For example  Sublime plugins can t interact with the sidebar  control or draw on the editing area  except in some limited ways eg  in the gutter  or manipulate the statusbar beyond basic text  Atom s  closed  part is unknown at the moment  but I get the sense it s smaller  Atom has a richer API  though poorly documented at present  with the design goal of allowing greater control of its UI  Being closely coupled with webkit offers numerous capabilities for UI feature enhancements not presently possible with Sublime  However  Sublime s extensions perform closer to native  so those that perform compute-intensive  highly repetitive or complex text manipulations in large buffers are feasible in Sublime   Since more of Atom will be open  Github open-sourced Atom on May 6th  As a result it s likely that support and pace of development will be rapid  By contrast  Sublime s development has slowed significantly of late - but it s not dead  In particular there are a number of bugs  many quite trivial  that haven t been fixed by the developer  None are showstopping imo  but if you want something in rapid development with regular bugfixing and enhancements  Sublime will frustrate  That said  installable Atom packages for Windows and Linux are yet to be released and activity on the codebase seems to have cooled in the weeks before and since the announcement  according to Github s stats   In terms of IDE functions  from a webdev perspective Atom will allow extensions to the point of approaching products like Webstorm  though none have appeared yet  It remains to be seen how Atom will perform with such  heavy  extensions  since the editor natively feels sluggish  Due to restrictions in the API and lack of underlying webkit  Sublime won t allow this level of UI customisation although the developer may extend the API to support such features in future  Again  Sublime s underlying performance allows for things that involve computational grunt  ST3 s symbol indexing being an example that performs well even with big projects  And though Atom s UI is certainly modelled upon Sublime  some refinements are noticeably missing  such as Sublime s learning panels and tab-complete popups which weight the defaults in accordance with those you most use   I see these products as complementary  The fact that they share similar visuals and keystrokes just adds to the fact  There will be situations where the use of either has advantages  Presently  Sublime is a mature product with feature parity across all three platforms  and a rich set of plugins  Atom is the new kid whose features will rapidly grow  it doesn t feel production ready just yet and there are concerns in the area of performance    Update Edit  May 18  2015   A note about improvements to these two editors since the time of writing the above   In addition to bugfixes and improvements to its core  Atom has experienced a rapid growth in third-party extensions  with autocomplete-plus becoming part of the standard Atom distribution  Extension quality varies widely and a particular irritation is the frequency by which unstable third party packages can crash the editor  Within the last year  Atom has moved to using React by way of shifting reflow repaint activity to the GPU for performance reasons  significantly improving the responsiveness of the UI for typical editing actions  scrolling  cursor movement etc    While this has markedly improved the feel of the editor  it still feels cumbersome for CPU intensive tasks as described above  and is still slow in startup  Apart from performance improvements  Atom feels significantly more stable across the board   Development of Sublime has picked up again since Jan 2015  with bugfixes  some minor new features  tooltip API  build system improvements  and a major development in the form of a new yaml-based  sublime-syntax definition  to eventually replace the old xml  tmLanguage   Together with a custom regex engine which replaces Onigurama  the new system offers more potential for precise regex matching  is significantly faster  up to 4x  and can perform multiple matches in parallel  Apart from colouring syntax  Sublime uses these components for symbol indexing  goto definition etc   and other language-aware features  In addition to further speeding up Sublime  particularly for large files  this feature should open up the potential for performant language-specific features such as code-refactoring etc   Further  big developments  are promised  though the author remains  as ever  tight lipped about them

User · Answer

Atom is written using Node js  CoffeeScript and LESS  It s then wrapped in a WebKit wrapper  which was originally only available for OSX  although there is now also a Windows version available   Linux version has to be built from source  but there is a PPA for Ubuntu users    A lot of the architecture and features have been duplicated from Sublime Text because they re tried and tested  The plugin system works almost the same  but opens up a lot of new features and potential by exposing new APIs too   I believe that the shortcuts remain mostly the same due to muscle memory     people will remember them and be able to instantly click with Atom   The preferences can be controlled with a GUI rather than by editing JSON directly  which might lower the entry barrier towards getting people started with Atom  I myself find it difficult to navigate them all since there is no search feature in Preferences   You can signup for an invite on the   atom-invites IRC channel or signup to their website and add your email  The first round of invites came quickly

User · Answer

Another difference is that Sublime text is a closed source project  while Atom source code is will be publicly available --although Github does not plan to release it as a real open source project  They want to give access to the code  without opening it to contributions    Github made the code public  http   blog atom io 2014 05 06 atom-is-now-open-source html

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Atom is still in beta  v0 123 as I m writing this  but it s moving fast  Way faster than Sublime  New builds are released on a weekly basis  sometimes even few of them in the same week  In its short life span  it had more releases than Sublime which takes months to release a new feature or a bug fix  Here s an updated take on things looking back on the path Atom has taken since the launch of the beta    Sublime has better performance than Atom  Simply because it s written in C    Atom on the other hand is a web based desktop app built on top of Chromium  and while they take performance close to heart  it will be really hard or even impossible to reach the same speed and responsiveness  Last July Atom began using React and it gave it a nice performance boost but you can still feel the difference  Apart from that  if Atom   s performance issues will not push users away - Sublime better speed up the release cycle  brush up its small UX tweaks  and consider letting in more contributors because this is where Atom is winning   Atom s package ecosystem is also growing really fast  it might not be as big as Sublime s at the moment but I have a feeling that with GitHub at it s back it will keep growing even faster  It probably has the majority of IDE like plug-ins you can think of  A major difference right now is that it can t handle files bigger than 2MB so it s something to keep in mind  The one thing you ll notice first is that the Sublime minimap is gone  Other than that  the first impression is that Atom looks almost the same as Sublime  I wrote a more in depth comparison about it in this blog post  No easy straightforward way to port your Sublime configurations  packages and such as far as I know

User · Answer

How is Atom different from Sublime    Atom is an open source text editor IDE  built on JavaScript HTML CSS  Sublime Text is a commercial product  built on C C   and Python  Comparable to Atom is Adobe Brackets  another open source text editor IDE built on JavaScript HTML CSS  Be minded that this makes Brackets more oriented towards Web development  specially in the front end  Advantages of open source projects are faster rate of development and  of course  price   Does it include IDE features like build tools  function definition jumps  documentations  etc     The short answer is yes  yes  and yes  The app is completely modular  Open source will give people the freedom to fill the gaps on several of these features   Has anyone using Sublime got a Beta invitation to point out the differences    Advantages of Atom is entry-level hackability  since it s built on the same code that powers Web sites  Advantages of Sublime Text is performance  as it doesn t need to run on top of Node js  and it s a more mature product  about to reach a stable version 3  There are a long list of minor differences that can be included in the comments  I wish this markdown could be able to draw a table for comparisons  but that s another issue    Because of Atom s rapid turnout  I am afraid some of differences I list here will become outdated over time  Per example  at the time of this writing  Atom is only available on the Macintosh while Sublime Text is already multiplatform   Can I use the themes  schemes and packages from Sublime as is  like Sublime could do with text mate    The short answer is no  but because of Atom s hackability  it will be easy to retool packages from other editors to Atom

User · Answer

I tried Atom and it looks really nice BUT there is one major problem  at least in v 0 84    It doesn t support vertical select Alt Drag - this is a must for every modern code editor

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ATTENTION      -- because of poorly made caching system  in Atom loss of data occurs often when using big files    It has been proven numerous times

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One major difference is the support of  Indic Fonts  aka South Asian Scripts  including Southeast Asian languages such as Khmer  Lao  Myanmar and Thai   Also  there is much better support for East Asian languages  Chinese  Japanese  Korean   These are known bugs  actually the most highly rated bugs  that have been going on for years  thought it appears East Asian language support used to work better but have now become difficult to use     http   sublimetext userecho com topic 117587-thai-language-issue   http   sublimetext userecho com topic 99013-can-not-show-or-type-chinese-charactor-on-ubuntu-system

User · Answer

Atom is open source  has been for a few hours by now   whereas Sublime Text is not

User · Answer

One major difference that no one has pointed out so far and that might be important to some people is that  at least on Windows  Atom doesn t fully support other keyboard layouts than US  There is an bug report on that with a few hundred posts that has been open for more than a year now  https   github com atom atom-keymap issues 35    Might be relevant when choosing an editor

User · Answer

Atom has been created by Github and it includes  git awareness   That is a feature I like quite a lot     Also it highlights the files in the git tree that have changed with different colours depending on their commit status

[editor] What is the difference between Sublime text and Github's Atom

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