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  1. Stackups
  2. DevOps
  3. Code Collaboration
  4. Text Editor
  5. Atom vs Sublime Text vs Vim

Atom vs Sublime Text vs Vim

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Sublime Text
Sublime Text
Stacks33.8K
Followers27.8K
Votes4.0K
Vim
Vim
Stacks27.9K
Followers22.8K
Votes2.4K
Atom
Atom
Stacks16.9K
Followers14.5K
Votes2.5K
GitHub Stars60.8K
Forks17.3K

Atom vs Sublime Text vs Vim: What are the differences?

  1. Customization: Atom provides extensive customization options through its packages and themes, allowing users to personalize their workflow to a great extent. Sublime Text also offers customization but might require more effort to achieve the same level as Atom. Vim, on the other hand, has a steep learning curve for customization due to its modal editing system.
  2. Vim Compatibility: Vim commands and plugins can often be used in Sublime Text through plugins, making it a popular choice for Vim users transitioning to a more modern editor. Atom, while providing Vim keybindings through plugins, may not offer the same seamless integration for hardcore Vim users.
  3. Resource Usage: Sublime Text is known for its lightweight nature and efficient performance, making it an ideal choice for users with lower-end devices. Atom, on the other hand, can be resource-heavy due to its Electron framework, impacting performance on slower machines. Vim is extremely lightweight and runs efficiently even on older hardware.
  4. Package Ecosystem: Atom boasts a vast ecosystem of plugins and themes through its package manager, allowing users to enhance their editing experience with a variety of community-contributed extensions. Sublime Text also has a wide range of plugins available but may not offer the same level of integration and ease of installation as Atom. Vim's plugin ecosystem is robust and extensive, with a focus on productivity and efficiency in text editing tasks.
  5. User Interface: Atom comes with a modern and visually appealing user interface, making it attractive to users who value aesthetics in their coding environment. Sublime Text offers a clean and minimalist interface, focusing more on functionality rather than visual flair. Vim has a text-based interface that may not appeal to users accustomed to graphical editors but provides unmatched speed and efficiency in text manipulation.
  6. Learning Curve: Atom provides a user-friendly interface with intuitive features, making it relatively easy for beginners to start using. Sublime Text offers a similar learning curve with a straightforward setup and familiar user interface. Vim, however, has a steep learning curve due to its unique modal editing system, requiring dedication and practice to master efficiently.

In Summary, Atom, Sublime Text, and Vim each have distinct advantages in terms of customization, compatibility with Vim, resource usage, package ecosystem, user interface, and learning curve, catering to different preferences and needs of users.

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Advice on Sublime Text, Vim, Atom

Kamaleshwar
Kamaleshwar

Software Engineer at Dibiz Pte. Ltd.

Jul 8, 2020

Decided

Visual Studio Code became famous over the past 3+ years I believe. The clean UI, easy to use UX and the plethora of integrations made it a very easy decision for us. Our gripe with Sublime was probably only the UX side. VSCode has not failed us till now, and still is able to support our development env without any significant effort.

Goland being paid, as well as built only for Go seemed like a significant limitation to not consider it.

1.36M views1.36M
Comments
Walter
Walter

Jan 12, 2021

Review

Neovim can basically do everything Vim can with one major advantage - the number of contributors to the code base is just so much wider (Vim is ~100% maintained only by B. Mooleanaar). Whatever you learn for Neovim you can also apply to Vim and vice versa.
And of course there is the never ending Vim vs Emacs controversy - but better not get into that war.

162k views162k
Comments
Rogério
Rogério

Software Developer

Jan 9, 2021

Needs adviceonVisual Studio CodeVisual Studio CodeAtomAtomNode.jsNode.js

For a Visual Studio Code/Atom developer that works mostly with Node.js/TypeScript/Ruby/Golang and wants to get rid of graphic-text-editors-IDE-like at once, which one is worthy of investing time to pick up?

I'm a total n00b on the subject, but I've read good things about Neovim's Lua support, and I wonder what would be the VIM response/approach for it?

372k views372k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Sublime Text
Sublime Text
Vim
Vim
Atom
Atom

Sublime Text is available for OS X, Windows and Linux. One license is all you need to use Sublime Text on every computer you own, no matter what operating system it uses. Sublime Text uses a custom UI toolkit, optimized for speed and beauty, while taking advantage of native functionality on each platform.

Vim is an advanced text editor that seeks to provide the power of the de-facto Unix editor 'Vi', with a more complete feature set. Vim is a highly configurable text editor built to enable efficient text editing. It is an improved version of the vi editor distributed with most UNIX systems. Vim is distributed free as charityware.

At GitHub, we're building the text editor we've always wanted. A tool you can customize to do anything, but also use productively on the first day without ever touching a config file. Atom is modern, approachable, and hackable to the core. We can't wait to see what you build with it.

Goto Anything;Multiple Selections;Command Palette;Distraction Free Mode;Split Editing;Instant Project Switch;Plugin API;Customize Anything;Cross Platform
Vertically Split Windows;Vimdiff;Folding;Plugins;Flexible Indenting;Unicode
Atom is a desktop application based on web technologies;Node.js integration;Modular Design- composed of over 50 open-source packages that integrate around a minimal core;File system browser;Fuzzy finder for quickly opening files;Fast project-wide search and replace;Multiple cursors and selections;Multiple panes;Snippets;Code folding;A clean preferences UI;Import TextMate grammars and themes
Statistics
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
60.8K
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
17.3K
Stacks
33.8K
Stacks
27.9K
Stacks
16.9K
Followers
27.8K
Followers
22.8K
Followers
14.5K
Votes
4.0K
Votes
2.4K
Votes
2.5K
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 720
    Lightweight
  • 652
    Plugins
  • 641
    Super fast
  • 468
    Great code editor
  • 442
    Cross platform
Cons
  • 8
    Steep learning curve
  • 7
    Everything
  • 4
    Number of plugins doing the same thing
  • 4
    Flexibility to move file
  • 4
    Doesn't act like a Mac app
Pros
  • 347
    Comes by default in most unix systems (remote editing)
  • 328
    Fast
  • 312
    Highly configurable
  • 297
    Less mouse dependence
  • 247
    Lightweight
Cons
  • 8
    Ugly UI
  • 5
    Hard to learn
Pros
  • 529
    Free
  • 449
    Open source
  • 343
    Modular design
  • 321
    Hackable
  • 316
    Beautiful UI
Cons
  • 19
    Slow with large files
  • 7
    Slow startup
  • 2
    Most of the time packages are hard to find.
  • 1
    Cannot Run code with F5
  • 1
    Can be easily Modified
Integrations
Linux
Linux
macOS
macOS
Windows
Windows
No integrations available
GitHub
GitHub

What are some alternatives to Sublime Text, Vim, Atom?

Visual Studio Code

Visual Studio Code

Build and debug modern web and cloud applications. Code is free and available on your favorite platform - Linux, Mac OSX, and Windows.

Notepad++

Notepad++

Notepad++ is a free (as in "free speech" and also as in "free beer") source code editor and Notepad replacement that supports several languages. Running in the MS Windows environment, its use is governed by GPL License.

Emacs

Emacs

GNU Emacs is an extensible, customizable text editor—and more. At its core is an interpreter for Emacs Lisp, a dialect of the Lisp programming language with extensions to support text editing.

Brackets

Brackets

With focused visual tools and preprocessor support, it is a modern text editor that makes it easy to design in the browser.

Neovim

Neovim

Neovim is a project that seeks to aggressively refactor Vim in order to: simplify maintenance and encourage contributions, split the work between multiple developers, enable the implementation of new/modern user interfaces without any modifications to the core source, and improve extensibility with a new plugin architecture.

VSCodium

VSCodium

It is a community-driven, freely-licensed binary distribution of Microsoft’s editor VSCode.

TextMate

TextMate

TextMate brings Apple's approach to operating systems into the world of text editors. By bridging UNIX underpinnings and GUI, TextMate cherry-picks the best of both worlds to the benefit of expert scripters and novice users alike.

gedit

gedit

gedit is the GNOME text editor. While aiming at simplicity and ease of use, gedit is a powerful general purpose text editor.

Kakoune

Kakoune

Kakoune is a code editor heavily inspired by Vim, as such most of its commands are similar to vi’s ones. Kakoune can operate in two modes, normal and insertion. In insertion mode, keys are directly inserted into the current buffer. In normal mode, keys are used to manipulate the current selection and to enter insertion mode.

Adobe Dreamweaver

Adobe Dreamweaver

It gives you faster, easier ways to design, code and publish websites and web applications that look amazing on any size screen. Create, code and manage dynamic websites easily with a smart, simplified coding engine. Access code hints to quickly learn and edit HTML, CSS and other web standards. And use visual aids to reduce errors and speed up site development.

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