Sublime vs. Atom: Which Text Editor Is Best for You?

Text editors (also known as code editors) are an essential part of the developer’s toolkit. At their most basic level, they let you create and edit plain text files without having to worry about the hidden formatting of a word processor or the overbearing complexity of an Integrated Developer Environment (IDE). Their simplicity makes text editors ideal for quickly sketching out ideas and editing files. In the world of text editors, two platforms reign in popularity.

In one corner you have Sublime Text, a shareware cross-platform source code editor built with Python and C++. In the other corner you have  Atom, an open-source code editor from GitHub built with web technologies HTML and Node.js. Both are highly capable text editors that have huge followings and active developer communities, which is great for startup developers.

As of December 15, 2022 Atom has been officially retired and is no longer being updated. Users can still download older versions of the text editor, but keep in mind the tool is no longer receiving updates.

In this article, we’ll take a look at the differences between Sublime and previous versions of Atom so that you can pick the best code editor for your needs, as well as explore alternatives.

What is Sublime?

Sublime has been around since 2008 and is often considered the gold standard of text editors for its performance, slick UI, and useful features, especially the minimap, which gives developers a bird’s-eye view of their code while they work. Since Sublime’s first release, many other text editors (particularly Atom) have taken their cues from Sublime. However, being the old timer does have some advantages. For one, Sublime boasts color-coded support for a number of obscure and specialized languages, like Erlang, Go, Lisp, and Lua.

Sublime’s best features embody its philosophy of getting things done as quickly as possible. The Goto Anything feature is a super convenient way to open files and instantly jump to particular lines, words, or symbols. Multiple Selections allows you to change multiple lines of code at once.

One downside to Sublime is that it isn’t open source. Though you can enjoy a trial mode for as long as you want, pricing for the full version comes in at $99. While development on Sublime seemed to stall for several years, it’s recently picked up again, meaning people should expect more support and features going forward.

What is Atom?

Created by the folks at GitHub, Atom was a hackable text editor built for maximum customizability.  Atom borrowed a lot of the UI, shortcuts, and functionality that made people love Sublime.

As a text editor, Atom also came with a few handy features, including smart autocomplete, integrated spell-check, and find-and-replace.

While superficially similar to Sublime, Atom had some significant differences under the hood. The major one was that Atom was built on web technology. More specifically, Atom was built as a customized version of Chromium, Google’s open-source web browser project.

This meant that packages could be written in JavaScript and HTML/CSS, making extending Atom’s capabilities as easy as writing a mini web app.

Alternatives to Sublime and Atom

While the Atom development environment is no longer active, there are still plenty of other alternative text editors to Sublime and Atom. Here’s a brief list of popular alternatives:

VS Code

Visual Studio Code, also known as VS Code, is a source-code editor developed by Microsoft for Windows, Linux, and macOS. Open source and built with Electron, Node.js, and TypeScript, it’s similar to Atom under the hood. Unlike Atom, it’s noticeably faster and includes more built-in features out of the box, such as Intellisense autocomplete. VS Code boasts a similarly large extension ecosystem and installs with its own package manager.

Brackets

Though Brackets contains basic support for server-side languages, it’s really built for front-end developers and designers. The addition of visual tools, Photoshop integration, and preprocessor support make it uniquely well suited to front-end production work. Another advantage to Brackets is that it contains more out-of-the-box features than Sublime or Atom. If you’re a front-end developer who wants a text editor that’s good to go from the minute you install it, then Brackets might be an appealing option.

Atom vs. Sublime: Major similarities

If you’re still evaluating other source code editors, you can take a look at the previous similarities and differences between Atom and Sublime. Both Atom and Sublime support all the features you'd come to expect from a text editor, including:

• Text editing
• Syntax highlighting
• Debugging
• Keyboard shortcuts
• Support for most operating systems
• Active communities on Stack Overflow

If we include add-ons, we can extend that list to cover other popular features like:

• Autocomplete
• Git integration
• Package control
• Debugging
• Snippets
• Popular languages such as Python, Java, JSON, and JavaScript
  

Atom vs. Sublime: What’s the difference?

While both text editors are packed full of features, support a wide range of languages, and give you everything you need to start coding, there are a few differences.

Open vs. closed sourced

Atom was open sourced while Sublime is closed sourced (proprietary). That means Atom had the common benefits of open source software including:

• True customizability with the ability to edit Atom’s source code directly.
• An active open source community of developers building extensions, plugins, and patching bugs.
• Continuous updates, developments, and improvements.

But keeping your source code proprietary is not without its benefits:

• Dedicated services and support
• Tighter quality control of a single development team
• Better security

By keeping their source code proprietary, Sublime gets to reap any performance advantages from its proprietary code without worrying about others copying their technology. On the flip side, they can’t grow as quickly as an open source project and updates are comparatively limited. Generally speaking, the main cons of closed source applications are that they are more expensive. Sublime costs $99, while Atom was free.

Editing and workflow

When it comes to editing and usability, Atom had a great, beginner-friendly GUI:

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You could click to the Settings tab and modify your preferences right away.

Sublime is bare bones out of the box, and doesn’t have user settings unless you script them in manually by finding your preferred settings from the list of default settings:

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It’s easy enough to see how a beginner might be overwhelmed by Sublime’s approach to settings.

In the long run, this is a minor detail, as it’s also easy to see why a programmer might prefer Sublime’s interface. Both tools have all the features you’d expect in a text editor including syntax highlighting, the ability to handle UTF-8 encoded characters, and a customizable appearance.

There are also some slight differences in features. For example, Sublime’s aforementioned Goto Anything feature is a pretty convenient way to open files and instantly jump to particular lines, words, or symbols.

Performance

Sublime remains the clear winner in performance. Designed with speedy coding in mind, Sublime has no problems opening and editing multiple files at once. For those who had previously used Atom, there was a small but noticeable lag in file and upload times if  you opened too many files.

Customization: Themes, packages and plugins

Both platforms are fairly bare bones out of the box with plenty of options for tailoring your text editor to your needs. When Atom was active, it had a larger add-on ecosystem and robust API options, but most of those addons are no longer available due to the tool being sunsetted.

Sublime may not have as many plugins as Atom, but it still boasts an impressive library of over 5000 packages including:

• Package Control is the official Sublime Text package manager for downloading and installing other packages. It is omitted from the initial installation of Sublime, and you’ll need to download it separately before getting started with packages.
• Emmet is for web developers who want the ability to type expressions (abbreviations) similar to CSS selectors and turn them into code fragments with a single keystroke.
• Sidebar Enhancements augments the Sublime Text sidebar with more options such as “move to trash,” “open with..,” and “clipboard.”
• SublimeCodeIntel is a code intelligence plugin for SublimeText that provides autocomplete capabilities for a variety of languages.

Sublime vs. Atom: The Verdict

In this article we took a look at the major similarities and differences between Atom and Sublime. A good rule of thumb when picking between two great comprehensive text editors is to consider which strength resonates the most with you.

For maximum speed at scale...

Choose Sublime. While many other text editors have borrowed Sublime’s features and elegant appearance, none have matched its performance. Because it’s written in C++, it’s able to maintain high-performance speed even when working with multiple large files and a number of packages. This has made it beloved by developers who work quickly and jump constantly between multiple files.

For maximum extensibility...

Atom was a better bet. It provided a strong, flexible foundation that you could your dream text editor or IDE upon. But since you can’t use Atom any more, you should consider trying out VS Code, which is also an open-source editor that has many similarities to our old friend Atom.

At the end of the day, the choice between which text editor you choose boils down to personal preference.  A back-end developer will need different tools than their front-end counterpart. There may be other editors that make the most sense for the type of work you perform regularly. Or there may be some in-house custom feature that requires all developers on your development team to use the same source code editor. Whatever your specific requirements are, choose the source code editor that makes the most sense for your needs.‍

Upwork is not affiliated with and does not sponsor or endorse any of the tools or services discussed in this section. These tools and services are provided only as potential options, and each reader and company should take the time needed to adequately analyze and determine the tools or services that would best fit their specific needs and situation.