For my programming class in the upcoming winter, I'm finally switching to Atom from Sublime Text as the recommended default text editor for my (novice) students. My reasons, in descending order of importance:<p>1. Atom has nice defaults, such as spaces for default tabbing and automatic trimming of white space upon save. In ST, you have to manually alter the user config file.<p>1.5 Atom has much better file handling in its project sidebar -- e.g. Right-clicking a file brings up the expected options for moving/copying/etc a file. And the dialog box is much clearer. In ST, IIRC, I have to install 2 separate plugins to have that convenience.<p>2. Atom's package manager is built in. In ST, you have to activate the console and paste in a Python command to install the PM.<p>3. The prominent "Download" button on sublimetext.com, until recently, defaulted to 2. And the download page for 3 lacks a call to action, at least in comparison to the page text that warns the reader that 3 is still in beta. I was always amazed at how many students installed ST2 contrary to my instructions until I visited the ST homepage for myself (which I never do unless I have to reinstall ST from scratch).<p>4. Atom installs the 'atom' CLI command by default. ST requires manual shell configuration to get 'subl'<p>5. Atom is free. ST has a free trial but then nags the user upon every nth save. I know, minor inconvenience, but as a happy purchaser of ST, I found that I vastly underestimated how much that nag dialog broke the flow, especially if students followed my advice to hit Cmd-S casually.<p>I agree with the OP that ST is substantially more performant, which is why ST is still my editor of choice. But for my students, performance is less of a concern. For most novices, their concept of a "text editor" is Microsoft Word...so a 3 second load up time won't bother them.<p>That Atom chokes on non trivial data files, e.g. a CSV of 100K rows, has been the strongest reason to stick to ST. But I now see that as an <i>asset</i> when it comes to teaching beginners. I make them learn the command line, and no better way to drive home the importance of tools like head, tail, sed, and grep than to have students experience firsthand Atom's grinding death when trying to render even simple text.