StackShareStackShare
Follow on
StackShare

Discover and share technology stacks from companies around the world.

Follow on

© 2025 StackShare. All rights reserved.

Product

  • Stacks
  • Tools
  • Feed

Company

  • About
  • Contact

Legal

  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Service
  1. Stackups
  2. DevOps
  3. Code Collaboration
  4. Text Editor
  5. Atom vs Emacs

Atom vs Emacs

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Emacs
Emacs
Stacks1.3K
Followers1.2K
Votes322
Atom
Atom
Stacks16.9K
Followers14.5K
Votes2.5K
GitHub Stars60.8K
Forks17.3K

Atom vs Emacs: What are the differences?

Key Differences between Atom and Emacs

Introduction

In this article, we will compare and highlight the key differences between Atom and Emacs, two popular text editors used by developers for coding purposes.

  1. Customization and Extensibility: Atom provides a highly customizable and extensible environment through its built-in package manager. Users can easily install packages to add new features, themes, and keybindings. On the other hand, Emacs, known for its powerful customizability, offers a Lisp-based scripting language that allows users to completely modify its behavior and functionality.

  2. Ease of Use: When it comes to user-friendliness, Atom has a more modern and intuitive interface, making it easier for beginners to get started. It offers a visual approach to settings and customization options. Conversely, Emacs has a steeper learning curve due to its heavy reliance on keyboard shortcuts and commands, which may be challenging for beginners but can significantly improve productivity for experienced users.

  3. Performance: Atom is known for its resource-intensive nature, sometimes leading to slower startup and response times, especially when working with large files. On the other hand, Emacs is designed to be lightweight and highly efficient, ensuring faster performance even when dealing with extensive codebases, making it suitable for older hardware or limited resource environments.

  4. Native Language Integration: While both editors support multiple programming languages, Emacs has a long-standing reputation for its deep integration with various programming languages and tools. Emacs provides extensive language modes and packages, making it a powerful choice for developers who work with multiple languages. Atom, although it also offers language-specific packages, may not have the same level of integration and support for certain languages.

  5. Inline Documentation and Help: Emacs offers a comprehensive built-in documentation system, allowing users to access documentation, tutorials, and reference manuals directly from within the editor. This feature assists users in learning and exploring Emacs's extensive functionality. Atom, while it does offer a documentation feature, may not provide the same level of in-depth and comprehensive documentation as Emacs.

  6. Large Community and Ecosystem: Atom has a vibrant community that actively develops and maintains a wide range of open-source packages and themes. The availability of numerous plugins extends the functionality and customization options of Atom. Emacs, being one of the oldest text editors, has a massive and devoted community that continues to contribute to its ecosystem. The vast collection of packages and configurations available for Emacs provides a wealth of options for customization and enhancement.

In summary, the key differences between Atom and Emacs can be summarized as follows: Atom offers a more user-friendly and modern interface, with a high degree of customization and extensibility through its built-in package manager. It may suffer from performance issues on resource-limited systems compared to Emacs, which excels in efficiency and customization options. Emacs has deep language integration, comprehensive documentation, a steeper learning curve, and a large, dedicated community.

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs
CLI (Node.js)
or
Manual

Advice on Emacs, Atom

Andrey
Andrey

Managing Partner at WhiteLabelDevelopers

May 18, 2020

Decided

Since communication with Github is not necessary, the Atom is less convenient in working with text and code. Sublim's support and understanding of projects is best for us. Notepad for us is a completely outdated solution with an unacceptable interface. We use a good theme for Sublim ayu-dark

539k views539k
Comments
Felix
Felix

Graphic Designer & Web Developer at hosting.de GmbH

Jan 9, 2020

DecidedonVisual Studio CodeVisual Studio CodeAtomAtom

I use Visual Studio Code every day, it was very refreshing coming from Atom to get a lightweight, all i need setup right out of the box.

After working with Atom for around 2 years I switch to VSCode.

Here is why:

  1. Color display of variables in code. This may now sound much, but it improve the display of scss variables and its a core feature.
  2. Out of the box features.
  3. Automation! VSCode suggests usefull things to you.
  4. Integraded console. I love the console in VSCode. It is faster than my 'default' cmd on Windows. For Atom you would have to install a package, that doesn't work so well on Windows.
  5. Output logging per Plugin.
  6. Setup time. In VSCode I can set up my workspace in under 5 minutes. For Atom I need
  7. Plugins work perfect out of the box. This is a mayor one for me. For example: In order to set up Editorconfig you have to adjust mutliple values and plugins to get it work. Plugin creators of Editorconfig for Atom are not to blame: They include a linter, that verifies whether the settings are correct or not.
  8. Git implementation. VSCode ships with Git and even if the git packet of vscode doesn't look like much, theres a lot to it. For example you can watch changes inline.
  9. Minimap and vertical scrollbar. This feature is much better implementet in VSCode and you don't need an extra plugin.
  10. Auto completion. Sass mixins example: @include and you press CTRL+SPACE and VSCode shows you every Sass mixin.
  11. Copy paths from open file tab. In VSCode you can copy the path of an file directly when you have it open. In atom you need to select 'show in tree view' and than copy the path or relative path.
  12. Tree view. The tree view VSCode automaticly brings you to the current open file by default. This helps when working with components.
  13. File search. The file search supports the asterisk so you can search for eg molecule-*.ts.
  14. Tasks support. Tasks are integrated in VSCode so eg. for Typescript you can CTRL + SHIFT + B and select tsc: watch - tsconfig.ts.
  15. Short waiting time. For example when deleting files or beautifying 20.000 lines of json (Atom hangs up).
  16. More releases. Faster feature implementation. Active community.
128k views128k
Comments
René
René

Sr. Financial Analyst

Aug 21, 2020

Review

I have used and like them both... here's my take on what to use in your case.

  1. Use whatever software your instructor is using when learning a language. It makes it simpler to start. Then change to whatever you like.
  2. Use an IDE (Integrated Development Enviroment). For Java I'd pick InteliJ (because I have found the Jetbrains IDEs great) or Visual Studio as a second pick (because it's free for individual coders).
  3. Pick your text editor: the Atom vs Notepad++, vs others question Both Atom and Notepad++ offer many features and add-ons, making it a long-disputed competition. This is what drives to chose between one and the other, and I have been alternating: On Atom: The good:
  • Good looking coding environment
  • Good autocomplete
  • Project focused structure to your files The bad:
  • Higher system resources usage
  • Slower loading time (if you are opening and closing)

Notepad++ The good:

  • Very light system resources use
  • Fast and simple, with decent code higlighting
  • Loads very fast The bad:
  • Not as pretty as Atom
  • Autocomplete and syntax checking is not that good
  • File-focused editing
483 views483
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Emacs
Emacs
Atom
Atom

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.

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.

Content-sensitive editing modes, including syntax coloring, for a variety of file types including plain text, source code, and HTML.;Complete built-in documentation, including a tutorial for new users.;Full Unicode support for nearly all human languages and their scripts.;Highly customizable, using Emacs Lisp code or a graphical interface.;A large number of extensions that add other functionality, including a project planner, mail and news reader, debugger interface, calendar, and more. Many of these extensions are distributed with GNU Emacs others are available separately.
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
60.8K
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
17.3K
Stacks
1.3K
Stacks
16.9K
Followers
1.2K
Followers
14.5K
Votes
322
Votes
2.5K
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 65
    Vast array of extensions
  • 44
    Have all you can imagine
  • 40
    Everything i need in one place
  • 39
    Portability
  • 32
    Customer config
Cons
  • 4
    Hard to learn for beginners
  • 4
    So good and extensible, that one can get sidetracked
  • 1
    Not default preinstalled in GNU/linux
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
    No longer maintained
  • 1
    Can be easily Modified
Integrations
No integrations available
GitHub
GitHub

What are some alternatives to Emacs, Atom?

Sublime Text

Sublime Text

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

Vim

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.

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.

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.

Related Comparisons

GitHub
Bitbucket

Bitbucket vs GitHub vs GitLab

GitHub
Bitbucket

AWS CodeCommit vs Bitbucket vs GitHub

Kubernetes
Rancher

Docker Swarm vs Kubernetes vs Rancher

gulp
Grunt

Grunt vs Webpack vs gulp

Graphite
Kibana

Grafana vs Graphite vs Kibana