Atom vs Sublime Text vs Visual Studio Code

Overview

Sublime Text

Stacks33.8K

Followers27.8K

Votes4.0K

Atom

Stacks16.9K

Followers14.5K

Votes2.5K

GitHub Stars60.8K

Forks17.3K

Visual Studio Code

Stacks186.5K

Followers169.1K

Votes2.3K

GitHub Stars178.2K

Forks35.9K

Atom vs Sublime Text vs Visual Studio Code: What are the differences?

Introduction In this article, we will compare the key differences between three popular text editors - Atom, Sublime Text, and Visual Studio Code. Markdown code will be used to present the information in a format suitable for a website.

Interface and Appearance: Atom provides a modern and customizable interface, with a wide range of themes and packages available for customization. Sublime Text offers a clean and minimalistic interface that focuses on functionality and simplicity. Visual Studio Code combines the best of both worlds, providing a modern and clean interface with extensive customization options.
Performance and Resource Usage: Atom, being built on web technologies, can sometimes be slower and require more system resources compared to the other two editors. Sublime Text is known for its blazing fast performance and low resource usage. Visual Studio Code strikes a good balance, offering fast performance while also providing a feature-rich environment.
Extension Ecosystem: Atom has a rich ecosystem of extensions and packages, making it highly customizable and adaptable to different needs. Sublime Text also has a wide range of packages available, although it may not be as extensive as Atom's. Visual Studio Code boasts a vast extension marketplace with a rapidly growing community, making it more versatile in terms of available extensions.
Integrated Terminal: Both Atom and Sublime Text lack an integrated terminal by default. However, Visual Studio Code comes with a built-in terminal, allowing for seamless integration between code editing and command line tasks.
Git Integration: Atom provides built-in Git integration, allowing version control operations directly within the editor. Sublime Text requires the installation of a package for Git integration. Visual Studio Code also has built-in Git capabilities, with a highly intuitive and feature-rich interface for managing Git repositories.
Debugger Support: While all three text editors have debugger support, Visual Studio Code stands out with its comprehensive debugging capabilities. It provides built-in support for multiple programming languages and offers an interactive debugging experience with breakpoints, call stacks, and variable inspection.

In summary, Atom offers a modern and customizable interface, Sublime Text excels in performance and resource usage, and Visual Studio Code combines a sleek interface with a wide range of features and extensions.

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)

Manual

Advice on Sublime Text, Atom, Visual Studio Code

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

Samriddhi

Machine Learning Engineer at Chefling

Sep 26, 2020

Decided

Lightweight and versatile. Huge library of extensions that enable you to integrate a host of services to your development environment. VS Code's biggest strength is its library of extensions which enables it to directly compete with every single major IDE for almost all major programming languages.

1.04M views1.04M

Comments

410-Ventures

Nov 18, 2020

Review

PyCharm (pro)

great editor designed specifically for Python and python apps
complex (good for configurability, bad for simplicity)
expensive ($200 first year, $120 third year)

PyCharm (free)

same as above but without a REST client or support for other web development tools (which you will likely end up using)
ok to get your feet wet (you can always upgrade later) Full comparison: https://www.jetbrains.com/pycharm/features/editions_comparison_matrix.html

VS Code (free)

Configurable "IDE" with support for most modern languages
TONS of simple-to-install extensions that add functionality
Great docs and UI

Sublime Text (free)

one of the most minimal editors out there
it just works

It's really down to personal preference. But I would recommend downloading all of the FREE editors, getting setup in each, and keeping only the ones you like.

My personal choice for web development is VS Code but I started with Pycharm (free), and use Sublime text on occasion.

Just focus on learning and developing and you will find what features you're looking for.

12.1k views12.1k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Sublime Text	Atom	Visual Studio Code
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.	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.	Build and debug modern web and cloud applications. Code is free and available on your favorite platform - Linux, Mac OSX, and Windows.
Goto Anything;Multiple Selections;Command Palette;Distraction Free Mode;Split Editing;Instant Project Switch;Plugin API;Customize Anything;Cross Platform	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	Combines UI of a modern editor with code assistance and navigation; Integrated debugging experience
Statistics
GitHub Stars -	GitHub Stars 60.8K	GitHub Stars 178.2K
GitHub Forks -	GitHub Forks 17.3K	GitHub Forks 35.9K
Stacks 33.8K	Stacks 16.9K	Stacks 186.5K
Followers 27.8K	Followers 14.5K	Followers 169.1K
Votes 4.0K	Votes 2.5K	Votes 2.3K
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 Doesn't act like a Mac app 4 Flexibility to move file 4 Number of plugins doing the same thing	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	Pros 341 Powerful multilanguage IDE 310 Fast 194 Front-end develop out of the box 158 Support TypeScript IntelliSense 142 Very basic but free Cons 46 Slow startup 29 Resource hog at times 20 Poor refactoring 14 Poor UI Designer 11 Weak Ui design tools
Integrations
Linux macOS Windows	GitHub	No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Sublime Text, Atom, Visual Studio Code?

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Related Comparisons

Atom vs Sublime Text vs Visual Studio Code: What are the differences?

Interface and Appearance: Atom provides a modern and customizable interface, with a wide range of themes and packages available for customization. Sublime Text offers a clean and minimalistic interface that focuses on functionality and simplicity. Visual Studio Code combines the best of both worlds, providing a modern and clean interface with extensive customization options.
Performance and Resource Usage: Atom, being built on web technologies, can sometimes be slower and require more system resources compared to the other two editors. Sublime Text is known for its blazing fast performance and low resource usage. Visual Studio Code strikes a good balance, offering fast performance while also providing a feature-rich environment.
Extension Ecosystem: Atom has a rich ecosystem of extensions and packages, making it highly customizable and adaptable to different needs. Sublime Text also has a wide range of packages available, although it may not be as extensive as Atom's. Visual Studio Code boasts a vast extension marketplace with a rapidly growing community, making it more versatile in terms of available extensions.
Integrated Terminal: Both Atom and Sublime Text lack an integrated terminal by default. However, Visual Studio Code comes with a built-in terminal, allowing for seamless integration between code editing and command line tasks.
Git Integration: Atom provides built-in Git integration, allowing version control operations directly within the editor. Sublime Text requires the installation of a package for Git integration. Visual Studio Code also has built-in Git capabilities, with a highly intuitive and feature-rich interface for managing Git repositories.
Debugger Support: While all three text editors have debugger support, Visual Studio Code stands out with its comprehensive debugging capabilities. It provides built-in support for multiple programming languages and offers an interactive debugging experience with breakpoints, call stacks, and variable inspection.

Atom vs Sublime Text vs Visual Studio Code

Overview