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Comment by tombert | Hacker News Reader

I'm actually kind of happy about this. While I don't personally use Atom at all, I think it's good that an open source editor is getting extremely popular.

Much as I like Sublime Text, the fact that it's proprietary has prevented me from using it.

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> Much as I like Sublime Text, the fact that it's proprietary has prevented me from using it.

Same here, and when I recently ran into some built in limitations with gvim regarding its inability to easily deal with proportional width fonts, I switched to Atom. I've been really happy so far -- the vim mode plugin is nice. Atom isn't perfect, but it's good enough for now, and the extensibility model makes me confident that it will just keep getting better.

I like Atom, but what's kept me with Vim is slight performance hit that you seem to have with Atom.

I'm sure this will get ironed out more, and maybe it has been in later iterations.

Have you managed to get good performance out of it?

Why would you want proportional width fonts in Vim? Forgive me for asking, it's probably pretty obvious to you.

For non-code writing such as academic papers, notes and things written in markdown. All of which feature a mix of code, math, and plenty of prose. I don't love writing prose in monospace, and I also don't love using multiple tools for one task, and I also don't love using the pointer on the laptop (as oppposed to navigation keys in vim-like environments). With Atom, I can kill all of these birds with one editor.

Write 'normal' text for example, also if you're including CJK-strings in your app it is kind of nice if they are not rendered as teensy or on top of each other.

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