If you use Atom with VIM plugins why not use NeoVim or vim directly? It opens huge files as fast as sublime does. You have plenty of plugins to adequate your needs, definitely not as advanced as IntelliJ but I would say better than Atom.
Let's be honest. There is an amount of time and energy needed to figure out how to setup Vim and make it look the way you want it, and work the way you want it to, that not everyone can or wants to invest.
I did spend a lot of time with Vim but never got to the point where I had all my plugin issues solved. Eventually I moved mostly back to Sublime with Vim emulation, and very recently have moved again to VS Code with Vim emulation, and I'm quite happy.
What's the current state of Vim emulation in VS Code? Last I tried it didn't support the c-i-<thingy> motions, nor a few other relatively basic ones that I use a lot.
Long time "lightweight" VIM user with gvim, using tabs, and often two windows (sessions)...
On OS X, MacVim was a delight.
Since I had to swiych back to Windows, and I use VirtualBox, gvim is really slow. It also has some nasty rendering issues due to its underlying gtk framework intercaction with the Virtual Box Guest Additions. The only work around I found was some obscure tweaks in the Compiz Comfing Settings Manager (CCSM) related to screen redraws. Spent hours and hours installing different VMs, Linux Mint, Ubuntu, etc. and trying to isolate the problem in Virtual Box.
Finally recently I heard about Sublime Text... it runs SO MUCH BETTER than gvim in a Ubuntu VM.
And.. icing on the cake... I discover it has a "vintage" mode that covers pretty much everything I used (ci" to replace inside strings, dt; to "delete till ;", vit to select visual inside tag, etc. It seems to support a lot more than the documentation says.
To top it off it appears to be very configurable as well.
All in all I genuinely wonder why you'd not want to use the editor? Because it's paid? It doesn't even enforce you to buy the software, which is prety gracious of the developer.
But honestly.. what started getting on my nerves.. is whenever I'd visit discussions about vim and you always have the same clique who point out how using the mouse is "inefficient" and how using vim inside terminal is the only true way of using vim, and how using tabs is "slow" compared to their way of switching buffers, etc. I suppose you can gleefully ignore these comments but it makes you question in the end if you are using an editor out of ideology. If I stick to Sublime Text I will definitely not miss those inane topics.
The main thing I don't like in Sublime Text so far are:
- the search replace UI... I much preferred the %s// way of doing things.
( but for multi file refactoring I much prefer a special tool for that like "regexxer" )
- the over abundance of auto completion. Unfortunately whenever a dev creates some autocomplete plugin they always feel as if it is the right thing to do to complete EVERYTHING. Well it makes "logical" sense to them, to scrape a source like mozilla MDN, or the specs sheets. And then they may even proudly describe how their plugin covers everything AND MORE .. including css properties or javascript syntax that isn't even implemented yet.
.. So TLDR I find out half the time I try to complete something I end up spending more time undoing the clusterfuck and it makes me wonder why I use it at all. I wish devs understood the 80/20 rule and make the completion work for the 80% case, so that the editor actually serves the user instead of slowing you down. How the heck do you remember everything that can be completed? THere is simply too many possibilities so you never know quite what will happen.
.. So now I need to find the setting in Sublime to auto complete only what is in all my open files and nothing else, and it's probably much more meaningful that way. Since when you add to a project, you'll end up reusing a lot of the functions both self made, and those often used from an API.
That's my rant for the day =)
PS:
But seriously Sublime + Vintage mode maeks it easy to switch from vim if necessary. The settings are:
Aside from that: I love vim and use it any time I work remotely (via ssh). But I spend good chunks of my time in Linux (Mint), Windows, and Mac. And Vim is great for the first and the last, but is awkward for Windows. And even if I don't mind the gui that looks like it came out of a dog's derriere, it makes synchronizing my settings a pain in the same region just because I need to change filenames (.vimrc becomes _vimrc, if memory serves), add a bunch of conditionals to handle different features, and possibly also change line endings (I forget if that is needed). Whereas atom is easily synced with a single mostly automated plugin that pushes everything I need to a gist.
I still prefer vim on my primary work station, but I am also eagerly following atom development in the hopes of filetype specific tab/indent/linelength rules to be better supported and various improvements to performance.
And on a less usability note: Atom looks REALLY good when you are doing a code demo or a presentation.
I am switching languages and frameworks quite often, always trying new stuff. So I don't have the time and patience to learn how to configure vim to work with all of them. For me it is mostly about navigation/searching/editing without leaving the home-row anyways, not so much about vim as the editor per-se.
