Atom Editor or Sublime Text – which one to pick?

So much this, and it applies to things other than editors too. I used to constantly look for people's opinions on all kinds of software to decide which one was best for me due to a belief that if I used something that I didn't end up liking then that time would have been wasted. I've now mostly reversed that habit because trying something out for yourself is the only way you'll know if you will like it, and the time invested isn't a waste so long as you come out with a better idea of what you prefer.

I know it's "linux only" (not really, I'm using an old version from windows.kde.org), but, seriously, I always found kate[0] better suited as a "programmer editor". I recenlty at work switched to sublime, but it's inferior to kate in almost everything (the only thing I see it handle better - and it handle very better - is the opening of very big (>30Mb) text files)

.. [0]: http://kate-editor.org/

Atom just feels weird and broken. Make a new document - why is Edit -> Undo enabled when there's nothing to Undo? Press Command-Z - why doesn't the menubar flash to indicate that I typed a key equivalent? Control-click on an item in the tree view on the right - why does it only highlight after the menu is dismissed? Make the window bigger - why is there a flicker, as the content repaints after the window resizes?

Atom exists in an uncanny valley, and re-introduces tons of problems that the design of OS X has worked hard to avoid. I hope Atom doesn't succeed for that reason: it's a big regression in UI.

Those of you who use Sublime or Atom exclusively for (code) work, does that mean you don't use an IDE?

There seems to be devs coming from at least three camps: the ones that came from the emacs/vi side that never really took to IDEs, those that once used (say) Eclipse and were burned by IDEs and now like the less-is-more of editors, and those that started developing in IDE's and can't imagine NOT having an integrated debugger and so on (Yes I know several text editors can be set up to have most IDE features, but for the sake of argument lets count IDEs as those that were built from the ground up as full IDEs).

Not sure what divides devs this way but the 2 main reasons should be platform: if you are used to linux of course you have huge benefits of having a console based editor, perhaps so much that you can forego a lot of the bells and whistles of a desktop based one, especially of you don't use graphical designers UI elements and such. The second reason I can think of would be language: If you are work on niche languages you are likely to find editor support in text editors, but not likely a good IDE. Likewise if you work in dynamic/weakly typed languages, the benefits of refactorings and navigation are much smaller than they are in a static/strongly typed langues.

So I'm curious: if you aren't a Haskell or js developer, are you using a non-IDE as your "main" editor? If so, why?

For me personally I want a full IDE for my dev work and can't imagine coding without full project support, integrated debugger, refactorings and so on, and I can't be bothered with configuring editor plugins for basic things such as auto-indentation, auto-complete or syntax highlighting, and I haven't seen any really good dev environents based on editors in neither Sublime, vi or emacs. I do use editors for viewing random files/logs, editing resources, making documentation and so on, but not as my main dev tool. As such, the requirements are very different from an editor that is a main dev environment from 8 to 5.