Atom is great for simple HTML coding. It's fast, has intuitive shortcuts and several options. I particularly love the "convert spaces to tabs" function that I haven't seen in other editors.
I'm not sure how it would fair in more serious web development today, if there are plugins for live updates of the page you are working on...
But the problem is that it has been discontinued so you know there are no new features or fixes coming through.
I like the macro feature for transforming text. For example, taking a CSV file of data and quickly turning it into a set of SQL "insert" statements. Also, useful for this is the find/replace feature using regular expressions such as taking a URL QueryString and breaking all the parameters into separate lines and perhaps sorting them for review.
Atom is highly customizable and allows for various themes and extensions that can make your code easier to read.
Atom has many code hinting features that allow users to write faster and integrate with services likeLINT that can clean up your code once your done to meet your internal teams style choices.
It's very fast and manages projects well - Accessing other files within a related folder(s) is very easy and intuitive.
Well Atom is open source so the re-new is a no brainer. The only way I would stop using Atom is if the developers somehow made it not function well. Or, if the project got forked to a commercial version or something. Or, there could be the case that development stops or that it was not updated on this or that platform
I give Atom a 9 because it is one of the most modern text editors built with JavaScript intentionally to allow the editor to be changed and modified with custom functionality that a team may need. I think I would otherwise give atom an 8 due to support, but it gets a 9/10 because of the extensibility/plugin capability.
Atom has an active forum and a Slack group where you can ask technical questions. Occasionally, the authors will pop in to answer a few questions here and there, but most of the time, its other helpful users who will assist you. Though they aren't the most knowledgeable, they are at least timely.
As for plugin support, that differs with each plugin, but as I mentioned before, many plugins are no longer maintained.
Our company likes to keep things open, and we don't want to prevent developers from customizing their environment the way they want. Atom seemed to be a lot more open than our existing tools and has good community support on pretty much any programming language. This can create some confusion since adding too many extensions or customizing can make the tool slower than it is supposed to be.
When you want to quickly edit a file, TextPad starts up quickly and has many features over Microsoft Notepad. Visual Studio Code is an alternative in that it is full-featured and will edit text files but is slower at startup. I prefer the macro feature in TextPad due to its simplicity.
The tool we use when we need quick fixes. Allows fast, reliable scripting to fix urgent problems in our applications.
When applications grow from 5-10 files to 100's, they need to be migrated to a heavier-duty IDE. This can be cumbersome and quite annoying, but is necessary to maintain code integrity on such a large scale (since it cannot be done with the limited default toolset of Atom).
