&gt; I am still unsure why anyone uses Atom when it consumes so many resources. The emacs instance I have had open for some time now is using 92Mb. Atom instances have been reported in the hundreds of megabytes [1].<p>It works well on the size files I mostly want to use it with, has a strong community producing support for the languages I want to use it with, doesn&#x27;t want to impose its own structure and management artifacts on projects the way IDEs tend to, and imposes less cognitive overhead than Emacs [0]. It might use more memory, but that&#x27;s never been a real practical problem, and even on my cheap 6Gb RAM laptop system, the difference between a programming editor taking up ~100Mb and &quot;hundreds of Mb&quot; just isn&#x27;t an issue in most cases.<p>[0] I recognize that this is largely due to familiarity, in that Atom follows closer to currently-popular UX paradigms and Emacs is its own unique beast that predates most of the things that Atom is following, but I&#x27;ve been using Emacs intermittently for <i>many</i> years, and Atom was still instantly more accessible. But even so, there are some languages where the available Emacs packages are so good that I prefer Emacs. Just as there are some things for which I prefer Visual Studio or an IntelliJ-based IDE. Its not like one tool is ideal for every person for every task.