ST's plugin API is extremely limited. There's hardly anything a plugin can do to influence the rendering of the text editor. ST plugins can: * Show autocomplet

ST's plugin API is extremely limited. There's hardly anything a plugin can do to influence the rendering of the text editor. ST plugins can: * Show autocompletion boxes (e.g. cmd-T) * Update the status bar * Edit text * Tag text regions (which can be used for custom highlighting, e.g. underline errors) Atom plugins can do almost anything by modifying the editor DOM, but more formally they can: * Display compilation error messages inline * Show popups * Display custom panels (e.g. the neat Git conflict resolver) within the editor window * Draw custom settings UI * Extend the file tree sidebar's rendering * Create and arrange editor windows * Create custom windows (e.g. Markdown Preview splits the current editor window and shows a live preview on the right-hand side) etc. Atom has also been better designed with regard to pluggability. For example, it comes with a single autocomplete system that packages can extend with custom autocompleters. Plugins don't have to invent their own autocompletion system. The fact that ST's plugins are executed in a sandbox environment also causes (afaik) issues for plugins that want to use toolchains such as Go.