I find it funny that neither the original blog post nor the comments here really talks much about "Why Atom can't replace vim".
The reason why Atom can't replace Vim, at least for me, is Atom is painfully slow due to the gigantic DOM tree behind it.
(Remember that the slur against Emacs -- itself once considered by some too heavyweight to compete with vi -- was that it used "eight megs" of memory.)
When I use an editor, I don't want eight extra KILOBYTES of worthless help screens and cursor positioning code! I just want an EDitor!! Not a “viitor”. Not a “emacsitor”. Those aren't even WORDS!!!! ED! ED! ED IS THE STANDARD!!!