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Comment by ultramancool | Hacker News Reader

Atom was around before VSCode and they feel roughly equivalent to me, no? They're both web browser based even...

I'm a heavy IDE and Emacs guy though, so perhaps I'm missing something.

I've been using both Atom and VSCode over the past few months and gradually got to the point where I just prefer VSCode. It's hard to pinpoint a specific reason, but it feels faster and a little more polished.

Agreed. I don't see anything in VSCode that's not present in any of the vast array of alternatives. But then again, I live in IntelliJ and Emacs land. I don't mind Atom but don't really use it for anything.

Light Table might deserve the term "transformative", but I didn't find it usable enough to rely on.

> Atom was around before VSCode

Nope. Visual Studio Code was created before Atom.[1] Although both VS Code and Atom are based on Electron[1] and are both Chrome-based. VS Code does seem to be stealing Atom's thunder as what they say [1]

[1] https://discuss.atom.io/t/atom-seems-to-be-lossing-contribut...

Electron (formerly called Atom-shell) was created for Atom.

The source you cited even says this!

Read this particular comment in that link.

https://discuss.atom.io/t/atom-seems-to-be-lossing-contribut...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_%28text_editor%29

Atom = 2014

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Studio_Code

VSCode = 2015

Am I missing something? Sure, MS had some preview online IDE thing before VSCode came out, but that's not the same thing obviously.

Yes you are. Please read the original blog post. [1][2]

Visual Studio code was originated from "Monaco" team, dated back in 2013.

Eletron (formally Atom-shell) was dated in Feb-March 2014.[3]

[1] http://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2016/04/14/vscode-1.0

[2] http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/04/micros...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_(software_framework)

Yeah, but point is, it wasn't released until 2015. Which is the part that matters. Who cares if they started developing something tangentially related to it 2 years earlier. Atom came out to the public first, and that's what matters in terms of plugins and such. I never heard anything about people making Monaco plugins, did you? VSCode was basically released because Electron came out. From the Atom devs. So while Monaco may have come first, VSCode certainly did not. And Monaco didn't offer the sort of things that VSCode and Atom focus on - namely community plugins.

So VS Code is based on Electron, but Electron came out the year after it?

That makes sense. I use things from the future all the time. /s

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