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Comment by elnado | Hacker News Reader

In 2012ish as a freshman intern at Microsoft, I asked Will Kennedy (then CVP in Office) how did he feel about people pirating Office apps. He said that they would rather permit people to use illegal versions of Office than have them use their competitor's tools. Essentially he was saying Microsoft would rather people use their products free of charge rather than using other products as it promotes Microsoft image and helps Microsoft dominate the workspace. Promoting VSCode vs Visual studio are not competing efforts - the two tools are solving different problems in different work environments / tech stacks. They're simply trying to branch out to permeate more of the workplace, and it's working. Now that I'm in a startup in SF, I look around and I see some people switching from Sublime to VSCode for our web/backend stack, who would never ever use Visual Studio (100% macs here).

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Sublime, people still use that over Atom? Do you see more people using VSCode than Atom, or Emacs? What about TextMate 2, no one?

Which language do your backend guys use VSCode for?

I have used Atom for about one year and then went back to Sublime. I do mostly back-end web development, in various languages.

I believe Sublime is a superior product in terms of performance and stability.

Reasons for switching back:

1 - Atom has some long-standing bugs that compromise its usability (e.g. there is a bug where you basically can't scale down a window after it was maximised: https://github.com/atom/atom/issues/10720 )

2 - Atom is slower, you may think a fraction of a second when opening a file or doing a search should not make much of a difference but, when you are using an editor every day for many hours, it ends up affecting your productivity.

PS I liked VS Code but it's different enough from the other 2 editors that it would take time for me to become proficient with it. I especially liked VS Code's debugging features.

Yup, Sublime Text rules. I still use 2.0.1 at work (on a Mac) mainly for Perl and JavaScript. It always works, it's fast, doesn't ever crash. I didn't like VSCode that much (mainly have a problem with the toolbar on the right and don't want to learn new key bindings/menus etc). Also I don't use debuggers that much, so it's a useless addition to VSCode for me. Atom is a lot like Sublime in terms of usage, but it's painfully slow. It is getting a bit better with every new iteration though. I'm using Atom at home for learning new stuff, as Sublime's widgets are fairly different from the general UI in Linux (looks like an editor from outer space) and Atom tends to integrate somewhat better.

Have you used TextMate 2? Possibly the editor with the best integration UI-wise, also, easily the most performant.

No, but if it's not open source and multi-platform (at least Linux and Mac) then I see no reason to switch. That's why I probably ignored it, in fact; also why I keep checking Atom out.

Not op, but I definitely preferred sublime to atom. I have since swapped entirely over to vscode, though, and I have been using it to write / compile / debug Node.js and c# / f# dotnetcore backend applications without many complaints.

I went back to sublime as I had too many stability issues with Atom. You can throw megs of data at Sublime (if needed) and it absorbs it, Atom grinds to a painful death.

> VSCode vs Visual studio are not competing efforts

Yet. Little by little, rather than invest in windows-only vstudio, they'll enhance code until it's building all the same stuff as studio and then they'll announce how amazing code is and stop talking about studio alltogether.

When MS ghosts a product, you know what its future is.

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