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Comment by sequoia | Hacker News Reader

> Atom

I could be wrong but my perception is that Atom is losing market share to VSCode all on its own– new devs are much more likely to adopt vscode & no growth ~= decline for an editor. Couple that with the fact that no one pays for Atom...

IMO They don't need to "kill" atom, they just need to wait a couple years, at which point it will just Yet Another Editor down the list with TextWrangler et al., if the next Atom doesn't come along and hasten its decline even further.

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This sounds entirely anecdotal. I haven't seen any significant exodus from Atom to VSCode among people I interact with. It seems like folks moving from other editors are about as likely to choose Atom as VSCode, and the things that used to lead to people choosing one or the other (i.e. performance, VSCode only opening one project at a time, the stupid huge icon bar in VSCode, etc.) have been resolved...Atom is now reasonably fast, VSCode can open multiple projects and you can close the stupid bar. I tried them both and ended up with Atom (and vim, where I actually still do most of my work, but new JavaScript projects are in Atom).

Atom still has more plugins, or did last time I looked (which was, admittedly, quite a while ago), and I think the ecosystem is a good indicator of how many people are actively using something.

The 2018 Stack Overflow Developer Survey [1] puts VSCode at almost double the number of developers compared to Atom (34.9% vs 18%). You're right about the package count: atom.io lists 7654 packages, compared to 6802 at marketplace.visualstudio.com, many of those being color themes (some seem generated and machine-published, too). That said, workflow for extension authoring in VSCode is amazing, the community is very much alive, and sometimes it almost feels like there's an "extension for everything". Quality may vary, naturally.

[1] https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018/

Wow, that's surprising. VSCode is not just (far) ahead of Atom, it's the leader on that survey. I'll have to give it another look. Last time I used it, it had far too many annoying characteristics.

> VSCode is not just (far) ahead of Atom,

Tutorial eco-system as well. When I jumped into JS development, all the getting started guides had Install VSCode as step 1.

So now I use VSCode.

> This sounds entirely anecdotal. I haven't seen any significant exodus from Atom to VSCode among people I interact with.

Were those two sentences in the wrong order?!

Anything that came out after vi is just another editor.

What is vi? Lol

It’s the successor to v.

I thought it was the successor to ex.

I picked up emacs in 1993 when I first got my hands on a unix system, and it was the only thing there that made remotely any sense. Fast forward to 2018, I'm still using emacs, and the upside is I haven't had to learn anything new in the intervening 25 years.

Please refrain to divert the discussion towards operating systems, we're talking about text editors here, for which ed is the standard.

https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed.msg.html

I very much share the sentiment and I’ve been using Vim (recently Neovim) pretty much exclusively for the last ~20 years. But VS Code “just works” to such an extent that I’m seriously tempted to use it.

(OT editor wars)

This was me basically 100%. If you're doing JS development, VSCode gives you so much out of the box it's hard to bring myself to even attempt to configure Vim to do all that, even if it is ""totally possible."" I miss the advanced text manipulation capabilities from vim (along with a few other things) but the upside of VSCode is just too great.

Personally I've seen more people using Atom than VSCode, but that is just anecdotal.

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