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Future of GitHub's Atom Editor

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36 pointsthangngoc8913 comments

What's I think people are missing the most about difference between Atom and VS Code is the UI.

I think it's the main difference between them. Atom was about creating a Sublime text with web technology, it's just a text editor, you open it and you can write code, it's very easy to use.

VSCode was more about creating a IDE with web technology, so the UI is a lot different and a lot harder to use for someone just starting to write code.

Performance wise Atom improve a lot during the last year and I don't see any difference in performance between them on linux.

I see a HUGE performance difference. I use VS Code now exclusively, having moved from Atom months ago. But most of the rest of my dev team is still using Atom. Every single time I've worked with one of them and used their machine one of the first things I notice is how much slower it is. We're all on Mac. And this happens even with folks that have much more powerful machines then I do.

And to your other point: I never even _notice_ it's Atom at first. They are so very similar visually, so I'm not sure I agree that the difference is in the UI. The thing that always tips me off that I'm using Atom is the performance, without a doubt.

> I use VS Code now exclusively, having moved from Atom months ago.

Ditto. I was a huge atom fan when it came out. Being able to customize it with web tech that I already knew was exhilarating. Between jobs I wrote over 20 packages.

When I went back to work I was still using Atom but I didn't have the time to baby it. All my packages were slowly dying and I didn't have time to support them. The overall stability of Atom was bad if you didn't have time to identify and rotate out dying packages.

Then VSCode got far enough along for me to use it daily. I have found it to be very stable and have almost all features I want without plugins. Rectangular text selection, drag-drop text, etc. Being an IDE for Node sealed the deal. I haven't used Atom since.

Am I the only person who thinks they should make a shim that lets one of them support the other's plugin API and discontinue the other?

The hack-ability of the two products is pretty different, right? The reason Vim Mode Plus (for Atom) is so amazing is due to GitHub's original internal plugin for Vim emulation being a "first-class-ish" citizen. The fork has gotten incredibly amazing. VSCode's vim emulation is fairly basic. That's not to say that it couldn't get better, just that it's not a design goal for VSCode.

Yeah, that's the best thing to do. Really stupid to develop two of the same products at the same time. I dropped Atom for VS code a few months ago, it pales in comparison to VS code. If someone is stuck on Atom, it's because they probably have some inhibitions about Microsoft products, or they have some kind of odd workflow that requires an odd Atom plugin.

VS Code is based on Atom right?

It uses Electron (the embedded Chrome wrapper) just like Atom does, but as far as I'm aware they dont share anything else that actually makes them an editor.

Atom also added the Language Server Protocol (developed by VS Code) that provides a common API for implementing IDE features (completion, refactoring, etc).

This is correct. VS Code is based off their Monaco Editor [0]

0 - https://microsoft.github.io/monaco-editor/

Actually, it's the other way around. From Monaco Editor's README [0]:

> The Monaco Editor is generated straight from VS Code's sources with some shims around services the code needs to make it run in a web browser outside of its home.

[0] - https://github.com/Microsoft/monaco-editor#faq

VS Code is the primary project now, but Monaco came first.[1]

[1] https://changelog.com/podcast/277

Monaco may now be built from VS Code source tree, but it is, IIRC, older than VS Code and was part of of Visual Studio Online (now Team Services) when it was released in 2013.

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