I recall when Mozilla announced that they were dropping legacy extension support, people were upset. Firefox legacy extensions pretty much had free reign in the browser internals, making them very powerful, but also making performance improvements difficult and API changes a headache. Now that Firefox has "done a Quantum" and vastly improved performance, it has won back some users, but there's still a vocal contingent of legacy extension fans holding on to some old Firefox version or a fork.

I use Atom precisely because of its extensibility, although I'll admit I wish it were faster sometimes. I've never used VS Code but I understand it beats out Atom in performance by limiting extensibility, much like what Firefox Quantum has done. So I feel "Atom Quantum" already exists in the form of VS Code, and Atom going that direction would cause it to lose whatever proposition it has in the eyes of its users (who do exist, although you wouldn't be able to tell from this thread alone) and turn it into "a crappy VS Code/Sublime knockoff."

TL;DR: As an Atom user, I would much rather Atom keep its focus on extensibility and make performance gains where possible, rather than drop its focus and try to become VS Code.

Well, Atom now belongs to Microsoft, too, as they bought GitHub, so that competition is at best going to exist for PR reasons...

VS proper isn’t that slow. It opens just as fast as Code does on my machine.

I think you see performance penalties in VS when you add things like Resharper.

I haven’t looked into it in about a month, but there are people on the atom team working on an experimental text editor engine written in rust rather than electron.

It won't be going away. Microsoft and GitHub have both independently said they see a place for Atom and they're not getting rid of it.

Let's also not forget that the deal isn't done yet. They still have 5-ish months to go before it's done. It'll probably still go through but until then they're separate companies (and even after then GitHub is becoming a subsidiary).

Maybe it makes sense for MS to use one to keep the other honest. Maybe the negative PR from shutting down Atom isn't worth it. Etc.

“Apache Atom”

You can customize theme colors and syntax colors live, in the settings.json file. Syntax looks like:

"workbench.colorCustomizations": { "[Monokai]": { "sideBar.background": "#347890" } }

or

"editor.tokenColorCustomizations": { "[Monokai]": { "comments": "#229977" } },

yes you can theme it live, although changing syntax colors is only possible through a (limited) json flavor of textmate.