One of the biggest advantages that I know of is that VSC has a very good NodeJS debugger for Javascript and Typescript[1]. Having the debugger integrated into the editor is huge improvement over Node Inspector. Last time I tried Atom's debuggers, they were not very good.

[1]: https://code.visualstudio.com/Docs/editor/debugging

The new Go extension [1] supports debugging as well. Just starting to play with it, but so far it's giving me a reason to start using VS Code.

[1] https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items/lukehoban.Go

VS Code's debugger has an open extension model that allows adding debuggers for other languages. We have Node, Go, and Chrome debugging today, and are planning on adding others.

Ruby please, general Ruby (& Rails) support!

Long time Atom user here as well.

When I first tried VS Code, the first thing that I noticed was how much better the performance was compared to Atom. From general snappiness of basic editing tasks to startup times to working with large files, VS Code simply outperformed Atom across the board according to my brief unscientific observations.

At the time, I ended up sticking with Atom mainly because VS Code wasn't open source and lacked extensions, but it looks like this release addresses both issues.

Well done, Microsoft. I'm definitely going to give VS Code another serious look and recommend other Atom users to do the same.

This is spot on for me as well. I always wondered how VSC was so much faster given that they are both on top of Electron. In either case, this is all great news.

Electron, iirc, is just the UI layer. Atom actually has a lot of code written to render, edit, and rerender text (they were initially using React at one layer of the process). I can't find it now, but there was a good blog post from the Atom team that discussed their efforts in detail. So I guess I'm trying to say that I believe the code handling the slow parts is predominantly unrelated to the UI layer. Also, iirc, VSCode's editor is based on Monaco (http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsofts-browser-based-dev-to...).

This is my experience as well. I am really impressed at how VS Code as no problem working with large and minified files.

It really depends on how large is considered large, since for me it crashes when opening a 60MB XML file...

There's other features, but the biggest for me is if you're writing TypeScript or C# you get first-class visual debugging support. Also the live Markdown Preview (cmd-shift-v) is pretty awesome.

You can use Split Editor and Markdown Preview to have live preview while editing.

The most recent release of VS Code includes a new `Markdown: Open Preview to the Side` command (cmd+k, v) which does this with a single command.

I don't see how that's different from atom.

Yep! That's how I do it.

Atom also has live Markdown preview (ctrl-shift-M)

When writing extensions, you get full TypeScript typings for everything.

You can set breakpoints for your NodeJS code, be it TypeScript or vanilla JavaScript.

I tried it out but too but Atom pulled me back because of its plugins and linters

VSCode is extensible now -- they are called extensions.

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/#VSCode

Interesting! I see there's a LaTeX highlighter but it seems there's no compiling add-on :(

You probably don't need a dedicated compiling add-on VS Code has a very simple, but capable, generic task running system. If you hit Ctrl+Shift+B ("Build" shortcut) it will launch and if it is the first time you've run it in that folder it will scaffold for you a sample JSON config file with a bunch of examples of how to configure it (and more examples are online).

Thanks! I tried the most basic building command possible and it works well. Displaying the PDF on the right panel would be very nice but it's a start. For reference I used the following tasks.json:

   {
    "version": "0.1.0",
    "command": "texify",
    "isShellCommand": true,
    "args": ["-p","${file}"],
    "isBuildCommand": true,
    "showOutput": "always"
   }