Isn't VSCode Electron based too? After reading this article[1], I've shunned desktop apps using Electron, because it just seems wasteful in terms of memory. I've switched back to Sublime.

[1] https://josephg.com/blog/electron-is-flash-for-the-desktop/

Yes, but while Sublime is still way faster, there's not much human-time-perceptible difference between Sublime and VS Code, and there's still (even in this new 1.18) a huge difference between Atom and the other two.

Sublime (or really any competently-designed native editor) does indeed use way less memory for any text-editing task than any Electron-based app. But memory is fast. VS Code shows that an Electron-based app can exhibit performance basically equivalent to a native app at most tasks (other than opening that initial window, where it's still an order of magnitude slower).

So I think the performance problem with Atom is more Atom than Electron.

(Still, though, if you only have 16GB RAM, you probably don't want to use more than 4 Electron-based apps.)

> there's not much human-time-perceptible difference between Sublime and VS Code

VS Code chokes pretty horribly on 'large' files and is really slow to load. It also has noticeable typing latency vis a vis Sublime.

Hmm, I have never seen any typing latency with VS Code, but I use fast computers and few plugins. It is indeed slow during initial loading, and unusable with large files.

My comment wasn't intended to advocate for inefficient software based on web browser cores; I was just trying to note that most of Atom's abysmal performance issues seem to be more Atom's fault than Electron's, since VSCode is so much better.

Sublime, and any competently-designed native text editor, will always be faster than one based on Electron. Still, I leave both editors (and a few others) open throughout my workday.

IDK about vscode, but it is much more snappier then Atom, at least from my experience.

But, I do agree about Electron. Worst thing ever for desktop apps. When I look at my process manager, I wanna cry when I see 10+ apps taking 500+ MB each when native one would take like 30MB.

VS Code is an Electron app, too.

I am mostly ok with it with vscode because it is very responsive, leaner than a full IDE but still offers a lot of IDE like features for a wide variety of languages.

Vscode is comparatively young but it might already have the broadest support for things like semantic completion/go to source/step debugging and being written in electron might have played a part in that.

I find my Atom is plenty fast, as long as I don't bloat it with too many (and the wrong kinds) of plugins. The large file problems were almost a deal-breaker for me but then I switched to the latest beta and that fixed those problems.

That said, I am not 100% sold on it yet. The killer feature of Atom.io for me is that it is cross-platform. For most developers that shouldn't matter but have been working on some platform-agnostic web development tutorials and for that use case, there really isn't any valid alternative.

Cross-platform support is not a rare thing for text editors. Even Sublime Text is cross-platform and it does it without bundling an entire browser inside the package.

This is my exact experience. VS Code was the first Microsoft-associated product I touched in an eternity, and boy what a pleasant editor it is. Atom greets me with a blank screen for two seconds and at times it even made my fans spin. Not so with VS Code.