VS Code fairs quite similar to Atom in many tests in the linked article. But it does that by restricting what plugins can and can't do, and by integrating a large number of the functionality itself.

I prefer to have the choice of multiple plugins each with their own tradeoffs, so I sacrafice some speed for it, but that choice can more than make up for it in many cases.

And as for you claiming that web developers shouldn't be writing an IDE, feel free to contribute if you see any easy gains.

> I prefer to have the choice of multiple plugins each with their own tradeoffs

Just curios, do you know any languages besides Javascript for which this "freedom of plugins to do anything easily" resulted in any better editing experiences with Atom than with alternatives?

I'm pretty content with VSCode plugins for Python (including those for Jupyter integration and others from scientific computing area) and Go for example. Only real improvement that would actually help me would be truly intelligent (well, more like "not retarded" actually and "don't crash when trying to refactor" but anyhow...) refactoring capabilities for dynamic languages (like JetBrains IDEs have), but having the editor based on a browser + unlimited freedom of plugins to do anything with the UI wouldn't really help for such a feature, that would be implemented in a separate process anyway and could work fine even as a Vim plugin (well, Neovim, since it fixed the interprocess com and async limitations of Vim or so I've heard...).

JetBrains tools are the gold standard for Java, and I use them as well when i'm in that world. But for Python, JS, go, and a handful of smaller langs Atom is treating me well.

And while it's true that the browser-based nature of Atom won't help with refactoring tools, they do allow you to easily integrate any CLI tools with it (or I should say, they make it easy for ME to do!).

I'm not trying to claim Atom is the best in every way, but if you are in it's target demographic, it's a good experience. I'm more than positive that many people have better setups using other toolsets, and i'm sure there are many people who are worse-off for using Atom at all. But for me, it's a great tool that enables me to do things faster than I could before I used it.

What would be the "gold standard" Python plugin for Atom? Looking at https://atom.io/packages/python-tools I see "Show usages: [...] Currently only supports detection of symbols within the same file. This will be extended to support usages outside the current file in the future.".

That's kind of useless. VSCode or Sublime may fail at refactor, but such a feature like browsing usage of a symbol (across multiple files, in a dynamic project), the UI experience is pretty gorgeous in VSCode (just took this screenshot for ex: http://dl4.joxi.net/drive/2017/08/23/0019/1932/1279884/84/dd... ) despite the "limitations" of plugins, and usable in Sublime.

I'm thinking of building a GUI for a "visual language" (ML-specific DSL) and whether to use Atom or VSCode as a base for a plugin actually (because it would be "visual" + "source" side by side, so bolting it atop an editor people already use for code and has good integration for git and all would make more sense), that's why I'm going to take a deeper look at how these "modern editors" beasts work actually...

To be honest my Python usage is much less than it was a few years ago. I generally only work in small standalone scripts and some contributions to larger projects every now and again... So I wouldn't be able to help all that much with that.

But for your GUI that you want to build, you will have a significantly easier time doing that in Atom than in VS Code. I don't know much about writing plugins for VS Code, but I hear it's much more restrictive compared to Atom in terms of what you can and can't do.

I believe that a plugin that can generate a "visual language" is going to be difficult or impossible to do with the tools provided by VS Code, they mostly have specific APIs for dealing with editor windows as text.

With atom you could roll your own display stuff but you have the whole power of the browser to do any styling/layout/display you want. You'd basically just need to "render" your UI to a web page, then embed that as a pane in the editor.

With some of the others like Sublime and VIM I know even less about their plugin abilities, but I have a feeling it's going to be difficult to do in either of them.

I hear a lot of talk about vs code. Tried it the other day was not impressed.

For a full ide webstorm/phpstorm seems nicer but slower to load. Sublime text editor much faster. Vim much more portable. I even found dreamweaver 5 to have more features, (editing single files over sftp, accurate visual preview).

Why is everyone moving to vscode? Is it a visual studio familiar feelings type thing or does it offer things I've missed in my limited preview.

It's all about the "little things". It's basically Sublime, except some core features like git integration (brought by gitguttter plugin in sublime), debugger gui, integrated terminals are baked in and "just work the way you'd expect" with the default settings.

Then there's the fact that the settings are either self-documenting or well documented online, so much easier to customize without spending time learning how to do it: just start editing the settings (btw, Sublime "stole" the 2-pane default/user settings ui idea from vsc) and figure out what does what as you go.

And then there's the fact that plugins seem to "just work" and "out of the box". With Sublime plugins I often had the "ok, I installed it, AND the other 3 things it needs to do it's job too, now how do I freaking use this poc?!" often followed by the keybindings being "wtf, this conflicts with everything else, no I have to think what my custom ones to be" etc. The whole "don't make me think", "don't waste my time" and "just works out of the box as expected" philosophy, adopted by most plugins too, and coupled with being just fast enough.

But yeah, with default settings VSC is annoying and looks bloated, but if you hide most of its UI and setup vim mode keybindings it feels like a superpowered vim :) Microsoft tends to be very good at "the little things" and at "discoverable UIs"... I still like Windows' UI most despite only occasionally using it nowadays for example: beyond the top layer of "monkey shit" (that you may need to hide/disable/reconfigure etc.) is a nicely configurable UI that caters well to power users.