I see IDE competition kinda like browser wars. I was just thinking the other day that VSCode was slower than it used to be. What if VSCode becomes slower? What if MS adds a bunch of bloat to it and it becomes like VS proper?

Similar to when Chrome was the shiny new entrant, while FF was suffering with memory leak issues. Today, the roles are a bit reversed.

If Atom can pull a Firefox I could see it taking market share away... anyway, competition is healthy, even if the value prop isn’t so clear right now.

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 think editors tend to do best in the language they're made in, as thats the prime use case the developers have in mind. VS is great for C++ and C#..., but actually kinda terrible for JavaScript and TypeScript. On the other hand, VSCode is great at web, but debugging C++ in it is miserable. No support for STL containers, constant digging around in fields to get what should be at your fingertips from the start.

As for performance, I took a clean install of VS Enterprise just last night, opened the VSCode source code in it, and files would take up to 10 seconds to just syntax highlight. Compare that to opening the VSCode source in VSCode, where everything is instant. And you say VS opens as fast as VSCode? I find that hard to believe. VS has an entire loading box it shows before it even renders the main window, because of how slow the startup is. Is this a cold open or maybe restoring from an in-memory instance?

> VS has an entire loading box it shows before it even renders the main window, because of how slow the startup is

And even when it's loaded it's not done. You can look forward to some more loading when you open a code file, when you try to open the main menu and a dozen other things. They went full eclipse.

> VS is great for C++ [...]

Citation needed. I never could experiment with Clang in VS, but using the MS toolchain, all the most horrible experiences I had with C++ were exclusvely tied to VS.

Pretty sure Atom will just go away soon. VS Code is better at the same thing and now that they’re under the same roof it makes no sense to keep Atom around.

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.

Maybe it's Xray? https://github.com/atom/xray (I'm personally super-excited to see how Xray turns out!)

That’s it! I’m on mobile, so I didn’t take the time to post a link. I’m excited to see how it turns out as well

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).

Plus, it's open source, MIT licensed, so it would be difficult at best to make it just ¡poof! disappear.

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”

It has awesome packages and looks pretty good. I’m sure this comment is repeated in every post that has mentioned atom in the last year or two, so there may be some more in depth analysis if you do a search.

VSCode and Atom have nearly the same value prop. Atom’s ecosystem works better for me for the languages I develop in.

Can VSCode edit itself yet? Atom was great for adjusting CSS of the editor on the fly.

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.