Comment by mikece
8 years ago
Atom and VS Code are both built on Electron. No need to kill Atom as it and VS Code are built for different purposes.
8 years ago
Atom and VS Code are both built on Electron. No need to kill Atom as it and VS Code are built for different purposes.
What different purposes? They're both text editors / lightweight IDEs focusing on plugin extensibility built on top of Electron. They're literally the same thing.
And there are many who would say a sedan and a crossover are basically the same thing, but the devil is in the details.
Atom is extensible to a fault. A plugin can do just about everything and anything. FFS tabs are actually a plugin! While that means that performance will suffer, many (myself included) use Atom because of that insane freedom that plugins have to do what they need to do.
VSCode on the other hand is much more "if you want to do X, use this API". It's much more controlled, much more opinionated about how things "should" be done using VSCode as a platform.
From 30,000 ft, they are the same. But their goals and details differ, and I always prefer more choice rather than less.
Atom has a whole team under Github. If they're both run by Microsoft, that seems like a clear cost-cutting measure; why develop two vastly similar electron-based code editors when you could just move that team + all of the interesting tech into VSCode?
I use neither, and I can see that the two take fairly different approaches, but why would you say they're build for different purposes. I don't think it's clear why a single org (though very far apart) has two approaches for a code text editor.