If you hadn't touched either yet, would you go VScode or Atom?

Planet Earth
21

@robfallows, thanks for that.

Now I remember, Github is the company behind both Electron AND Atom – and Electron is the platform Microsoft build VSCode on.

Here’s the history:

On 11 April in 2013, Electron was started as Atom Shell.[9]
On 6 May 2014, Atom and Atom Shell became open-source with MIT license.[10]
On 17 April 2015, Atom Shell was renamed to Electron.[11]
On 11 May 2016, Electron reached version 1.0.[12]
On 20 May 2016, Electron allowed submitting packaged apps to the Mac App Store.[13][14][15][16]
On 2 August 2016, Windows Store support for Electron apps was added.[17][18]

Interestingly, if you go to the Visual Studio Code wiki page, VSCode IS actually built off the same editor component (“Monaco”) as Github’s Atom:

“Although [VSCode] uses the Electron framework, the software does not use Atom and instead employs the same editor component (codenamed “Monaco”) [as Atom]”

Also, if you go to the Electron website, https://electron.atom.io/, there’s an impressive list of apps built on this tech – some of them I actually use often. And one of them, Electron based Beaker Browser https://beakerbrowser.com or https://github.com/beakerbrowser/beaker – looks really cool. I can see Beaker Browser being useful when trying to create demo/example webapp projects and the like.

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22

I highly recommend VSCode, it’s what I use everyday. Especially if you’re on Windows, VSCode is simply the faster, more stable way to go.

In the year I used Atom, I had several releases just break the Windows version of the app, or make it unusably slow. It’s unfortunate, because Atom has the potential to be the better editor, and has a richer community surrounding it, with tons of customization and add-ons.

Still, I use VSCode, it gets the job done and it’s more stable in my experience. It has all the essential extensions you’d need for web dev, including an excellent ESLint plugin.

23

Awesome detective work - I never knew that!

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24

VSCode. Simple performance (namely, not down right laggy) and UI consistency.

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