Prediction: If VS Code is the general do-it-all editor, Atom will become the GitHub editor. Atom is quickly ramping up feature integration with GitHub — seen here with integrating review comments inline with the code and the deep GitHub PR integration in general.
GitHub and Atom have a very linked future, with GitHub planning to become more involved with the actual code-writing process. Atom will be the conduit though which they achieve that.
VS Code has had excellent git integration for a long time, as well as GitHub-specific integrations through an extension.
Atom may have started the move towards lightweight (relatively) IDEs, but VS Code is undoubtedly the more popular one. Honestly, when I saw this post on HN I was quite surprised to see that Atom is still actively developed - if there's anyone reading this that prefers Atom over VS Code, I'd really like to find out why?
Prediction: I believe eventually MS will kill Atom or let development languish. People will complain that "MS is evil" and "look who they were in the past" and so on, but devs will go where the features are.
VS Code is one of the finest examples of open source Done Right™, and while it owes something to Atom and Electron, this is pure open source darwinism.
Can anyone who has stayed with Atom after evaluating VSCode comment on why to stay with Atom? I switched to VSCode and would never consider going back to Atom at this point.
Since the GitHub acquisition, it makes no sense for MS to maintain both and I agree 100% with the parent comment that this will be killed soon.
Take what you will from it. I'm not sure they will kill it, but I don't know why they need to maintain two editors either, then again they already maintain Visual Studio as well. I think it would be nice to see how both teams push their editors, but I feel like over the long haul it will be some VIM vs Neovim type of this. Additionally, VS Code will focus on strongly supporting Microsofts tech (via plugins), while Atom will focus on GitHub to some extent.
> VS Code is one of the finest examples of open source Done Right™
It's easy to do OSS right when your a major cloud OSS vendor who are able to use your billions of profits from hosting OSS to fund a 30+ strong dev team in creating a free "OSS" product.
If that's the definition of doing OSS right, then the only sustainable "free" products that will be done right will come from multi-billion dollar cloud vendors. I do love VS Code tho, just not a fan of seeing most of the generated wealth from OSS being collected by the major cloud vendors, this trend is going to hurt the diversity of the OSS ecosystem as we know it.
Irrespective of the funding model that made it possible, I will say the VS Code team is doing a fantastic work iteratively shipping new features with each release at a super high velocity.
IMO it's a poster child for why most future Desktop Apps will be built using a Hybrid or WebView dev model like Electron where its productivity is unmatched.
Strongly disagree. VS Code is a corporate tool IDE, which is dull and awkward to use as just an editor, and binary spyware in it "phones home" to its users' masters in Redmond. It's exactly what an MSDN subscriber would like, but dire for anyone else.
Atom is fun. It's easy to configure in weird personal ways, get rid of parts you don't use, add your own plugins, change CSS as you like. There's an insane number of plugins and themes. It's like emacs but organized and nice.
So far the statements from project owners in public and on Slack have been that Atom 1 & 2 development continues full speed.
If it is "killed" we'll just fork it and run up a black flag.
I do a lot of code review, so I'm excited to be able to do that from my editor where all of my other tooling is set up instead of in a web browser. Suggested code changes will be much easier if I write them in a context where I can compile/run them. And no more clicking that "expand" thing 20 times to see something earlier in the file.
1. I haven't heard anything about it recently but that doesn't mean work isn't continuing on it. Xray wasn't supposed to "fix" anything really, it was a fairly extreme experiment to see if it would be worth going down that path.
2. No, and it's not trying to be, as "speed" isn't their top priority, extensibility is.
That being said, the days of opening a 5mb file and the editor getting brought to its knees are largely over (unless you have poorly written extensions which can still take everything down, because again in Atom extensions are EVERYTHING and can do ANYTHING).
>The fuzzy finder’s project crawling performance has been improved dramatically by switching to a ripgrep-powered backend. This is most noticeable in projects with large numbers of files - for example, we measured a 14x speed boost in a project with 270K files.
I don’t understand why Microsoft hasn’t pulled the GitHub integration into VS Code. It seems like it would be in their best interest given that they own both now.
[+] [-] taylorlapeyre|7 years ago|reply
GitHub and Atom have a very linked future, with GitHub planning to become more involved with the actual code-writing process. Atom will be the conduit though which they achieve that.
[+] [-] GordonS|7 years ago|reply
Atom may have started the move towards lightweight (relatively) IDEs, but VS Code is undoubtedly the more popular one. Honestly, when I saw this post on HN I was quite surprised to see that Atom is still actively developed - if there's anyone reading this that prefers Atom over VS Code, I'd really like to find out why?
[+] [-] outside1234|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arjun27|7 years ago|reply
[1] https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/itemdetails?itemName=Gi...
[+] [-] wakeywakeywakey|7 years ago|reply
VS Code is one of the finest examples of open source Done Right™, and while it owes something to Atom and Electron, this is pure open source darwinism.
[+] [-] xrd|7 years ago|reply
Since the GitHub acquisition, it makes no sense for MS to maintain both and I agree 100% with the parent comment that this will be killed soon.
[+] [-] giancarlostoro|7 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18507817
Take what you will from it. I'm not sure they will kill it, but I don't know why they need to maintain two editors either, then again they already maintain Visual Studio as well. I think it would be nice to see how both teams push their editors, but I feel like over the long haul it will be some VIM vs Neovim type of this. Additionally, VS Code will focus on strongly supporting Microsofts tech (via plugins), while Atom will focus on GitHub to some extent.
[+] [-] mythz|7 years ago|reply
It's easy to do OSS right when your a major cloud OSS vendor who are able to use your billions of profits from hosting OSS to fund a 30+ strong dev team in creating a free "OSS" product.
If that's the definition of doing OSS right, then the only sustainable "free" products that will be done right will come from multi-billion dollar cloud vendors. I do love VS Code tho, just not a fan of seeing most of the generated wealth from OSS being collected by the major cloud vendors, this trend is going to hurt the diversity of the OSS ecosystem as we know it.
Irrespective of the funding model that made it possible, I will say the VS Code team is doing a fantastic work iteratively shipping new features with each release at a super high velocity.
IMO it's a poster child for why most future Desktop Apps will be built using a Hybrid or WebView dev model like Electron where its productivity is unmatched.
[+] [-] youeseh|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paulcarroty|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mdhughes|7 years ago|reply
Atom is fun. It's easy to configure in weird personal ways, get rid of parts you don't use, add your own plugins, change CSS as you like. There's an insane number of plugins and themes. It's like emacs but organized and nice.
So far the statements from project owners in public and on Slack have been that Atom 1 & 2 development continues full speed.
If it is "killed" we'll just fork it and run up a black flag.
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] dmnd|7 years ago|reply
Thanks, Atom team!
[+] [-] ksec|7 years ago|reply
1. What happened to Xray? The Next Generation of Atom that was suppose to fix all the performance problem of Atom.
2. Is Atom as fast as VS Code now?
[+] [-] Klathmon|7 years ago|reply
2. No, and it's not trying to be, as "speed" isn't their top priority, extensibility is.
That being said, the days of opening a 5mb file and the editor getting brought to its knees are largely over (unless you have poorly written extensions which can still take everything down, because again in Atom extensions are EVERYTHING and can do ANYTHING).
[+] [-] PurpleRamen|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aashcan|7 years ago|reply
Another leaf out of VS Code's book?
[+] [-] Hamuko|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] olliepop|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JHonaker|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dbg31415|7 years ago|reply
I open a file, there's still this "clunky" lag of 2-3 seconds to open. I hope they work on optimizing this at some point.
[+] [-] graphememes|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] outside1234|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elbrian|7 years ago|reply
It's too little, too late now.
[+] [-] guessmyname|7 years ago|reply
What do you mean? Atom has always been available for macOS, Windows, and Linux.