Atom vs Visual Studio Code

Overview

Atom

Stacks16.9K

Followers14.5K

Votes2.5K

GitHub Stars60.8K

Forks17.3K

Visual Studio Code

Stacks186.5K

Followers169.1K

Votes2.3K

GitHub Stars178.2K

Forks35.9K

Atom vs Visual Studio Code: What are the differences?

Atom and Visual Studio Code (VS Code) are both popular text editors used in software development. Here are the key differences between Atom and Visual Studio Code:

Performance and Resource Usage: Atom is built using web technologies and can be resource-intensive, especially when working with large projects or opening multiple files. It may experience occasional lags or slower startup times compared to VS Code. On the other hand, VS Code is built on the Electron framework but optimized for performance. It is known for its faster startup time, responsiveness, and efficient resource usage.
Extensibility and Ecosystem: VS Code has a larger and more mature ecosystem with a vast library of extensions available in the Visual Studio Code Marketplace. The VS Code extensions cover a wide range of functionalities, including language support, code snippets, linters, debuggers, and integration with various frameworks and tools. Atom also has a decent collection of extensions but may have fewer options and a smaller community compared to VS Code.
User Interface and Customization: Atom follows a more minimalistic approach, with a clean and intuitive design. It provides a simplified interface by default, which can be customized through themes and packages. On the other hand, VS Code offers a versatile user interface with more advanced features and a wide range of customization options. It allows users to personalize their editor's layout, color scheme, and toolbar configuration.
Built-in Features: Atom comes with a set of built-in features such as a file tree view, integrated Git support, and a command palette. However, compared to VS Code, Atom may have a more limited set of built-in functionalities. VS Code offers a rich set of features out of the box, including advanced code editing capabilities, IntelliSense, debugging tools, and integrated terminal. It provides a comprehensive development environment that caters to the needs of various programming languages and frameworks.
Company Support and Updates: Atom is developed and maintained by GitHub, while Visual Studio Code is developed and supported by Microsoft. Both editors receive regular updates and improvements but being backed by Microsoft, VS Code benefits from a larger development team and frequent updates. Microsoft actively maintains and enhances VS Code, addressing issues, introducing new features, and providing excellent community support.

In summary, Atom, built by GitHub, is known for its simplicity, and focuses on customization and extensibility, offering a hackable experience for developers. VS Code, developed by Microsoft, emphasizes performance and versatility, providing a rich set of features, built-in Git integration, and extensive language support.

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Advice on Atom, Visual Studio Code

Kamaleshwar

Software Engineer at Dibiz Pte. Ltd.

Jul 8, 2020

Decided

Visual Studio Code became famous over the past 3+ years I believe. The clean UI, easy to use UX and the plethora of integrations made it a very easy decision for us. Our gripe with Sublime was probably only the UX side. VSCode has not failed us till now, and still is able to support our development env without any significant effort.

Goland being paid, as well as built only for Go seemed like a significant limitation to not consider it.

1.36M views1.36M

Comments

Samriddhi

Machine Learning Engineer at Chefling

Sep 26, 2020

Decided

Lightweight and versatile. Huge library of extensions that enable you to integrate a host of services to your development environment. VS Code's biggest strength is its library of extensions which enables it to directly compete with every single major IDE for almost all major programming languages.

1.04M views1.04M

Comments

410-Ventures

Nov 18, 2020

Review

PyCharm (pro)

great editor designed specifically for Python and python apps
complex (good for configurability, bad for simplicity)
expensive ($200 first year, $120 third year)

PyCharm (free)

same as above but without a REST client or support for other web development tools (which you will likely end up using)
ok to get your feet wet (you can always upgrade later) Full comparison: https://www.jetbrains.com/pycharm/features/editions_comparison_matrix.html

VS Code (free)

Configurable "IDE" with support for most modern languages
TONS of simple-to-install extensions that add functionality
Great docs and UI

Sublime Text (free)

one of the most minimal editors out there
it just works

It's really down to personal preference. But I would recommend downloading all of the FREE editors, getting setup in each, and keeping only the ones you like.

My personal choice for web development is VS Code but I started with Pycharm (free), and use Sublime text on occasion.

Just focus on learning and developing and you will find what features you're looking for.

12.1k views12.1k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Atom	Visual Studio Code
At GitHub, we're building the text editor we've always wanted. A tool you can customize to do anything, but also use productively on the first day without ever touching a config file. Atom is modern, approachable, and hackable to the core. We can't wait to see what you build with it.	Build and debug modern web and cloud applications. Code is free and available on your favorite platform - Linux, Mac OSX, and Windows.
Atom is a desktop application based on web technologies;Node.js integration;Modular Design- composed of over 50 open-source packages that integrate around a minimal core;File system browser;Fuzzy finder for quickly opening files;Fast project-wide search and replace;Multiple cursors and selections;Multiple panes;Snippets;Code folding;A clean preferences UI;Import TextMate grammars and themes	Combines UI of a modern editor with code assistance and navigation; Integrated debugging experience
Statistics
GitHub Stars 60.8K	GitHub Stars 178.2K
GitHub Forks 17.3K	GitHub Forks 35.9K
Stacks 16.9K	Stacks 186.5K
Followers 14.5K	Followers 169.1K
Votes 2.5K	Votes 2.3K
Pros & Cons
Pros 529 Free 449 Open source 343 Modular design 321 Hackable 316 Beautiful UI Cons 19 Slow with large files 7 Slow startup 2 Most of the time packages are hard to find. 1 No longer maintained 1 Cannot Run code with F5	Pros 341 Powerful multilanguage IDE 310 Fast 194 Front-end develop out of the box 158 Support TypeScript IntelliSense 142 Very basic but free Cons 46 Slow startup 29 Resource hog at times 20 Poor refactoring 14 Poor UI Designer 11 Weak Ui design tools
Integrations
GitHub	No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Atom, Visual Studio Code?

Sublime Text

Sublime Text is available for OS X, Windows and Linux. One license is all you need to use Sublime Text on every computer you own, no matter what operating system it uses. Sublime Text uses a custom UI toolkit, optimized for speed and beauty, while taking advantage of native functionality on each platform.

Vim

Vim is an advanced text editor that seeks to provide the power of the de-facto Unix editor 'Vi', with a more complete feature set. Vim is a highly configurable text editor built to enable efficient text editing. It is an improved version of the vi editor distributed with most UNIX systems. Vim is distributed free as charityware.

Notepad++

Notepad++ is a free (as in "free speech" and also as in "free beer") source code editor and Notepad replacement that supports several languages. Running in the MS Windows environment, its use is governed by GPL License.

Emacs

GNU Emacs is an extensible, customizable text editor—and more. At its core is an interpreter for Emacs Lisp, a dialect of the Lisp programming language with extensions to support text editing.

Brackets

With focused visual tools and preprocessor support, it is a modern text editor that makes it easy to design in the browser.

Neovim

Neovim is a project that seeks to aggressively refactor Vim in order to: simplify maintenance and encourage contributions, split the work between multiple developers, enable the implementation of new/modern user interfaces without any modifications to the core source, and improve extensibility with a new plugin architecture.

VSCodium

It is a community-driven, freely-licensed binary distribution of Microsoft’s editor VSCode.

TextMate

TextMate brings Apple's approach to operating systems into the world of text editors. By bridging UNIX underpinnings and GUI, TextMate cherry-picks the best of both worlds to the benefit of expert scripters and novice users alike.

gedit

gedit is the GNOME text editor. While aiming at simplicity and ease of use, gedit is a powerful general purpose text editor.

Kakoune

Kakoune is a code editor heavily inspired by Vim, as such most of its commands are similar to vi’s ones. Kakoune can operate in two modes, normal and insertion. In insertion mode, keys are directly inserted into the current buffer. In normal mode, keys are used to manipulate the current selection and to enter insertion mode.

Related Comparisons

Performance and Resource Usage: Atom is built using web technologies and can be resource-intensive, especially when working with large projects or opening multiple files. It may experience occasional lags or slower startup times compared to VS Code. On the other hand, VS Code is built on the Electron framework but optimized for performance. It is known for its faster startup time, responsiveness, and efficient resource usage.
Extensibility and Ecosystem: VS Code has a larger and more mature ecosystem with a vast library of extensions available in the Visual Studio Code Marketplace. The VS Code extensions cover a wide range of functionalities, including language support, code snippets, linters, debuggers, and integration with various frameworks and tools. Atom also has a decent collection of extensions but may have fewer options and a smaller community compared to VS Code.
User Interface and Customization: Atom follows a more minimalistic approach, with a clean and intuitive design. It provides a simplified interface by default, which can be customized through themes and packages. On the other hand, VS Code offers a versatile user interface with more advanced features and a wide range of customization options. It allows users to personalize their editor's layout, color scheme, and toolbar configuration.
Built-in Features: Atom comes with a set of built-in features such as a file tree view, integrated Git support, and a command palette. However, compared to VS Code, Atom may have a more limited set of built-in functionalities. VS Code offers a rich set of features out of the box, including advanced code editing capabilities, IntelliSense, debugging tools, and integrated terminal. It provides a comprehensive development environment that caters to the needs of various programming languages and frameworks.
Company Support and Updates: Atom is developed and maintained by GitHub, while Visual Studio Code is developed and supported by Microsoft. Both editors receive regular updates and improvements but being backed by Microsoft, VS Code benefits from a larger development team and frequent updates. Microsoft actively maintains and enhances VS Code, addressing issues, introducing new features, and providing excellent community support.

Atom vs Visual Studio Code