Overview

Atom

Stacks17.0K

Followers14.5K

Votes2.5K

GitHub Stars60.8K

Forks17.3K

Brackets

Stacks448

Followers752

Votes202

GitHub Stars33.1K

Forks7.6K

Visual Studio Code

Stacks185.7K

Followers169.1K

Votes2.3K

GitHub Stars178.2K

Forks35.9K

Atom vs Brackets vs Visual Studio Code: What are the differences?

Comparison of Atom, Brackets, and Visual Studio Code

Introduction

This Markdown code provides a comparison between Atom, Brackets, and Visual Studio Code highlighting their key differences.

1. User Interface and Appearance:

Atom offers a highly customizable user interface with a modern and sleek design that allows users to personalize their workspace. Brackets also provides a visually pleasing interface with a minimalistic design and a clean code editor. On the other hand, Visual Studio Code excels in its flexibility, providing a more professional and feature-rich user interface.

2. Extensibility and Plugins:

Atom is known for its extensive library of plugins and themes, allowing users to customize and enhance their editing environment extensively. Brackets, although less popular, provides a good range of plugins for most development needs. However, Visual Studio Code stands out with its vast collection of plugins and extensions, many of them developed and maintained by Microsoft, making it a powerful tool for developers.

3. Performance and Speed:

Atom is built on the Electron framework, which can often result in performance issues and reduced speed, especially when working with larger projects. Brackets, being a lightweight editor, offers decent performance for smaller projects. On the other hand, Visual Studio Code strikes a good balance between functionality and speed, significantly outperforming Atom while being faster and more efficient than Brackets.

4. Integrated Development Environment (IDE) Features:

Atom provides a rich set of IDE features such as multiple cursors, code folding, built-in Git integration, and a built-in package manager. Brackets also offers some essential IDE features like code hinting and code folding. However, Visual Studio Code offers a comprehensive set of powerful IDE features, including IntelliSense, debugging tools, built-in terminal, source control integration, and extensive language support.

5. Community and Support:

Atom has a large and active community, with numerous online resources, tutorials, and forums available for assistance. Brackets, although less popular, still has an active community that offers support. Visual Studio Code, being developed and maintained by Microsoft, benefits from a robust support system, a helpful community, and regular updates and improvements.

6. Operating System Compatibility:

Atom is compatible with Windows, macOS, and Linux, making it a versatile choice for developers on different platforms. Similarly, Brackets also supports Windows, macOS, and Linux. However, Visual Studio Code expands compatibility further and also supports more niche platforms such as ARM-based Linux distributions.

In Summary, Atom, Brackets, and Visual Studio Code have key differences in terms of their user interface and appearance, extensibility and plugins, performance and speed, IDE features, community and support, and operating system compatibility.

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Advice on Atom, Brackets, 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	Brackets	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.	With focused visual tools and preprocessor support, it is a modern text editor that makes it easy to design in the browser.	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	Code Hints from a PSD;Inline Editors;Live Preview;Preprocessor Support	Combines UI of a modern editor with code assistance and navigation; Integrated debugging experience
Statistics
GitHub Stars 60.8K	GitHub Stars 33.1K	GitHub Stars 178.2K
GitHub Forks 17.3K	GitHub Forks 7.6K	GitHub Forks 35.9K
Stacks 17.0K	Stacks 448	Stacks 185.7K
Followers 14.5K	Followers 752	Followers 169.1K
Votes 2.5K	Votes 202	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 Cannot Run code with F5 1 Can be easily Modified	Pros 51 Beautiful UI 40 Lightweight 25 Extremely customizable 20 Free plugins 14 Live Preview Cons 3 Not good for backend developer 1 You have to edit json file to set your settings. 1 Bad node.js support	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	JavaScript Node.js Adobe Photoshop Adobe Dreamweaver	No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Atom, Brackets, 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.

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.

Adobe Dreamweaver

It gives you faster, easier ways to design, code and publish websites and web applications that look amazing on any size screen. Create, code and manage dynamic websites easily with a smart, simplified coding engine. Access code hints to quickly learn and edit HTML, CSS and other web standards. And use visual aids to reduce errors and speed up site development.