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Mar 1, 2023

Atom vs Visual Studio Code

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Atom
15.9K
13.7K
+ 1
2.7K
Visual Studio Code
149.7K
134.8K
+ 1
2.2K
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Atom vs Visual Studio Code: What are the differences?

Atom: A hackable text editor for the 21st Century . 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; Visual Studio Code: Build and debug modern web and cloud applications, by Microsoft . Build and debug modern web and cloud applications. Code is free and available on your favorite platform - Linux, Mac OSX, and Windows.

Atom and Visual Studio Code belong to "Text Editor" category of the tech stack.

"Free" , "Open source" and "Modular design" are the key factors why developers consider Atom; whereas "Powerful multilanguage IDE" , "Fast" and "Front-end develop out of the box" are the primary reasons why Visual Studio Code is favored.

Atom and Visual Studio Code are both open source tools. It seems that Visual Studio Code with 79.3K GitHub stars and 11.1K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Atom with 49.2K GitHub stars and 12.1K GitHub forks.

Asana , Microsoft , and Intuit are some of the popular companies that use Visual Studio Code, whereas Atom is used by Lyft , Typeform , and PedidosYa . Visual Studio Code has a broader approval, being mentioned in 1133 company stacks & 2378 developers stacks; compared to Atom, which is listed in 836 company stacks and 725 developer stacks.

Decisions about Atom and Visual Studio Code
Samriddhi Sinha
Machine Learning Engineer at Chefling · | 6 upvotes · 842.5K views
Chose
Visual Studio Code Visual Studio Code
over
Brackets Brackets IntelliJ IDEA IntelliJ IDEA PyCharm PyCharm
in

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.

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Kamaleshwar BN
Senior Software Engineer at Pulley · | 12 upvotes · 1.1M views
Chose
Visual Studio Code Visual Studio Code
over
GoLand GoLand Sublime Text Sublime Text
at

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.

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Andrey Ginger
Managing Partner at WhiteLabelDevelopers · | 3 upvotes · 431.8K views
Chose
Sublime Text Sublime Text
over
Atom Atom Notepad++ Notepad++
at
( )

Since communication with Github is not necessary, the Atom is less convenient in working with text and code. Sublim's support and understanding of projects is best for us. Notepad for us is a completely outdated solution with an unacceptable interface. We use a good theme for Sublim ayu-dark

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Simon Ibssa
Student at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo · | 2 upvotes · 1.1M views
Chose
Visual Studio Code Visual Studio Code
over
Sublime Text Sublime Text
in

I decided to choose VSCode over Sublime text for my Systems Programming class in C. What I love about VSCode is its awesome ability to add extensions. Intellisense is a beautiful debugger, and Remote SSH allows me to login and make real-time changes in VSCode to files on my university server. This is an awesome alternative to going back and forth on pushing/pulling code and logging into servers in the terminal. Great choice for anyone interested in C programming!

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Pros of Atom
Pros of Visual Studio Code
  • 528
    Free
  • 447
    Open source
  • 342
    Modular design
  • 320
    Hackable
  • 316
    Beautiful UI
  • 170
    Github integration
  • 147
    Backed by github
  • 119
    Built with node.js
  • 113
    Web native
  • 107
    Community
  • 35
    Packages
  • 18
    Cross platform
  • 5
    TypeScript editor
  • 5
    Nice UI
  • 5
    Multicursor support
  • 3
    cli start
  • 3
    Chrome Inspector works IN EDITOR
  • 3
    Simple but powerful
  • 3
    Open source, lots of packages, and so configurable
  • 3
    Snippets
  • 2
    It's powerful
  • 2
    Code readability
  • 2
    Awesome
  • 2
    Smart TypeScript code completion
  • 2
    Well documented
  • 1
    "Free", "Hackable", "Open Source", The Awesomness
  • 1
    Apm publish minor
  • 1
    works with GitLab
  • 1
    full support
  • 1
    vim support
  • 1
    Split-Tab Layout
  • 1
    Consistent UI on all platforms
  • 1
    User friendly
  • 1
    Hackable and Open Source
  • 0
    Publish
  • 334
    Powerful multilanguage IDE
  • 301
    Fast
  • 189
    Front-end develop out of the box
  • 157
    Support TypeScript IntelliSense
  • 140
    Very basic but free
  • 123
    Git integration
  • 104
    Intellisense
  • 76
    Faster than Atom
  • 51
    Better ui, easy plugins, and nice git integration
  • 43
    Great Refactoring Tools
  • 42
    Good Plugins
  • 40
    Terminal
  • 36
    Superb markdown support
  • 35
    Open Source
  • 33
    Extensions
  • 26
    Large & up-to-date extension community
  • 26
    Awesome UI
  • 23
    Powerful and fast
  • 21
    Portable
  • 18
    Best code editor
  • 17
    Best editor
  • 16
    Easy to get started with
  • 15
    Good for begginers
  • 15
    Crossplatform
  • 14
    Lots of extensions
  • 14
    Extensions for everything
  • 14
    Built on Electron
  • 14
    Open, cross-platform, fast, monthly updates
  • 13
    All Languages Support
  • 12
    Extensible
  • 12
    "fast, stable & easy to use"
  • 12
    Easy to use and learn
  • 11
    Useful for begginer
  • 11
    Ui design is great
  • 11
    Faster edit for slow computer
  • 11
    Totally customizable
  • 11
    Git out of the box
  • 10
    Great community
  • 9
    It has terminal and there are lots of shortcuts in it
  • 9
    Fast Startup
  • 9
    Powerful Debugger
  • 9
    Works With Almost EveryThing You Need
  • 9
    SSH support
  • 9
    Great language support
  • 8
    Can compile and run .py files
  • 8
    Python extension is fast
  • 7
    Features rich
  • 7
    Great document formater
  • 6
    He is not Michael
  • 6
    She is not Rachel
  • 6
    Awesome multi cursor support
  • 5
    SFTP Workspace
  • 5
    Easy azure
  • 5
    VSCode.pro Course makes it easy to learn
  • 5
    Very proffesional
  • 5
    Language server client
  • 5
    Extension Echosystem
  • 4
    Has better support and more extentions for debugging
  • 4
    Virtualenv integration
  • 4
    Excellent as git difftool and mergetool
  • 3
    'batteries included'
  • 3
    More tools to integrate with vs
  • 3
    Better autocompletes than Atom
  • 3
    Emmet preinstalled
  • 3
    Supports lots of operating systems
  • 3
    Has more than enough languages for any developer
  • 2
    Fast and ruby is built right in
  • 2
    Microsoft
  • 2
    Light
  • 2
    Customizable
  • 2
    VS Code Server: Browser version of VS Code
  • 2
    CMake support with autocomplete
  • 1
    Good
  • 1
    Big extension marketplace

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Cons of Atom
Cons of Visual Studio Code
  • 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
  • 1
    Can be easily Modified
  • 44
    Slow startup
  • 27
    Resource hog at times
  • 20
    Poor refactoring
  • 15
    Microsoft
  • 13
    Poor UI Designer
  • 11
    Weak Ui design tools
  • 10
    Poor autocomplete
  • 8
    Microsoft sends telemetry data
  • 7
    Poor in PHP
  • 7
    Huge cpu usage with few installed extension
  • 6
    Super Slow
  • 5
    It's MicroSoft
  • 3
    Poor in Python
  • 3
    No Built in Browser Preview
  • 3
    No color Intergrator
  • 3
    Very basic for java development and buggy at times
  • 3
    No built in live Preview
  • 3
    Electron
  • 2
    Bad Plugin Architecture
  • 2
    Powered by Electron
  • 1
    Terminal does not identify path vars sometimes

Sign up to add or upvote cons Make informed product decisions

What is Atom?

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.

What is Visual Studio Code?

Build and debug modern web and cloud applications. Code is free and available on your favorite platform - Linux, Mac OSX, and Windows.

Need advice about which tool to choose? Ask the StackShare community!

What companies use Atom?
What companies use Visual Studio Code?
See which teams inside your own company are using Atom or Visual Studio Code.
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What tools integrate with Atom?
What tools integrate with Visual Studio Code?

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What are some alternatives to Atom and 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.
Brackets
With focused visual tools and preprocessor support, it is a modern text editor that makes it easy to design in the browser.
cell
cell is a self-constructing web app framework powered by a self-driving DOM. Learning cell is mostly about understanding how cell works, and not about how to use and memorize some API methods, because there is no API.
Element
Element is a Vue 2.0 based component library for developers, designers and product managers, with a set of design resources.
PyCharm
PyCharm’s smart code editor provides first-class support for Python, JavaScript, CoffeeScript, TypeScript, CSS, popular template languages and more. Take advantage of language-aware code completion, error detection, and on-the-fly code fixes!
See all alternatives

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