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by GeordiePowers 2763 days ago
I switched, after a prior history of many other editors, to VSCode, and then to Atom. One main reason: the vim plugin. The VSCode one was (is?) just not good. Atom's is quite good.

VSCode is better for most people; it's a great editor, and does more out of the box without configuration. However, if you're someone who DOES feel the need to tweak everything until it's just right, VSC doesn't hold up. JSON configuration is just clunky. Atom is, at least in some aspects, scriptable without the need to build a full plugin (though it's certainly no emacs), and that's quite valuable. And, when you introduce the atom-ide package, the gap in completion and debugging functionality between the two gets quite a bit smaller.

Also, anecdotally, Atom seems to have had better performance across my machines; especially on lower-end hardware. I'm only working on small-medium sized projects, so this might just be me.

2 comments

And I went from Atom to VS Code and then back to (Neo)Vim again. I haven't yet seen a Vim plugin which is complete enough for me to use without needing to change habits, so I just use Vim now and for some special situations VS Code.

Although now I've read that Atom is supposed to be faster than before, so I'm going to give that a try again.

Atom's vim bindings are great. They lack just one command that trips me up from time to time: :u.

Yeah, I can get by with cmd+z, but it would be nice not to be forced to context switch when I'm thinking in ex-mode.

Huh, I didn't even know there was an ex command for undo. Neat. I imagine that would be a pretty easy PR to the ex-mode package, if you're up to it ;)