[namelosw]

It's quite hackable but not like Atom or Emacs.

You can find some plugins that could make Atom seems completely different, but most of the VSCode image you can find on the internet remains similar.

Just like with Emacs you can rewrite Emacs itself. And all of the changes in Atom do not require restarting, while some of the VSCode plugins require to restart the code editor (but might explain a little bit why VSCode is faster).