From my evaluations early on in both they seemed like the same thing but VSCode had more features (esp. built-in terminal) and performed significantly better.
I'm sure that there's been a lot of progress in the years since, but I haven't kept up.
I could see not trusting Microsoft with an open source project, but now that they own Github they have two open source Electron-based code editors, and I can't imagine that's going to last for long. So really I'd be more concerned for the long term health of Atom than VSCode.
I prefer Atom because I use it since the early days and I am so used to it. The whole workflow is super awesome and everything is simple and clean. I don't have any performance problems nowadays (this was a big problem years ago) so I have zero complaints.
It's hard to switch, I tried VSCode, don't like it and have no reason to switch because _for me_ Atom just works and I love it.
From my evaluations early on in both they seemed like the same thing but VSCode had more features (esp. built-in terminal) and performed significantly better.
I'm sure that there's been a lot of progress in the years since, but I haven't kept up.
I could see not trusting Microsoft with an open source project, but now that they own Github they have two open source Electron-based code editors, and I can't imagine that's going to last for long. So really I'd be more concerned for the long term health of Atom than VSCode.