[rodw]

>I far preferred the UX and design of Atom, but I eventually caved

That's my experience exactly. I still haven't been able to configure VS Code to fully match the experience I want with respect to keybindings and subtle look-and-feel and functionality details.

Aside from the infrequent case of hanging when opening very large files I had no real issues with Atom and could have happily kept using it.

For what it's worth Pulsar (https://pulsar-edit.dev/) appears to be a community-maintained fork of Atom. (For that matter one of the primary Atom creators is working on https://zed.dev/.) But personally I got tired of swimming upstream and just caved to VS Code.

(I am a little tempted to go back to emacs, which was my editor of choice before Atom, but that's ends up being an enormous time-sink for me anyway.)