visual studio code seems way faster, pasting the object was nearly instantaneous and it looks like it has a nice set of features. also, i feel i should add, i realize electron is independent of atom, however it was developed by a github engineer previously working on nodewebkit for the github texteditor called atom. it used to be called "Atom Shell" and is in the atom/electron repo. So I was curious if this was related to electron generally, or choices made in atom.
Electron was indeed originally called Atom Shell, and part of Atom. But it's a general purpose shell for cross-platform apps - it basically provides a native application shell hosting Chromium. And lots of apps - including many that aren't developer tools - are built on it. While VS Code uses Electron, and we contribute to it, we've made a lot of design choices differently from Atom in building the editor and rest of the product.