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0 pointsfoldr5y ago0 comments

Atom (https://atom.io/) is another Electron-based text editor release by GitHub (before it was acquired by Microsoft). I think it predated VSCode. It certainly had more mindshare in the early days. But whereas VSCode has always been quite snappy, Atom acquired a reputation for poor performance.

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WorldMaker5y ago

> I think it predated VSCode

Yes, and no. They have a really interesting tale of convergent evolution.

Atom was the original Electron app (as pointed out Electron was even originally named "atom-shell"), so it predates VSCode as an Electron app. But the extremely performant "Monaco code editor" that VSCode was built on top of (that forms the heart of VSCode) was started at Microsoft years before to be a code editor in parts of the Azure Portal, and also it was the code editor in IE/Edge dev tools from as far back as IE 9 or 10 I think it was (up until the Chromium Edge). It wasn't packaged into an Electron app until after Atom, but it has an interesting heritage that predates Atom and was built for some of the same reasons that GitHub wanted to build Atom.

(ETA: Monaco's experience especially in IE Dev Tools and the wild west of minified JS dumps it had to work with from day one in that environment is where a lot of its performance came from that led VSCode to jumping Atom on performance out of the gate.)

schmorptron5y ago

Ah, gotcha! I only tried it out once after finding it on flathub, but never used it enough to notice it being slow. Interesting how that developed.

I'm guessing it's pretty much dead now that github is under the same company that also makes vscode, right?

WorldMaker5y ago

Given GitHub's Code Spaces use VSCode rather than Atom, that writing is definitely on the wall, it seems. (Arguably the feature was built for Azure and then rehomed to GitHub where it seems to fit better, but still a stronger indicator brand-wise than most of the other comparative statistics in Atom versus VSCode commit histories and GitHub/Microsoft employee contributions there to, which also seem to indicate that Atom is in maintenance mode.)

zwirbl5y ago

Pretty much like that, I tried Atom once (when I found platform.io and wanted to have a look) and it was just wild how slow it felt. On the upside, it made using those crappy Eclipse forks MCU manufacturers release (like CCC, Dave, etc.) fell a lot less painful

Rapzid5y ago

> another Electron-based text editor

Well electron used to be called "atom shell" :)

foldrOP5y ago

Ah good point. I didn't know that.

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