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VSCode or Atom?

Ali Abbas on June 09, 2019

Which one do you prefer and why?

  • VS Code
  • Atom
  • Sublime Text
  • Brackets
  • Emacs
  • Notepad++
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webdeasy.de

I don't understand why Sublime Text 3 is not so popular or well known among developers. I've been using Sublime Text 3 for many years because it's incredibly fast and you can install a plugin for everything. It's also very clear and simple.

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Thomas C. Haflich

I've used ST2, ST3, and Atom (among others), and I can say that it's really down to which defaults you like better and if you need some random feature or package that isn't in one of them.

Also, how much you're willing to put up with nagware. ST2/3 is either a significant investment or periodically pulls a winrar. Atom is roughly the same product for nothing.

I know a bunch of developers who use Notepad++ for everything. Oh, and the one guy who used Dvorak layout and coded in Vim. (I think as a team of developers grows, the odds of having one of those guys approaches one.)

It is an interesting assumption that everyone is in two very specific editors.

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Ben Sinclair

It's not "how much you're willing to put up with nagware", it's "whether you're prepared to breach the license agreement and use the software illegally".

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najmi

Hi ! I actually love sublime text 3 than any other IDE's because of the simplicity. Especially the tab shortcut for html tags.

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Ali Abbas • Edited

Exactly. I too use it when designing HTML, CSS and JS Static Web Pages.

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Brandon Conway

This is available in pretty much every editor. It is called Emmet. Emmet can do a lot more than just expand simple tags, you should watch a few videos about it and you will like it even more than you do now!

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Adam

Vscode has Emmett baked in. Sometimes you have to declare it for some languages like Vue but out of the box, html/css works great

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Brian Hanna

I need some IDE style features out of the box and Sublime Text 3 didn't really cut it for me. It's my go to for editing a one-off file, but VSCode is a nice middle ground between a full blown IDE and a text editor. Atom is just too slow for me.

Also, unless they've improved their sidebar APIs significantly in the last year, there isn't a plugin for everything I want ST3 to do, unfortunately.

It's super performant and flexible and a great choice for a lot of workflows, but I've found VSCode works better for mine

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Ben Sinclair

It's closed-source, proprietary-licensed, relatively-expensive, and not an IDE.

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Rishi Kumar Chawda

For me, It is because it is not free and VSCode is and it has been developed well for web developers - though I would still prefer sublime if I had the money, and will switch to it later probably. But for now, I get a lot of similar set of features in VSCode so yeah kinda gets the job for me.

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Florian Rand • Edited

Stack overflow survey, tools: insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/...

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Saurabh Sharma

vs code is nice but sublime text is king when it comes to performance.

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Ali Abbas

I agree. Sublime text is light and doesn't consumes RAM that much as compared to VS Code.

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miniscruff

I use neovim, it requires some configuring but I have everything I need that other editors offer. Mainly, I use it for the window controls and terminal integrations. Vim plugins for other editors are ok but have limitations.

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George

Hello. May be do you share your favorite plugins for neovim?

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Florian Rand • Edited

Hello there George! This may be of help (copy & paste from my init.vim):

Plug 'scrooloose/nerdtree'
Plug 'tpope/vim-commentary'
Plug 'tpope/vim-fugitive'
Plug 'tpope/vim-surround'
Plug 'itchyny/lightline.vim'
Plug 'bronson/vim-trailing-whitespace'
Plug 'Yggdroot/indentLine'
Plug 'jiangmiao/auto-pairs'
Plug 'w0rp/ale'
Plug 'junegunn/limelight.vim'
Plug 'mhinz/vim-signify'
Plug 'junegunn/fzf', { 'dir': '~/.fzf', 'do': './install --all' }
Plug 'junegunn/fzf.vim'
" For async completion
Plug 'Shougo/deoplete.nvim', { 'do': ':UpdateRemotePlugins' }
" For Denite features
Plug 'Shougo/denite.nvim'

" Color scheme
Plug 'dracula/vim', { 'as': 'dracula' }
Plug 'flrnprz/plastic.vim', { 'as': 'plastic' }
Plug 'flrnprz/candid.vim', { 'as': 'candid' }
Plug 'joshdick/onedark.vim'

" go
"" Go Lang Bundle
Plug 'fatih/vim-go'
Plug 'tweekmonster/hl-goimport.vim'
Plug 'buoto/gotests-vim'

"" HTML / CSS / XML Bundle
Plug 'tpope/vim-haml', {'for': ['haml', 'sass', 'scss']}
Plug 'mattn/emmet-vim'
Plug 'alvan/vim-closetag'
Plug 'ap/vim-css-color'
Plug 'amadeus/vim-xml'

" javascript
"" Javascript Bundle
Plug 'pangloss/vim-javascript', {'for': 'javascript'}
Plug 'othree/yajs.vim', {'for': 'javascript'}
"Plug 'posva/vim-vue', {'for': 'vue'}
Plug 'MaxMEllon/vim-jsx-pretty'

"Python
Plug 'vim-python/python-syntax', {'for': 'python'}

" typescript
"" Typescript support
Plug 'mhartington/nvim-typescript', {'do': './install.sh'}
Plug 'HerringtonDarkholme/yats.vim'
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realabbas profile image
Ali Abbas

Great 👍🖖

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georgmilevski profile image
George

Thanks.

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flrnd profile image
Florian Rand

Also, this article explain some of them: medium.com/@huntie/10-essential-vi...

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miniscruff

My nvim config is on GitHub.
github.com/miniscruff/dotfiles/blo...

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NOGIER Loïc

If you use VS Code, try VS Codium : vscodium.com/ is a Free/Libre Open Source Software Binaries of VSCode.

Microsoft’s vscode source code is open source (MIT-licensed), but the the product available for download (Visual Studio Code) is licensed under this not-FLOSS license and contains telemetry/tracking.

The VSCodium project exists so that you don’t have to download+build from source. This project includes special build scripts that clone Microsoft’s vscode repo, run the build commands, and upload the resulting binaries for you to GitHub releases. These binaries are licensed under the MIT license. Telemetry is disabled.

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Antonio Radovcic

Both are from Microsoft 😬 and VS seems to be more popular, so that‘s where more plugins etc. will be written for. That makes it my choice. Also it has the best out-of-the-box config for front-end-web-development, so it’s a good choice for beginners, too. The Electron-part bothers me a bit, but almost all desktop-apps I use are web-based (except Safari) so I just don’t care anymore tbh

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prassee

add emacs to this list

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realabbas profile image
Ali Abbas

Okay👍

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Florian Rand

And vim\neovim 😋

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Rafael Antonio Mejía Rosales

I love Sublime Text for its simplicity and speed, I even paid for the license to support its development, but I have to recognize sometimes it falls short on features for more complex projects and for those I reach for PHPStorm. If I have to go for an IDE, I rather go with a full featured one than a half-assed like VSCode.

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Rob Blake

I used and loved Atom for years. I was always nervous of using Microsoft software. I noticed that more and more respected developers were talking about using VS Code.

Then Microsoft bought GitHub. I decided that I might as well give VS Code a try. Now I really like it. It's not that much different to Atom IMHO but it's a good tool. I noticed that a lot of features that I liked in Atom have made their way into VS Code. Things like collaborative remote working for example.

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playaspec

I'm a little more than disturbed that Microsoft bought Github, and shortly after Atom started pestering me to try VSCode. Actually I'm annoyed. It smacks of "embrace, extend, extinguish." It triggers my PTSD whought from decades of shabby Microsoft software not doing the right thing and stealing my time as a result. No thanks.

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Roman Semenov • Edited

Sublime when I need to quickly open something simple, IntelliJ if I want to work on it more than 15min. Removing everything except code window (even tabs and line numbers) from IDE makes much more pleasant to use, looks like a text editor. And it's very fast too if you don't count load time, faster than vscode or atom.

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Ben Halpern

I'm curious about the future of Atom in general.

I made another #discuss post with some questions there if anyone cares to weigh in:

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bvmcode

I am a VS Code fan but I've never used Atom so it wouldn't be fair for me to compare them. I've stopped using PyCharm in favor of VS Code for python, and for javascript it's a slam dunk. VS Code is light weight and setting it up for your needs is relatively easy. I am not a huge fan of MS products but this one is great and ironically its one of their free products.

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Saugat Rai

I have tried brackets, sublime, atom and vscode.
I love Vs Code for its extensions and faster load. I tried Atom but it took time to open the app. I have also used sublime for 1 and half year. The keymaps for sublime is great. Thankfully, VS Code support keymapping of sublime.
I am currently using VS Code. I love its project manager extension which helps to switch between projects easily.

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Azalea

I'm a real noob when it comes to coding. And I can only give a perspective of a person who's just starting out.

VSCode scared the hell out of me and I'm not one to get easily scared with new things. Maybe cause I'm insanely curious about it that I was investigating on how to configure it to just give me an easy 'corrective' function, automatic 'pairing' of tags as well as the usual brackets and stuff. I still can't figure out how although there are barrages of resources on configurations in the Net. I can't seem to get any configurations right but I believe, perhaps I understood it wrongly (?). Especially since I'm just playing with JavaScript API and HTML for now, so...I can't brain advanced stuff just yet.

Atom has a beautiful interface and I tried it for a time, but some of the plugins I wanted to use can't be installed; maybe it's just my computer (?). But I am pretty sure it is as 'hackable' as they said; so many options to personalize it to your work.

Brackets is awesome and yes, it's very useful for front-end web development. I was very in love with the 'live preview' but for some reason, one day it did not work for me and I tried troubleshooting. Still could not find the reason why it did not work.

Now, I'm staying with Notepad++ since I just code simple stuff for exercises and tools for our GIS tasks at work. It's simple and for me, kinda 'idiot-proof'.

I am sure all the mentioned editors are awesome. As mentioned before, it comes down to what defaults you like better and which pre-existing workflow it takes to configure it to your need that you prefer more.

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Dom

WebStorm in my case 🙂
But VSCode is awesome as well!

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Maxime

I've tried all of them, and made a more detailed answer here stackoverflow.com/a/40842224/2398593

I'm also talking about angular is that answer but on the ide part I'd still use VSC no matter which JS/TS I'd work on :)

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TenshiDevelopment

I think both are very usefull, but i think Atom is like a normal text editor with features while VS Code is more for developer, but i like to use Atom.

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Jameel Ahmed

Vs Code

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Benny Powers 🇮🇱🇨🇦 • Edited

Atom, obviously 😉

Vim mode plus is a joy
Tones of plugins
And prior to the MS buyout I could claim it wasn't MS software.

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Shah Nawaz Shuvo

I use VS Code for over 2 years now. It serves me well. VS code has all the extensions you need and it is well maintained. Sublime text 3 is also very good and very lightweight. But finally you should use what YOU like most and what serves YOUR purpose the best.

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Arnyminer Z

For working with Git, VSCode. No use as a single-file text editor, I used to use Notepad++, but I changed to Sublime Text 3 for having a more modern IDE. Also, for PlatformIO development is really comfortable to use VSCode.

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Eric Zingeler

Sublime Text 3 was my first minimalist IDE. Atom and VS Code are evolutions of Sublime Text 3. VS Code is my daily driver for 2 reasons, it’s faster than Atom and more feature rich than ST3.

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najmi

I'm used to sublime. I tried code and atom. But I'm just more comfortable with sublime more.

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Bala Hantsi 🇳🇬

I prefer vscode simply because it's support computers with low specs, then it has large community and so many extensions to make a developer more productive

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Younes ADIL

Vs code is the best code editor

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Igor Crnogorac

Vs vode

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Melroy van den Berg

Vs code is really missing some key refactoring features for c/c++!! Argh! Atom is therefor still winning together with Sublime text, although I don't like the ui of Sublime

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Mahesh Sunuwar

I haven't used Atom much but i prefer VS Code for its various out of the box features/support for various stacks, mainly .NET.

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NexoPOS Solutions

However I'll still be in favor of vscode. Because of all the feature it offer. It might be slow or memory consuming but it's depends on the extensions that you do install as well

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NexoPOS Solutions

Both belongs to Microsoft. #EndGane

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Sahil Langoo • Edited

VS code AIO Editor .
Sublime Blazing Fast,promte after 20 saves.
Atom get sluggish with big projects.
Brackets only good for frontend
Notepad++ old school but not as fast as Sublime;

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Chris Achinga

I use VScode because it's fancy, has GitHub extension, and mainly because I started learning programming on VScode

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saint4eva

Though both VS Code and Atom are amazing products from Microsoft, I prefer VS Code to Atom.