Microsoft just fork Atom, and Atom had already good and a lot of extensions.
Before Microsoft buy Github, there was no reason to switch to VSCode instead of Atom.
When Microsoft buy Github, it received Atom from the Github team, and Microsoft stops the development of Atom.
VSCode was just Atom with the Microsoft brand, and some little tweaks from Microsoft, never a game changer compared to Atom, like Atom was in it's time.
Now Antigravity is again a fork with some little tweaks from VSCode, no game changer, just with the Google branding.
I guess we have different perspectives and information about the “rise” of VSCode.
I was an Atom user. Even before the acquisition of GitHub the major feature of VSCode was its speed and TS integration. AFAIK, the only common part between Atom and VSCode is Electron. Other than that, VSCode started with a different codebase based on TypeScript, while Atom was originally written in CoffeeScript.
Multiple design decisions helped VSCode to thrive (btw Erich Gamma was also part of Eclipse):
- The creation of the LSP. Each release of VSCode is also tied to TypeScript releases and improvements. There is a lot of collaboration between the two teams. That gave VSCode the best support for TS and JS. I used Atom and WebStorm regularly when VSCode came out, and VSCode auto-complete and TS support were orders of magnitude better. Everybody caught up since then, but I guess many users like me switched because of that.
- Unlike Atom, VSCode was designed with web integration in mind. A lot of sites started to use Monaco for code editing, and a lot of web-based IDEs use parts of it (CodeSandbox, StackBlitz, etc).
- Gradual rollout of plugin integration. While Atom has the philosophy of everything is pluggable, VSCode was intentionally limited. Which was a good thing given the poor loading performance of Atom.
By the time MS acquired GitHub, Atom usage was already in decline.
* Note: my side of the history, comes from my experience of working in a company that did a custom Eclipse IDE. We evaluated Atom and then VSCode as alternatives to “modernize” our IDE. So I have experience in looking at both Atom and VSCode code bases: they are totally different. Also, the main problem with VSCode for us was the limited extensibility.
> By the time MS acquired GitHub, Atom usage was already in decline.
I wanted to second this: I compared both, with Atom experience starting before the first VSC release. Atom had performance and stability problems continuously through that period, and never really won any of my coworkers over. A lot of that was simple performance: I remember using Is It Snappy? to test my subjective impression and finding that input latency was a full order of magnitude worse, which is the kind of thing which really colors your impression of an editor.
