Samuel Ye's IT Blog

Atom as a code editor just becomes slower and slower with the burden of massive plugins, requiring near 15s on my MBP to initially display file contents. In comparison, VSCode with similar extensions just takes 5s to show text upon launch. There must be some underlying architectural issues in the Atom startup process, as both are based on Electron. The memory/cpu footprint also has huge differences as this old post shows. Atom sometime even stops responding and asks to wait for editor window to run.

While speed performance is important but tolerable, all kinds of mysterious long pending bugs are indeed killing Atom. In my scenario, the vertical scrollbar sometime just turns into a white bar. The git interface cannot stage lines for files with unicode filenames, but only stages the whole file. The nuclide file tree is unusable because it constantly steals focus from text editor area! Lots of issues are reported, analyzed, and never reach a fix. Such problems have been long existed nuisances and should no more be born with.

Fortunately, VSCode now enjoys the affluence of extensions. Almost all of my Atom plugins find their counterparts in VSC. The only advantage of Atom is the beautifulness in contrast to the VSCode default theme’s coarseness (the blue status bar is horrible). Hopefully the Atom One Dark theme and keymap extensions are the cure.

Just after Microsoft bought Github, it seems the right time to switch from Atom to VSCode after all.