Atom vs. Visual Code Editor.

Speed, Plugins, Formatting Helpers, git support

There are several debates regarding editor comparisons over the forums. Today comparison will help you decide according to your preferences for the best suitable editor.

No Doubt Editor is the strongest tool in common for any developer. It helps you save a lot of switches and remembering tasks, for example, function parameters, similar function names, syntax formatting and a lot more you know of.

Quick Details

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  Atom
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  Visual Studio Code
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  2014
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  2015
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  Free
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  Free
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  Win/Linux/OSX
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  Win/Linux/OSX
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  GitHub
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  Microsoft
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Speed

Visual Studio code and Atom both are built with Node.js, Electron, HTML, and CSS, it definitely feels fast, the difference between both is of UI Editor, built on Monaco for Visual code Editor which makes it faster than Atom.

In terms of general usage speed opening files in the Atom editor or searching through the project is little hanging. When Atom was initially released it was really slow which got better but still slow compared to Visual Studio code. Atom takes few microseconds to open files but VS is instant.

One more major difference and upper hand of VS over Atom is when any imports (in case of React apps) are made in files. This feature is missing in Atom autocompleting import file name or path of it do not gets detected. Autocomplete in Vs can be triggered by using ctrl + space.

Atom requires saving the file to show errors or warnings in linter pane. However, VS Code underlines errors without requiring a file to save.

Plugins

Ability to add additional features to an edit is very important, and this is an area that Atom shines at. The package manager is installed by default and to make things even better, all packages are hosted on Github.

At the time of writing, they had a whopping 6,452 packages and themes available! Packages are so fundamental to Atom, that core features like Tree View and Settings View are simply pre-installed packages.

As with our other editors, VSCode has a nice plugin (extensions) ecosystem. The extension management is built-in, and there are already several thousand available! As with Atom, some come installed by default.

You’ll need to spend some time picking out plugins that are best for your workflow.

Hardware usage

In daily usage, I found VSEditor lighter than Atom. Initially, I thought it as of a misconception but when I googled it,

There were many issues raised that the system using more RAM and CPU while running Atom and the ultimate decision was VS Code Editor is the lightest among.

VS Exclusive Features

Git Source Control

It shows the changes in a file on the basis of git config file.

and also gives one-click options to

• Open file
• Discard changes
• Stage changes

InBuilt Terminal Console

InBuilt Code Debugger

Conclusion

However It is very clear that we felt VS Code Editor better than Atom in ways.

But it is always the end user and his preferences and priorities.

We do a lot of work using React, Node, Angular, Magento … we had a great experience with VS Code Editor.

We used Plugins like tslint, eslint, beautifier … and all worked well while setting and using.