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Awesome tool! Highly customizable, simple, and flexible. Yet fully functional and helpful!
(Atom is no longer available.) I used Atom a long time ago. It was super interesting to see a text editor that you could inject your own CSS into, and the community quickly made a ton of plugins for it. Somehow, all of that momentum seems to have been imparted to VS Code. Atom did great things, but it's gone now, and there are better editors in its place.
It was the best editor I experienced ever. Thoughtfully designed coloring, simple but powerful built-in Git/GitHub client, the linter integration which was only shown when we needed it... After Microsoft cut off the development resources for Atom and it became unstable, I tried to migrate to VSCode many times, but I required several years to accept the UI degradation. I wish Microsoft chose Atom and only replaced Atom's text editor component with Monaco editor... There are two Atom's successor, but Zed still has a critical bug for me (everything on the app is blurred), and Pulsar does not have maintained linter plugins, probably due to limited resources. I'm still looking for a better JavaScript/TypeScript editor...
Atom feels as heavy as an IDE. It has a lot of plug-ins but I find that many feel broken. Looking at Activity Monitor on Mac, you can see it uses a lot of battery, and this is a dealbreaker for me. Unfortunately it's the only "IDE" for Julia (which, ironically, is a high-performance language) so I stick with it for these tasks.
Awesome effort/work by the community though. It's too bad I don't agree with the choices the community had to make because I personally think this could have become a true "Emacs for the 21st century" text editor.
