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I love Atom and use it as my default text editor. There are all these people talking about IDE wars in the comments. I feel like Atom is an enhanced text editor at best. But the comparisons to VSCode and then eventually IntelliJ...not even the same ballpark.

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> But the comparisons to VSCode and then eventually IntelliJ...not even the same ballpark.

VSCode is pretty close to Atom in many ways (though some of its plugins and things like the integrated terminal get it closer to IDE territory)

Are you sure you're not thinking of Visual Studio rather than Visual Studio Code? (2 entirely different projects; Code isn't a subset or a "lite" version)

I am talking about VSCode, but you make a good callout about the two products because many people may not realize the differences. I agree that VSCode and Atom are similar, but you are right, and I feel like many people, end up using plugins to the point that push VSCode to IDE levels.

I must admit that I assumed it was a web version of Visual Studio until reading this thread.

Integrated debugger is a big step on the way to IDE-land as well. Having it interact with high quality language servers takes it another step (find all refs, jump to definition, etc). Throw in automated tasks and build rules and the line between enhanced editor and IDE starts to get really blurry.

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