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> A well-funded team could create a compelling competitor to VS Code.

And yet they failed. Remember Atom[1] or Brackets[2]? I'm sure they are still used by a lot of people. But it was interesting to see Microsoft grow VS Code so fast in popularity. My vague notion is that addressing developer pain points early and providing first party plugins for popular ecosystems gave them an edge.

[1] https://github.com/atom [2] https://brackets.io/

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As a small anecdote as someone who switched from atom, the killer feature for VS Code is being extendable AND performant. I used to use atom for a flexible text editor, and then still have to use sublime text if I wanted to open a large file (atom choked on multi MB json files).

I don't know if it's possible to get the performance you need to make an IDE/text editor feel snappy in most situations with a pure DOM solution.

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