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Comment by radlad | Hacker News Reader

Pedantic, but VS Code does not share a lineage with Atom, besides the fact that it is built on Electron (which was, admittedly, originally built for Atom.)

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I meant Atom used to be the base, and now it's VSCode

VS Code was not based on Atom's code base.

I didn't say it was!

What EGreg is saying is that most development environments and UX used to be based on Atom, while they are now based on VS Code.

EGreg didn't mean to say that VS Code used to be Atom, or is based on Atom, though I agree his wording was a bit ambiguous and it could be interpreted that way.

Oh interesting. This claim makes more sense, but I'm actually surprised by it too - my memory of things is that Sublime Text 2 (released 2012) was one of the most popular editors for scripting languages (JS, PHP, Python, etc.) However, there was a long period of inactivity before Sublime Text 3 was released (2017) with support for Python 3 plugins, and ST was getting stale as Python 2 was slowly phased out.

During that time, Atom was released (2014). But I don't recall it ever being especially popular - at least outside of the JS ecosystem. For one thing, it was kind of slow on release (people still complain about Electron!) and while it offered a lot of customization, these customization often seemed to worsen its performance. It was VS Code that really seemed to draw a wider audience from my perspective.

That said, I switched to vim around the time Atom came out, so I may be out of touch. I doubt there are any solid stats anywhere...

This is next and not Electron-based: https://zed.dev/

I took the claim ("Atom used to be the base, now VS Code is") to mean that custom DE toolchains used to be predominantly built on Atom but are now built on VS Code, not that VS Code was built on Atom. (The statement is pretty clearly saying VS Code replaced Atom as the base for something else, not that Atom was VS Code's base.)

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