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Comment by jonwinstanley | Hacker News Reader

As I remember it, VS code was Microsoft’s response to Sublime.

Sublime was exceptionally popular for web developers throughout the 2010s.

Sublime was maintained by a single person as far as I know.

VS code was pretty much a copy of Sublime but with a much better extensions system and relatively quickly there were some great plugins that made VS code the de-facto editor for web development.

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Wasn’t it a copy of Atom?

Yes, Atom was an earlier shot at building a Sublime competitor too.

I don’t know how usage of Atom compared to Sublime, but within my friends and colleagues it was only when VS code got good that people started moving away from Sublime.

I can only speak for $MY_JOB, but I'm pretty sure everyone was on Atom before VSC "got good". Atom had a good plugin ecosystem; what really drove the change was Atom's horrible performance issues whereas VSC was snappy and responsive.

What I believe also influenced the shift was that at that point in time MS had accumulated a decent amount of developer trust by giving us TypeScript and later on by acquiring GitHub. They appeared to care and have the right vision for open source.

Ahh ok, interesting. I bounced off atom immediately but VS code got me.

Nope it started as a Web IDE, going against Atom was their pivot to win market share, there are a few talks from the team if you search for VSCode history.

Let's also not forget one big reason VSCode took over and Sublime lost: VSCode is gratis and (mostly) open-source, while Sublime is proprietary.

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