I held out for a year or so after VSCode was released. It felt scummy how MS had swooped in and tried to hijack this new category of editor that GitHub had invented (this was before they'd been acquired, I believe)
But once I tried VSCode... man, there was no going back. It was infinitely more performant and cohesive. Atom (with IDE-like features installed) felt so sluggish by comparison. I think the main improvement was how opinionated VSCode and its extension APIs were; Atom extensions could have dependencies on each other. I remember you had to install an extension for generic IDE hover-overs and such, before installing the actual language plugin, and then there were competing standards for which generic hover-over framework each language wanted to use. It didn't just complicate the user-experience, I'm convinced this was the reason the editor would get so slow; the APIs were too low-level and all the plugins were fighting with each other instead of going through standard channels.
But, Atom will always have a special place in my heart. It blazed new trails in editor customizability (even if the degree ended up being its downfall, quite a bit of that legacy can still be found in VSCode). It invented the entire concept of web apps as desktop apps, which despite what some here would tell you, I think is a very good and important thing. And it always had such a fun, community feel to it that's been mostly lost with VSCode.
It was time, but I will miss it. I'll close off with the very cute and fun Atom 1.0 announcement video: https://youtu.be/Y7aEiVwBAdk
> Atom extensions could have dependencies on each other
This. This always has been and always will be a critical ecosystem mistake.
The principle of one msi/exe installing everything you need on Windows, one click downloading an entire app from a store on Android or iOS is seamless and almost always error free. Or in your example with VSCode having self contained encapsulated plugins that install with one click.
Meanwhile I'm having issues installing things and resolving dependencies with pip in python, apt in linux, npm, etc. basically all the time. It's a shit system that only pretends to be elegant and it's time we fucking admit it to ourselves. Designed by elitist morons for elitist morons and everyone else is paying the price.
Any ecosystem has to strike a balance between which things should be opinionated/officially-sanctioned/standardized, and which things should be left open in "userspace". I think Atom made the wrong choice by outsourcing some very standard features to the community, like hover-overs and underlines. VSCode seems to have hit a sweet-spot, offering standard solutions for common functionality but leaving plenty of doors still open for people to build on.
Well perhaps. The main distinction that needs to be made is whether something is supposed to be a library or a final product. It seems to be more and more usual these days to blur the line between the two and it's making life worse for everyone involved. Libraries should not be shipped separately, no exceptions.
Even cases like installing the .NET framework or the JVM or some C++ redistributable are parts of that idea that leaked into the otherwise flat packed environment of Windows for example, and all I've ever seen it is cause issues due to version mismatches or them missing. Just completely self destructive behaviour in order to save a few megabytes... and not even that when in practice you end up with 14 installations of the same thing with different versions for every app ffs.
Android is arguably handling this way better, as such stupidity simply isn't even allowed there (to my knowledge), as are web browsers. Imagine having to install a chrome extension to use a site properly, people would think you're insane!
> I held out for a year or so after VSCode was released. It felt scummy how MS had swooped in and tried to hijack this new category of editor that GitHub had invented (this was before they'd been acquired, I believe)
Depending on what you consider the "category" to be, Sublime Text (2) was well-established for years before Atom came out, with BBEdit and TextMate before it.
Not to mention Kate, Geany, and the various other "lightweight extensible code editors" that have been out there for years and years.
I meant editors built with web technologies, specifically. Though I've been informed in another thread that there was one called Brackets that I hadn't known about
> It invented the entire concept of web apps as desktop apps
Mozilla actually had that in early 2000 or so; their whole UI (before Firefox existed, even) was a webby. Except it was their own weird sort of webby and not normal HTML, most of the time.
Using normal HTML would be around IE4 with their .hta files, I think. Didn't seem to have too much uptake though.
> this new category of editor that GitHub had invented
There was prior art in the form of Bespin. GitHub’s innovation was electron and turning it into a desktop app. I think it’s amusing that VSCode has recently come full-circle and introduced a browser-based version.
But once I tried VSCode... man, there was no going back. It was infinitely more performant and cohesive. Atom (with IDE-like features installed) felt so sluggish by comparison. I think the main improvement was how opinionated VSCode and its extension APIs were; Atom extensions could have dependencies on each other. I remember you had to install an extension for generic IDE hover-overs and such, before installing the actual language plugin, and then there were competing standards for which generic hover-over framework each language wanted to use. It didn't just complicate the user-experience, I'm convinced this was the reason the editor would get so slow; the APIs were too low-level and all the plugins were fighting with each other instead of going through standard channels.
But, Atom will always have a special place in my heart. It blazed new trails in editor customizability (even if the degree ended up being its downfall, quite a bit of that legacy can still be found in VSCode). It invented the entire concept of web apps as desktop apps, which despite what some here would tell you, I think is a very good and important thing. And it always had such a fun, community feel to it that's been mostly lost with VSCode.
It was time, but I will miss it. I'll close off with the very cute and fun Atom 1.0 announcement video: https://youtu.be/Y7aEiVwBAdk