I’ve mentioned before that I use Atom as my code editor of choice.  Well, I have to be honest, recently it’s been annoying me a bit.  It can be slow, especially when I’ve got a lot of project folders loaded in (which I typically do as I’m a busy person).  But more annoying than that, about once a month it crashes completely, and then it won’t even open again, even after a reboot.  I have to manually go and find the configuration file, delete it, and then open it again (obviously, without my settings!) – this is infuriating and I’ve had enough.

This isn’t one of those posts where I compare all the different ones and declare a winner.  No, I’m busy!  So I referred to StackOverflow’s Developer Survey 2019, specifically the Development Environments and Tools section, where Visual Studio Code was the clear winner with 50.7%.

For comparison, Atom was 13.3%, so VS Code must be nearly 4 times better – right?

Well I thought I’d give it a go, and I’m glad I did.  It’s also Electron based, like Atom, but is so much faster in my experience, and hasn’t crashed yet (it’s been a few weeks).  When I installed it, it imported all my settings from Atom as well, so I’m still using the Sudo font and really happy with the way that it looks and feels.  And it’s created by Microsoft, so you know it’s going to be well looked after.

So this isn’t a comprehensive rundown of features or anything, but if you’re looking for a fast, free, sexy code editor, I’d recommend trying Visual Studio Code.