Linux Best Code (Text) Editor : Atom, Sublime or Visual Studio Code?

by Fady S. Ghatas | Apr 15, 2017 | Linux, Web development | 0 comments

Sublime Text

I used ST2 in the past. How it works: Getting the job done as simple as possible. ST2 is pretty fast in starting up and in usage in general.

Pros :

Free for evaluation.
Fast load up.

Cons :

Sublime Text can’t be used commercially unless you buy a license.
Not Open Source.

Atom

Atom was my choice for almost 2 years now, even before the initial stable release. Atom is created by GitHub and backed by an enormous community. I used atom mainly for web development . So my stack was : Remote-FTP, Git Plus, Atom Beautify, Terminal Plus and some languages support (JS, PHP, etc…)

Pros :

Amazing Community and large number of plugins
Open Source

Cons :

Some important features don’t come bundled with Atom (eg:Terminal) and needs to be installed through a package.
Usually Buggy and slow.
Some packages breaks a lot and sometimes makes Atom Unusable.
Code autofromat/beautify isn’t standalone (It uses external tools to do the real formatting) which may take extra steps to install and configure.

Visual Studio Code:

Visual studio is my current choice. It is very fast and have all main features needed for an editor and some IDE features as well for a fast work flow.

Pros :

Open Source
Very fast
Main features come prebundled with vscode (Terminal, Git, Code format, debugging, etc…)

Cons :

Community is still not as mature as atom or sublime.
Multiple licenses for the same version, Microsoft license for the executables and MIT for the source code.
Still not as many plugins as Atom or Sublime