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Hacker Trends › sublime vs atom vs vscode

sublime vs atom vs vscode on Hacker News

Across 2007–2026 of Hacker News, atom leads sublime vs atom vs vscode with 71,766 mentions to vscode’s 33,588, peaking in May 2022.

Mention-over-time for sublime vs atom vs vscode, overlaid across 2007–2026 of Hacker News. Each line is a live date-histogram over ~45M posts and comments, computed with Upstash Redis Search.

sublime19,239 mentions, peak Aug 2017atom71,766 mentions, peak May 2022vscode33,588 mentions, peak Nov 2022
2008201120142017202020232026
Open this comparison in the interactive tool — zoom to any date range and read the stories behind each spike →

How the lead changed hands

The text-editor crown, passed hand to hand: Sublime Text is the beloved editor of 2012–14, GitHub's Atom takes over 2014–15, then VS Code eats the world from 2018 on.

The stories behind each line

Top “sublime” stories
  1. Sublime Text 3.0 1,653 points · 2017
  2. Sublime Text 4 1,436 points · 2021
  3. I still like Sublime Text 1,184 points · 2025
  4. Show HN: Sublime Merge – A Git client from the makers of Sublime Text 935 points · 2018
Top “atom” stories
  1. Atom 1,475 points · 2014
  2. Sunsetting Atom 1,320 points · 2022
  3. Atom 1.0 1,096 points · 2015
  4. Atom Is Now Open Source 914 points · 2014
Top “vscode” stories
  1. My son (9 yrs old) used plain JavaScript to make a game, and wants your feedback 1,251 points · 2024
  2. Performance and telemetry analysis of Trae IDE, ByteDance's VSCode fork 954 points · 2025
  3. Vscode.dev 803 points · 2021
  4. VSCode’s SSH agent is bananas 737 points · 2025

Each term on its own

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