I used Atom before VSCode. I'm still in love with its minimalistic design and somehow font rendering in Atom better than in VSCode (still not sure why, I tried to play with settings and stuff, but nothing changed).
It was the first prominent Sublime Text alternative with JS that I use every day and quickly wrote my extensions, hack it and play with it.
There were even interesting decisions like a Rust-based rendering engine[1] using graphics without HTML and DOM (the same old problem with faster text rendering with web techs).
In my opinion, the ONE big thing that killed Atom was LSP[2]. VSCode was slightly better in everything, but good performance and LSP destroyed Atom and damaged all other editors (like Sublime).
But MS plays dirty here too. In VSCode, LSP works with many inner hacks. You can't get the same experience with LSP in other editors because some features are part of the editor, not just LSP. But I think LSP is excellent and use it in Emacs and Vim too. For Rust, it's maintained by the Rust team and the default "engine" for editors.
Anyway, I'm still using Atom today with a minimalistic theme and setup to edit markdown files with code and as a text editor with a friendly GUI overall.
