Honestly can't see why I'd use this - I have all the professional grade IDEs I need, why do I need one that is written in JS, is slower and consumes 5x more memory? Not to mention IDEs already have their own extension stores too. This seems like an 'IDE-lite', which doesn't make much sense in a world where professional grade IDEs are free.

The same reason thousands of programmers use Vim or Emacs with various extensions as their development environment. It allows the same editing experience across multiple languages. A consistent interface, lack of need for learning many (often very different) IDEs, less proprietary annoyance, many many more options for customization, much easier to port your setup to various platforms, etc.

Admittedly I don't think Atom is a very worthwhile text editor, but using an augmented text editor as an IDE is a very common practice.

> The same reason thousands of programmers use Vim or Emacs

Vim/emacs give a better experience though: they work in a terminal/over ssh and they are FAST and lightweight (memory use). Atom has neither of these properties.

I've been wondering if there's a way to use a more graphical editor over SSH, such as vscode or sublime. I get that I could just "learn VIM" but I already know a shitload of hotkeys for vscode/sublime (they're easily transferred), so I'd rather just use them.

[1] https://github.com/libfuse/sshfs , packaged by your distribution