Kotlin is a really sweet language. It is the perfect thing in between a “super-powerful and but difficult language” like Rust or Modern C++, and a “super-easy but that seems to be designed in the 80s” like Go. With the upcoming release on Kotlin Native, then, you can even ditch the JVM!

However, while IntelliJ is a great IDE, often I do not like to rely on big IDEs — especially when VSCode works perfectly well for 90% of my use cases. Therefore, it is time to see if and how I can use Kotlin in VS Code (and see what is missing).

People who know me already know: I’m a tool maniac. I can spend hours searching for the perfect configuration of keys, plugins, colors, themes, debugging tools and so on, and unfortunately this is how I waste a lot of time every now and then. Text editors and IDE are one of these big tools that I cannot stop searching for the perfect one. The real problem, though, is that I cannot find satisfaction for more than a month on a particular editor, so, during my life as a coder I used with a certain degree of experience tons of editors such as Vim, Emacs, Sublime Text, GEdit and much more. Honestly! Look at this! If  I had spent less time on tweaking my editors and more on coding, now I would have more side projects completed for sure. Anyway…

I have a certain envy for those developers that are able to stick on, for instance, Vim for more than 20 years. They are happy and enthusiastic of their editor! Lucky them! But I’m not in this way. Maybe I find the exploration more rewarding. I don’t know.

So, coming back to the topic, when I used Linux I was happy too and my favourite editor was by far Vim. Yes, the learning curve is steep as hell but this thing has never scared me (I try to learn too many newborn and cryptic programming languages to be scared by a text editor, complex or not that may be. Then, a couple of years ago, I moved back to Windows and I started to work on bigger project. For some reason, my pleasure and muscle memory in using Vim began to disappear.

Now, there is a long story made of IDE and text editors but I don’t want to spend too much time talking about my evolution (or devolution, your call) in the world of programming editors. The real goal of this article is to explain why, for now, I’m happily landed on Atom, the text editor mad in GitHub.