The real alternative (and what all these editors are based on) is Emacs. Take the plunge. You won't regret it.

Or if you do regret it, try Vim :)

Both great tools

The only vim implementation I would use now is evil-mode for Emacs. You should try it too.

Oh I have! Was very very nice. Got into lisp a bit, then gave it all up when something in the tower of babel broke in a subtle way and I realized I didn't need all the complexity.

Was super fun though. The experience is probably part of the reason I'm writing my own editor (in Lua).

Could you list your gripes with VSCode vs Atom?