If it has to move, it has to move. I do not know how the move will impact the current functionalities we have in Atom. I am entirely ignorant whether the way the IDE looks like depends basically upon Juno or on Atom. The console is excellent, the easy way we can customize the panes is terrific, and it’s effortless to move around across the different panes (by the way, if we could have the possibility to see different plots in the plots pane, that would be great).
I am not a programmer; I use Julia to solve problems in my field (macroeconomics). So I may be of little help on the software side of the problem. But my teaching experience may be helpful regarding your inquiry about the migration into VSCode. I taught a macroeconomics course to master students, for around 20 years, using Matlab. The students used to accept the challenge (their first encounter with numerical computation), but most were not very excited about it. In the previous semester, I used Julia (Atom + Jupyter) for the first time, and the students just loved it. I am not sure why. Maybe, because it was easy to install everything, maybe because it was easy to write down simple routines and check the output in the plot’s pane, or the run-cell and the output popping out and easily seen, perhaps because of the dark theme, and the highlighted colors syntax. Even undergrads were excited when I showed them how I had conceived the problem sets they were solving by hand and a calculator.
If we want to have Julia adopted by a massive number of people, we need to have an IDE with the output easily seen, flexible, and appealing … to the beginners. I may be wrong, but I think most Python users are still using Spyder, despite the existence of PyCharm and VSCode.
I’m just trying to help. I belong to the vast majority of people in the world of programming (clumsy programmers), but Julia needs them because they are quite abundant.