They saw an improvement when they introduced React too... http://blog.atom.io/2014/07/02/moving-atom-to-react.html http://blog.atom.io/2014/07/02/moving-atom-t

They saw an improvement when they introduced React too... http://blog.atom.io/2014/07/02/moving-atom-to-react.html http://blog.atom.io/2014/07/02/moving-atom-to-react.html So React taught them how to update the DOM manually ;) I suspect the case of a text editor is systematic enough so that they can have a specialized and minimal DOM update algo, without too much maintenance cost (which would be high if you try to implement specific minimal DOM update in a random app).