Microsoft launched today a shiny new code editor for Windows, OS X, and Linux: Visual Studio Code. It's a smart looking text editor with IntelliSense support, git integration, and a few other bits and pieces that developers will enjoy.

What Microsoft didn't say when announcing the new editor was how it built Visual Studio Code. In a move that might seem a little surprising, given the regular animosity between the two companies, the editor is built on top of Chromium, the open source version of Google's Chrome browser.

The app is built using an open source desktop application framework developed by GitHub called Electron. Electron uses HTML5, JavaScript, and other Web technologies, using Chromium for presentation, and io.js (a fork of node.js) to tie it all together. GitHub has an Electron-based editor called Atom, and Visual Studio Code is based on it.

With Atom being cross-platform, it's no great surprise that Visual Studio Code is, too.

Update: We're reliably informed Visual Studio Code isn't in fact built on the Atom editor; its internal references to Atom are a relic of Electron's previous name, Atom Shell. Instead, the code editor is a version of Monaco, the editor also used in Visual Studio Online.