I looked into Ionide that enhances Atom/VSCode into an F# IDE. I'd say compared with the IDE toolings of other languages I've looked into recently, like Haskell and OCaml, the experience is pretty good. It has auto-complete, Paket and Fake integration. It is still not as good as VisualStudio though. One thing I miss a lot is "Go to definition" on a type in assemblies. With VisualStudio, it brings you to the "ILDASM" style metadata. This is greatly useful for exploration.

But I still appreciate the cross-platform capability that the tool brings in - with Ionide, Fake, Paket/Nuget, there's no need for VS and full profile .NET develop environment.

So an F# development pattern I would like to establish from now on, is to use the fsharp yeoman generator to scaffold the project (rather than letting VisualStudio to the job). And when VisualStudio is available, use it with the .fsproj file. When it's not available, I can fallback to Atom/VSCode.

P.S. just realized WebSharper(document looks awesome!) is a fullstack web framework using F#, including frontend. Its REST service support also looks promising.