Sad to see this go. I was an early adopter of Atom, and I wrote two extensions for it, one of which while it was still in beta.
The Atom developers made some technology choices that in retrospect were ill-advised, CoffeeScript being the worst of them and splitting everything into dozens of packages a close second. They tried to backpedal on both of these later on, but by that time VSCode, with its far superior engineering built around TypeScript, was rapidly taking over.
Of course, the GitHub acquisition was the last straw, but to be fair Atom was already pretty dead by then.
While the Atom project ultimately failed, it did give us Electron and Tree-Sitter, two technologies that will certainly outlive it.
Atom predated the LSP and leaned heavily into customizations with all the plugins running inside the UI thread (more like a traditional web page and 3p scripts). At the time they viewed the extreme customization support as a feature, and there was a thriving ecosystem of folks making plugins.
That architecture has a major flaw though. A default install was fast, but a real configuration with all the plugins ended up quite slow.
VSCode's architecture worked much better in real world configurations, and it turns out better performance wins in the editor space, even if it meant losing certain customizations (up to a limit). The architecture also allowed seamless remote editing, something Atom never could have done.
The interesting thing has always been that both were built on Electron. Atom's developers had built all the tools and primitives needed, they just didn't have the understanding of the long term ecosystem effects of their design.
People hate on electron, but it's a pretty amazing piece of tech if you ask me. I can turn a browser game into a steam game with basically no effort which is nice because browsers change over time and electron helps you get a working offline snapshot of something you created.
I started a job in 2018 and someone commented “what are you still on Atom for? Everyone has moved to vs code”. So yeah it’s been kinda dead for a long time now.
I tried Atom for a while in Windows, but a file watching bug made it quite inconvenient. Every time I edited and saved a file in another IDE (at the time, I was stuck using it to compile and debug an embedded system), that IDE would rename the original to a temporary file in a temporary directory before writing the new version. Atom would follow the rename rather than re-load the new file at the original path. It would make the open tab useless.
I tried making an issue for it, but someone ranted on about moving files around on a Mac and then closed the issue.
I tried trying to solve the bug myself, but I got about 4 layers deep into callbacks across at least three different repos, and gave up.
I know people shit on VSCode but in my humble opinion, VSCode single handedly destroyed Atom. Far superior tool, 100% free and adoption growth was crazy.
I also was an early tester (not adopter) of Atom and I kinda hated it right from the start, but it's been a while and I could never really put my finger on it. I think it always somehow felt sluggish (I'm talking trying out several builds over several months, not just a one-off). But I've also never warmed up to Sublime (which was fast but also felt off).
Interestingly the moment I tried out VS Code (many years later) I instantly liked it and have been using it sporadically ever since, and as people always liken the two, I am confused to this day why one felt wrong and one felt right.
Personally, I prefer CoffeeScript. The code gets more concise, it stimulates a coding style that's more objective and less "enterprisy" than TypeScript with all the excessive OO stuff. A simpler and more concise language attracts more contributors overtime.
However, TypeScript has clearly won and static typing can help a lot with autocomplete stuff, so there is no point fighting back.
There is a solid alternative, though. Pulsar. Atom was kind of dead, but it still had a small, dedicated fanbase including myself. Hopefully Pulsar will be able to keep the project alive as long as us Atom fans use it
VSCode is owned by Microsoft, ever since Microsoft bought GitHub in 2018 it was bound to happen. The two text-editors had the same audience therefore Atom was bound to get shut.
I'm not sure it's fair to say it failed. Not everything is forever. It served very important purposes, helped push technology forward and paved the way for editors like VSCode.
I guess I'm old school, but I'm genuinely surprised by how Microsoft drove such widespread adoption of Visual Studio which, as I remember, was an expensive, basically enterprise-only IDE for very Microsoft-specific proprietary technologies like C# and .NET.
we had the conversation at University back in 2002; it went, "Atom is a dumb name" (for a beta package for editing, building in). What is this, the year of Marvel Comics taking over the Galaxy or something?
Typescript makes VSCode very slow though. I remember the feeling when switched from Atom to VSCode it's wicked fast. And then Typescript happens, my macbook's fan keeps spinning from time to time.
VScode is also crap.
It doesn't even support multi screen multi-window, heh no thank you.
I can't comprehend, how anybody can use VScode for any real work.
It might sound controversial, but for me Atom was almost a 1 to 1 Sublime copy with worse performance and quality. It was slow and ugly. It’s only quality was that it was 0$.
It was the first editor I’ve seen to choke when opening 1M file (it even had a warning that it’s a too big file - lol). There simply was not enough RAM in the world for this memory hog.
I’m not really sad to see it go. It was another free toy of a big company that people used not to spend 60$ on real thing made by small company and waste thousands of dollars on lost productivity and time.
I wonder if it played a part in Microsofts purchase of Github. When you look at things like code spaces, co-pilot and how VSC can now work directly on Github/Azure repositories without moving the code to "your machine", it seems like they found a good way to make Github (and Azure DevOps) more profitable through Atoms successor.
Tree-sitter[0] came out of Atom performance optimization, I think, and that's a legacy that will live on a long time. Atom was in my view the closest thing to emacs out there, and it's sad to see that sort of user-empowerment not live on.
I resisted switching to VS Code for a long time because I far preferred the UX and design of Atom, but I eventually caved not because of performance gains I wanted in VS Code (honestly I found Atom plenty fast for the work I was doing), but because many Atom extensions were left to rot and slowly broke over time as most maintainers moved to VSCode extensions.
I think the Atom editor + Hydrogen plugin for running interactive Python sessions inline with the code is still unmatched by anything available in VS Code. This setup is what I migrated to when I ditched Matlab for the "scientific Python" stack, and I'm still here.
Multiple concurrent kernels, the ability to connect any .py file to any running kernel, sharing variables and imports across multple .py files, inline matplotlib output that persists on-screen and inline with the code even when running other code cells... the list goes on. I'm really fond of this setup. I use it daily--it's an essential component of my day job--and intend to do so for the foreseeable future. VS Code does seem to be the way of the future but there have just been too many friction points for me to leave Atom.
I'm a happy user of Atom as my daily driver for basic note taking and scratch pads. Even though it's being sunset, I look forward to using it for years to come.
Perhaps it will have a good fork one day, but honestly it works great as-is. Sometimes software reaches a point where it just works, and you appreciate not having a team that wants to change everything.
> Even though it's being sunset, I look forward to using it for years to come.
I'd be very, very careful with that. My understanding is that Atom will no longer receive any updates, including security updates. Atom has had a remote code execution vulnerability in the past that could be triggered by simply opening a package readme IIRC.
Atom is deeply integrated with the browser/Node.js ecosystem, and as such using a stale version sounds potentially very dangerous. I sincerely wish it was different, and that we could just continue using unmaintained applications as long as they "work", but that is sadly not the state of software today.
For those looking for a good substitute, I've switched to Sublime Text and so far I've gotten it to pretty much a near-perfect replica of the original. Kind of surprising to me how much of the Atom UI was built to mimic the Sublime interface.
I also tried VSCode, but was never really quite able to get into the interface the same way. For a while I tried customizing the interface with plugins like CustomizeUI, but Microsoft broke those recently, and I've been happier with Sublime.
I was a noob when Atom was new and I remember thinking it was unusably slow. Took a minute to realize that I had loaded my entire computer's directory, not just the project I was working on.
By looking at the other comments, I see the seemingly unavoidable discussion over which is the best text editor/IDE. My opinion on the matter is the following: the best text editor/IDE(/many other tools) doesn't exist. What exists is the best tool for you. Each one of us has it's own opinion based on its personal experience, and it's baked by arguments that stem out of what we find most important in those tools. The problem arises when, after picking what is the best tool for me, I forget about the last two words and it becomes the best tool. Each one of us is the most productive when it's using its own favorite tool, but it doesn't mean that if I convince someone else to switch to my preferred tool, then that person will be more productive. Each one of us has to see for him/herself which tool suits him/her best. It is fine if we suggest other people to try our tools for some reasons, but it makes little to no sense to argue that our favorite tool is objectively the best one.
I tried Atom a few years ago and was impressed by the features, but it was such a resource hog that I ditched it immediately. As someone with web development experience amounting to zero, it seems strange to me that nobody is asking about the feasibility of porting it to less resource hungry Electron alternatives (Tauri? Neutralino? ...?). Tauri has made the front page lately and everyone praises it for being a much lighter alternative to Electron, so using it would seem the natural step, or am I missing something?
I'm not a huge fan of Microsoft, but they hired Erich Gamma and that was a brilliant move. He is an engineer I have tremendous respect for, with obvious vision. He was key in VisualAge for Java, which was a Java IDE, written in Smalltalk, which supported refactoring down to the smallest level (including file operations). He was obviously a key designer for VSCode. From its earliest days, I could see how they were sketching in facilities for advanced features in an open way, and it has maintained its development well.
I didn’t quite understand the loss of Atom until I authored https://ghuntley.com/fracture about VSCode. Now I deeply care about ensuring programming languages do not outsource their LSP development to Microsoft and enable them to capture the ecosystem as is happening in python.
I've moved to VS Code (or rather Codium, the OSS build of Code) long time ago, but still keep the Atom keybindings and icons (both available in the extension gallery). RIP.
[+] [-] p-e-w|3 years ago|reply
The Atom developers made some technology choices that in retrospect were ill-advised, CoffeeScript being the worst of them and splitting everything into dozens of packages a close second. They tried to backpedal on both of these later on, but by that time VSCode, with its far superior engineering built around TypeScript, was rapidly taking over.
Of course, the GitHub acquisition was the last straw, but to be fair Atom was already pretty dead by then.
While the Atom project ultimately failed, it did give us Electron and Tree-Sitter, two technologies that will certainly outlive it.
[+] [-] esprehn|3 years ago|reply
That architecture has a major flaw though. A default install was fast, but a real configuration with all the plugins ended up quite slow.
VSCode's architecture worked much better in real world configurations, and it turns out better performance wins in the editor space, even if it meant losing certain customizations (up to a limit). The architecture also allowed seamless remote editing, something Atom never could have done.
The interesting thing has always been that both were built on Electron. Atom's developers had built all the tools and primitives needed, they just didn't have the understanding of the long term ecosystem effects of their design.
[+] [-] umvi|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Gigachad|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sgtnoodle|3 years ago|reply
I tried making an issue for it, but someone ranted on about moving files around on a Mac and then closed the issue.
I tried trying to solve the bug myself, but I got about 4 layers deep into callbacks across at least three different repos, and gave up.
[+] [-] codegeek|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wink|3 years ago|reply
Interestingly the moment I tried out VS Code (many years later) I instantly liked it and have been using it sporadically ever since, and as people always liken the two, I am confused to this day why one felt wrong and one felt right.
[+] [-] haolez|3 years ago|reply
However, TypeScript has clearly won and static typing can help a lot with autocomplete stuff, so there is no point fighting back.
[+] [-] daemond|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danjoredd|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nigamanth|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vertis|3 years ago|reply
I'd call that success.
[+] [-] scarface74|3 years ago|reply
That’s not the positive thing that you think it is.
[+] [-] lopkeny12ko|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] herbst|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] topherPedersen|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kaichanvong|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] martini333|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] kingboss|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Existenceblinks|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RektBoy|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] szastamasta|3 years ago|reply
It was the first editor I’ve seen to choke when opening 1M file (it even had a warning that it’s a too big file - lol). There simply was not enough RAM in the world for this memory hog.
I’m not really sad to see it go. It was another free toy of a big company that people used not to spend 60$ on real thing made by small company and waste thousands of dollars on lost productivity and time.
[+] [-] bearon|3 years ago|reply
Atom provided the seed, excitement and vision for what is possible on this platform, and should be proud of that fact.
[+] [-] rajeshp1986|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Moxdi|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] devjab|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oaiey|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] m000|3 years ago|reply
Atom provided the seed, excitement and vision for bloated Electron apps, and shouldn't be very proud of that fact.
[+] [-] paxys|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robto|3 years ago|reply
[0]https://tree-sitter.github.io/tree-sitter/
[+] [-] dcchambers|3 years ago|reply
Farewell friend, you will be missed.
[+] [-] brundolf|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ddhhyy|3 years ago|reply
Multiple concurrent kernels, the ability to connect any .py file to any running kernel, sharing variables and imports across multple .py files, inline matplotlib output that persists on-screen and inline with the code even when running other code cells... the list goes on. I'm really fond of this setup. I use it daily--it's an essential component of my day job--and intend to do so for the foreseeable future. VS Code does seem to be the way of the future but there have just been too many friction points for me to leave Atom.
[+] [-] locofocos|3 years ago|reply
Perhaps it will have a good fork one day, but honestly it works great as-is. Sometimes software reaches a point where it just works, and you appreciate not having a team that wants to change everything.
[+] [-] p-e-w|3 years ago|reply
I'd be very, very careful with that. My understanding is that Atom will no longer receive any updates, including security updates. Atom has had a remote code execution vulnerability in the past that could be triggered by simply opening a package readme IIRC.
Atom is deeply integrated with the browser/Node.js ecosystem, and as such using a stale version sounds potentially very dangerous. I sincerely wish it was different, and that we could just continue using unmaintained applications as long as they "work", but that is sadly not the state of software today.
[+] [-] manbart|3 years ago|reply
https://pulsar-edit.dev/
[+] [-] gnramires|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ComplexSystems|3 years ago|reply
I also tried VSCode, but was never really quite able to get into the interface the same way. For a while I tried customizing the interface with plugins like CustomizeUI, but Microsoft broke those recently, and I've been happier with Sublime.
[+] [-] emadabdulrahim|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GTP|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] squarefoot|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davidy123|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ghuntley|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] krunck|3 years ago|reply
VSCode is dead to me. I don't want to use development tools which allow a corporation to constantly inject it's agenda into my work.
[+] [-] notpushkin|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] balls187|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pohl|3 years ago|reply
https://lapce.dev
https://github.com/lapce/lapce
[+] [-] saikatsg|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Raed667|3 years ago|reply
They seem to have spun-off a new project "Phoenix Code Editor" [2].
[0] https://brackets.io
[1] https://github.com/brackets-cont/brackets
[2] https://github.com/phcode-dev/phoenix