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Sunsetting Atom
- alaricus 4y agoMicrosoft kills another great open source project. This is sad. Don't rely on Microsoft.
- mempko 4y agoAnd here we are with vim and emacs still being updated and improved. Good job Bram and John.
- jstx1 4y agoIt's what kickstarted Electron which eventually gave us VSCode, Slack, and lots of HN comments about memory usage. It also had the sweetest default theme of any code editor. RIP.
- antileet 4y agoElectron was originally known as "Atom Shell"!
- faizshah 4y agoDoes anyone remember brackets? I cant remember if brackets or atom came first but I remember switching from sublime to brackets to atom. Good times, I heard DHH is still using TextMate.
- throw_m239339 4y agoBrackets came first.
- solarkraft 4y agoI do, it was quite cool! What stuck most with me is the CSS color picker.
- ketzo 4y agoDid my first ever paid programming work in Brackets, helping some friends build a Wordpress blog. Good times.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- whywhywhywhy 4y agoI still use Textmate, think it's actually excellent these days and still updated a few times a year. Spellcheck always works, nothing ever crashes and acts weird I run it for 10+ months without issue. VSCode on my PC the spell check is inconsistent and weird and on a long enough timeline it actually crashes the whole operating system if you leave it open.
- ngc248 4y agoI am still using brackets on the mac and I have to say very satisfied with it. I came from windows where notepad++ is unbeatable.
- IncRnd 4y agoI've used TextMate for a long time. It works great.
- ubermonkey 4y agoI was in TextMate all day every day for a long, long time but gradually shifted to Emacs, hilariously, AFTER I quit coding for a living -- because of OrgMode.
- skohan 4y agoElectron is both an amazing enabling technology, and also an artifact of the sad state of affairs for computing platforms. One could imagine a world where strong standards have been established which would allow you to easily deploy lean native applications across a wide variety of platforms. Instead we ended up in this bizzare world where if you want to maintain a desktop GUI app, you either need a large team to support multiple platforms, or you need to target minified javascript of all things, and run your software on top of a large, arcane compatibility layer.
- dijit 4y agoI still think of these inefficient things as being great multipliers of potential, even if wasteful. FWIW: I'm probably one of the most "IT Conservative" people on this site, I still believe in sysadmins, dislike systemd, hate electron etc; But there is something to be said about developer productivity: if you can build a prototype in 10 days when it would have taken 10 weeks that can be a huge differentiator between companies; it means you can make 6x more prototypes in the same time window, or work through different iterations of the same idea. That's hugely beneficial. I think if you treat inefficient things this way (I consider Ruby/Python in the same way) then we all benefit, test your ideas then go for gold on a more efficient platform.
- skohan 4y agoYeah I think I am in a similar camp. As a person involved in product development, I love the speed at which web technologies allow us to move. As a computer scientist, I can't help but cringe at the massive amount of collective inefficiency in the current state of computing. But don't get me wrong, I'd rather have the inefficient thing which creates value than nothing at all.
- vdnkh 4y ago> One could imagine a world where strong standards have been established w And yet this didn't happen and Electron did. The "free market" of FOSS development settled on Electron as the winner for cross-platform development.
- marricks 4y agoAlso all have the same magnitude of latency and lag. At least you know if one of them bugs you, they all will.
- dewey 4y agoThere's a bunch of Electron powered apps that feel really snappy, definitely faster and snappier than some default apps Apple ships on macOS these days. Examples for me would be: VSCode and Linear
- marricks 4y agoI should have put the example I was comparing to: VIM. I like VIM as an editor because it's extremely fast and works well once you adapt to it. I'm sure VSCode and Linear are fast, nice, and fine. I just hated the lag/latency compared to my terminal text editor.
- redox99 4y agoA few Electron apps are acceptable. But it's still very noticeable how less responsive they are compared to Win32 programs.
- niutech 4y agoBefore Electron (f.k.a. Atom-Shell), there was Node-Webkit (l.k.a. NW.js), which also was a foundation for plenty of apps: https://github.com/nwjs/nw.js/wiki/List-of-apps-and-companies-using-nw.js https://github.com/nwjs/nw.js/wiki/List-of-apps-and-companie...
- rvz 4y agoTranslation: 'Extinguishing Atom Text Editor'. Really expected and unsurprising.
- bm5k 4y agoIt took longer than I expected.
- mproud 4y agoWhat recommendations do you all have for alternatives?
- kevinwang 4y agoI think the reason it's unused these days is because it's largely been replaced by vscode
- Grazester 4y agoVisual Studio Code is the most obvious. I actually forgot Atom existed. I move from it to VSC because Atom was just such a resource hog.
- Night_Thastus 4y agoVSCode seems to be the go-to for most.
- shusaku 4y agoSublime I guess. I made the switch awhile back because if just how much snappier it is, but it’s sad to see Atom go with all its nice add-ons…
- mtkd 4y agoI moved from Sublime to Atom ... "Atom community involvement has declined significantly" Probably because it works well enough, some tools don't need endless enhancing
- sph 4y agovim -> Sublime -> Emacs -> VSCode -> Emacs ^^^^^ I am here.
- ollien 4y agoand then vim again. It will come full circle :)
- curiousmindz 4y agoI think the writing was on the wall for a long time. Since it is only happening in 6 months, I wonder if the community will try to transition/fork it. Do you know if there is still enough interest?
- franciscop 4y agoI don't think so, even if I use Atom as my primary editor there's a bunch of other great open source ones and even some non-OSS, and migration is trivial, so there's likely no need.
- yeq 4y agoI really liked Atom for non-code editing as it is usually much faster than VS Code, so this is quite unfortunate news
- vorpalhex 4y agoIf you are working in markdown, there are a good bundle of other options too.
- Doctor_Fegg 4y ago“Sunsetting” an open source project seems… unfitting? Hand it off to the community, look for new maintainers, donate it to the Apache Retirement Home for Veteran Projects, sure. But saying that you’ve decided to “sunset” or “archive” it, telling users to plan for their migration, seems counter to the notion that open source software forms part of a commons - something that Github, of all companies, should understand.
- civilized 4y agoGitHub is owned by Microsoft, the company that invented "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish". We should be counting down the days till they sunset VS Code to focus on VS Code "Pro".
- red_phone 4y agoI’m not sure the term has ever been applied to Microsoft’s own products…
- dkarl 4y agoThey embrace, extend, and extinguish products they don't make money on, so that people are forced to use products that they do make money on.
- IncRnd 4y agoMicrosoft doesn't make money from VS Code. Atom was retired due to a lack of activity with the project. I've never even seen anyone use Atom, since the time it was released 8 years ago.
- Night_Thastus 4y agoIt's a shame. Atom was my first love, taking me away from the pain of using GEdit to write code for my college courses. I loved finding new packages and tuning and tweaking it all just right. I'll miss it.
- shusaku 4y agoFirst love is a great description. I was 100% a vim guy for most of my career, but I tried out Atom and it ignited my love for the GUI
- Arubis 4y agoAtom was great, but I'll admit that I'd forgotten about it entirely.
- maxpert 4y agoSad day! But VSCode ate it up. Whatever one might say this had a huge hand in making Electron mainstream.
- jaywalk 4y agoAtom did much more than help make Electron mainstream. Electron was actually born out of it: https://www.electronjs.org/blog/electron/ https://www.electronjs.org/blog/electron/
- jonathaneunice 4y agoI like Atom and use it occasionally. But I use VS Code day-in and day-out. The decision makes sense. If VS Code were not exceptionally good, Atom might have had more of an opportunity. But "yet another good option" is not enough to drive investment, sustain a community, and spin an ecosystem.
- edgyquant 4y agoMaybe I’m misremembering but didn’t VSCode begin as a fork/skin of atom?
- wiseowise 4y agoNo? It did use Electron though (Atom Shell).
- edgyquant 4y agoYup. My mistake https://thenextweb.com/news/microsofts-cross-platform-visual-studio-code-app-is-based-on-githubs-atom-editor https://thenextweb.com/news/microsofts-cross-platform-visual...
- nobodywasishere 4y agoAtom created Electron, VS Code is built on Electron
- jacobmischka 4y agoAtom predated VS Code and was the impetus for Electron, which VS Code uses. You may know this, but this comment makes it seem like they tried and didn't have an opportunity. They literally invented what the majority of new "desktop" apps uses to render UIs, they just couldn't compete with Microsoft (before they were bought out, after which of course Microsoft wasn't going to invest seriously in it). Edit: Fixed typo (thanks torstenvl!).
- torstenvl 4y ago
- Dave3of5 4y agoI remember this being released and this was a concern at the time that the project would be abandoned. If I remember this it was mostly a concern as Github as a company should focus on their main product which is not an editor and that there are many existing editor that do it better. I suspect that what actually killed this is the acquisition of Github by Microsoft and the fact that Microsoft are pushing VSCode very hard. Dev tooling is something Microsoft had a lot of experience (and failures) in and it was always an uphill battle.
- hackernewds 4y agoWhat other editors are better and could be recommended? I guess I'm replacing Atom today
- bogwog 4y agoSublime Text gets my vote. Pretty hard to go back to anything else after using it. It’s not free, but if you’re really strapped for cash you can use it like most people use Winrar, at least until the guilt overcomes you.
- Dave3of5 4y agoVim, emacs, sublime, vscode, notepad++ there are lots.
- edgyquant 4y agoEh VSCode killer atom long ago.
- Atreiden 4y agoCalled this ~4 years ago when they were acquired by M$. But it's still really sad to see. I use it because it was trivial to CSS style it to match my Desktop. It's comfortable to me in a way that other editors thus far have not been. Are there other editors with this level of customizability? I know VSCode and Sublime support theming but from what I can tell it involves installing pre-packaged themes.
- piefayth 4y agoWell, if you just want a custom VSCode theme, you can try Theme Studio for VSCode: https://themes.vscode.one/ https://themes.vscode.one/. Login/signup required, though. No affiliation.
- aordano 4y agothere is an extension that lets you set arbitrary css in VSCode, albeit it's a bit cumbersome to use. https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=be5invis.vscode-custom-css https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=be5invis...
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- rgoulter 4y agoIf level of customizability is your main metric: Emacs can go from this: https://emacshints.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/spash1.png https://emacshints.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/spash1.png to this: https://github.com/rougier/nano-emacs https://github.com/rougier/nano-emacs
- whiskey14 4y ago+1 for nano-emacs
- brundolf 4y agoYou can do a lot of customization in VSCode. Not as much as Atom, but way more than the average editor. I'm not positive whether or not it would be enough to serve your case
- vjandrea 4y agoJust a noob here, but I love the way Atom displays and handles merge conflicts; still my editor of choice when I rebase / merge.
- haolez 4y agoI still prefer Atom's UX design over VSCode and I can't explain why. Amazing job on that front! I hope it gets traction with community support.
- ehayes 4y agoMe too. Even if you have a great theme in VSC you're still stuck with the sidebar and the bad Microsoft-y typography choices everywhere.
- bckr 4y agoI was able to make VSCode look pretty great with a bit of work by following the ebook Make VSCode Awesome: https://makevscodeawesome.com/ https://makevscodeawesome.com/ great fonts, minimal visual clutter etc
- eating555 4y agoSame here. I've tried VSCode multiple times but still switched back to atom. Just FEELS RIGHT.
- brundolf 4y agoIt feels a little more natural/human. VSCode's default theme looks like Tron. Both are valid, but I can see how Atom's is more "cozy". It also had some fun "squishy" animations that were nice For the colors at least, there are VSCode themes that will try to mimic it for you
- ehayes 4y agoOver the past year I've tried a few times to switch from Atom to VS Code, but there's always a little thing that brings me back. With effort most of the functionality could be reproduced in VSC, but the stupid MS typography can't be themed away.
- imbnwa 4y agoYeah, overall UX of VSC bothers me next to Atom and I can't explain why
- joshstrange 4y agoI know a lot of people love vscode but are there any people who have tried something like IDEA/WebStorm/PHPStorm/etc that then went back to vscode? I had to help a developer setup deploys to a dev server from vscode the other day and I wanted to pull my hair out. I'll admit it's at least in part due to not using vscode myself but I was a heavy Sublime Text user which is very similar to vscode when it comes to how you find/configure plugins. I understand that vscode is very powerful and infinitely extendable but I feel like I shouldn't have needed to try 4-5 different vscode plugins (all configured via json) before I found one that worked and did what I needed. At least 2 of the top downloaded plugins when searching for "SFTP" were read-only/archived on GitHub, the top one had a "reloaded" version which was also discontinued from what I could tell. I'm comparing this experience to IDEA which has this built in (including support for deploying to multiple servers at the same time) and all configurable in the GUI. Maybe I'm just getting old and cranky but vscode seems to get unwieldy very quickly (plugin conflicts, not being able to tell what's doing what, writing almost all config in json). The plugin ecosystem seems to be much lower quality that I what I see in the Intellij product line. I guess I'm just not interested in "building my own IDE" and forever tweaking it, I'd much rather buy a product that does almost everything I need in a sane way.
- colordrops 4y agoTotally agree, if I'm gonna put effort into building my IDE it's gonna be vim or emacs. I use nvim most of the time and intellij on occasion for debugging.
- johnchristopher 4y agoOh, I do the same. Coding in vim and debugging in vscode. The GUI and mouse support is a better experience.
- vultour 4y agoAh, a fellow full-time vim user. There are dozens of us!
- stefanos82 4y ago
- slumber86 4y agoSuper sad, atom's column editing still rocks. are there alternatives for vsCode?
- pjmlp 4y agoWell, they managed to drive it much longer than I expected after GitHub's acquisition.
- sakaroz 4y agowho was using it anyway ?
- bellBivDinesh 4y agoAtom was my first go to editor years ago when its git integration felt miles ahead. Then I saw gitglass(?) in VS Code and was moved to switch for shared workspace files at my job. I remember it as lightweight and fun.
- jlkuester7 4y agoI have never found a git integration that I liked more or found more simple and intuitive than Atom's. I found that even folks who were new to git would quickly become comfortable with managing git interactions via Atom. VSCode's "Source Control" on the other hand is a such a big UX dumpster-fire that I cannot bring myself to even try using it any more....
- wly_cdgr 4y agoAtom has been dead for years, this is just the state funeral. The situation now is: * Sublime for the Williamsburg corpo-hipsters * emacs and vim for the wizards and furries * VSCode for all the normies who just want to get on with doing their job and don't feel a need to express their identity or politics through choice of editor * WebStorm for the chads with the monster rigs to run it
- ThaDood 4y agoThis makes me feel conflicted.
- tinco 4y agoI use VSCode because its Vim plugin is better than that of Sublime. If/when Sublime has caught up, I'd happily go back to it for that sweet performance and uncluttered UI. So am I a normie, a corpo-hipster or a furry wizard?
- throwaway413 4y agoHermione Granger - muggle born with vested corporate interest
- alpaca128 4y ago> its Vim plugin is better than that of Sublime I'm pretty sure Sublime has a plugin that uses an actual NeoVim instance to process all inputs with all your configuration. Never tried it, I don't use Sublime. But I can confirm the feature works well in Firefox via FireNvim.
- tinco 4y agoI think this is what vscode does as well. The magic is in how it cooperates with the GUI. All jumps and movements work, as well as search/replace and the hilighting and selections are even the native vscode hilights and selections so it's fluid going from mouse to vim and back. Last time I used Sublime (4+ years ago) there were a bunch of vim commands that didn't work.
- keewee7 4y agoReally begs the question what Visual Studio Code did right and what Atom did wrong.
- bogwog 4y agoI didn’t use Atom much, but I think it’s obvious that the primary reason it died was because Microsoft decided to make their own competing editor, and then bought the parent company of Atom. It wasn’t exactly the most popular editor at the time, but it did still have some users. Reminds me of how Adobe killed off FreeHand (the only competitor to Illustrator at the time) by buying the parent company and then halting development. Of course, Microsoft likely gave zero shits about Atom as a competitive threat since it was effectively dead at the time anyways, but I still think it’s interesting to see the similarities to the Adobe situation.
- mynameisvlad 4y ago> the primary reason it died was because Microsoft decided to make their own competing editor > Microsoft likely gave zero shits about Atom as a competitive threat since it was effectively dead at the time anyways How can Microsoft both give zero shits because it was effectively dead, while also still being the primary reason it died? That seems to be a chicken-egg problem.
- bogwog 4y agoI mean that Microsoft's acquisition of Github had nothing to do with Atom whatsoever (I assume), but the acquisition was the final nail in the coffin for it. Would it have survived if Microsoft didn't acquire Github? It's possible, however unlikely. But after the acquisition? Not a chance.
- pygy_ 4y agoChronology. VSCode ate Atom's lunch before MS purchased GH.
- akagusu 4y agoGlad to see that someone remembered FreeHand. It was much better than Ilustrator, this is why Adobe killed it.
- dindresto 4y agoDoes anyone know the current status of https://zed.dev/ https://zed.dev/, the editor by former Atom devs?
- sphars 4y agoThe founder is in this thread, stating they just started an alpha release: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31669615 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31669615
- geodel 4y agoEditors are like browsers, huge amount of upfront work to even get parity with decades old editor and no commercial potential to sell product. Charge a little bit of money and a million of well paid IT workers suddenly become so poor to pay for tools they need for work. They would further spend productive time haranguing maintainers on why editor need to be open source (code word for just free as in beer) or how 60-70 dollars / year is too much for a code editor and so on. So end result is only editors exist are feature complete long time back/ or maintained by companies who could just give it for free, compensating it with cloud revenues. Besides a couple of paid editors with insignificant market share of course.
- aniforprez 4y agoI wish there was an editor I feel comfortable paying for Idea stuff is just way too bulky for me. I don't like using any of them, sacrilegious as that may be, and don't feel the need to use them for since I don't use java. Paying for Sublime is just not worth it with its far poorer plugins and API and their release cadence is atrocious. I checked Nova from Panic out and it looks promising but it's VERY far from being a replacement for my current setup So I see almost no reason to switch from vim and VSCode, both of which are free and have extensive plugin support and are great at what they do. If something comes along that is faster, has good language support and good list of extensions, I would have no trouble paying for it
- iamnbutler 4y agoWe just started a private alpha this week! Lots of news and more public facing information coming soon.
- mattsouth 4y agoThis makes me sad as I very much prefer the atom approach to the git and github panels than the vscode approach. vscode is much faster for typescript development though.
- peter_retief 4y agoI actually used atom for a while, it was a bit bulky but not terrible. I had forgot that it was an option.
- ericd 4y agoEvery now and then I’m reminded of why I decided to stop chasing the shiny new and just go back to emacs.
- akagusu 4y agoEmacs is up and running for the last 40 years and it will be for the next 40. Definitely is a software you can bet on.
- lanstin 4y agoYeah. Which Linus uses, so probably works well enough for all non UI work whatsoever. Except maybe SQL?
- faho 4y agoHe doesn't. Linus uses MicroEMACS [0], which is an entirely different editor that uses emacs bindings. It's not the lisp vm that incidentally happens to edit code that GNU Emacs is. Or, as he puts it [1]: > I use this abomination called "micro-emacs", which has absolutely nothing to do with GNU emacs except that some of the key bindings are similar. [0]: https://github.com/torvalds/uemacs https://github.com/torvalds/uemacs [1]: https://www.tag1consulting.com/blog/interview-linus-torvalds-linux-and-git https://www.tag1consulting.com/blog/interview-linus-torvalds...
- tlhunter 4y agoEven though Atom was much "lighter" than VS Code in terms of UI, VS Code had so much more development resources thrown at it that it was ultimately much speedier than Atom. IIRC, even Brackets was faster. I see people complaining about the death of Atom, but in the past few years there just hasn't been a use case where Atom was the best choice.
- deeptote 4y agoSeriously, who actually uses Atom anymore? Before VSCode was a thing, I used it but then I got into Vim, Neovim, and now VSCode with the Vim plugin.
- sheepybloke 4y agoExactly. I used Atom for a while, but then it started getting so slow. My coworker mentioned I should try VSCode, and it did everything I wanted Atom to do but faster.
- nerdponx 4y agoAtom to me was always "toy version of Sublime Text for web dev hipsters".
- a1371 4y agoGood memories with Atom. I had a silly "super mode" extension on it that gave me streaks when typing uninterrupted. It has lots of action graphics and screen shakes, I loved it.
- brundolf 4y agoI held out for a year or so after VSCode was released. It felt scummy how MS had swooped in and tried to hijack this new category of editor that GitHub had invented (this was before they'd been acquired, I believe) But once I tried VSCode... man, there was no going back. It was infinitely more performant and cohesive. Atom (with IDE-like features installed) felt so sluggish by comparison. I think the main improvement was how opinionated VSCode and its extension APIs were; Atom extensions could have dependencies on each other. I remember you had to install an extension for generic IDE hover-overs and such, before installing the actual language plugin, and then there were competing standards for which generic hover-over framework each language wanted to use. It didn't just complicate the user-experience, I'm convinced this was the reason the editor would get so slow; the APIs were too low-level and all the plugins were fighting with each other instead of going through standard channels. But, Atom will always have a special place in my heart. It blazed new trails in editor customizability (even if the degree ended up being its downfall, quite a bit of that legacy can still be found in VSCode). It invented the entire concept of web apps as desktop apps, which despite what some here would tell you, I think is a very good and important thing. And it always had such a fun, community feel to it that's been mostly lost with VSCode. It was time, but I will miss it. I'll close off with the very cute and fun Atom 1.0 announcement video: https://youtu.be/Y7aEiVwBAdk https://youtu.be/Y7aEiVwBAdk
- SahAssar 4y ago> It felt scummy how MS had swooped in and tried to hijack this new category of editor that GitHub had invented Wasn't brackets and atom released pretty much at the same time, both built on CEF?
- brundolf 4y agoInteresting! I hadn't heard of brackets before.
- moffkalast 4y ago> Atom extensions could have dependencies on each other This. This always has been and always will be a critical ecosystem mistake. The principle of one msi/exe installing everything you need on Windows, one click downloading an entire app from a store on Android or iOS is seamless and almost always error free. Or in your example with VSCode having self contained encapsulated plugins that install with one click. Meanwhile I'm having issues installing things and resolving dependencies with pip in python, apt in linux, npm, etc. basically all the time. It's a shit system that only pretends to be elegant and it's time we fucking admit it to ourselves. Designed by elitist morons for elitist morons and everyone else is paying the price.
- Narann 4y agoI use Atom for static Markdown blogging only. The reason is I customized Atom for this specific task and nothing more. Atom is mostly an advanced text editor than an IDE. I have Hunspell in both English and french, it detect word similarity and provide auto completion for this, it has some typewriter extension, etc. I'm reluctant to use VSCode because of M$ pushing for its tooling, but it looks like I will have no choice on the long run. Is there anyone in the same boat? Which highly configurable text editor can be use for this?
- trinsic2 4y agoI'm in the same boat and look for a configurable text editor. I have Sublime, but haven't used it much, until now.
- trinsic2 4y agoMan this is sad... As a markdown/HTMl writer, I used Atom every day... It had great extensions. So It looks like Sublime then.. Any other Editors for a non-coder that has good (Community) extension support like Atom besides Sublime?
- fartcannon 4y agoSo this would be slightly different than embrace, extend and extinguish (EEE). This is acquire, substitute and then sunset (ASS)
- gcau 4y agoI still use Atom purely for its simple easy git UI (while coding in VSCode). VSCodes git UI, and all others I've seen, are a disaster in comparison. I want a simple, easy UI - in atom its exactly that. If I need more I'll just type it in the CLI. I wish there was something else I could use that's like this.
- fbcpck 4y agoInteresting to find that I'm not the only person doing this! I also just hop to Atom if I need to do something more involved with git I typically do this when tidying up / amending >1 commit at a time (anything I can't do easily with git rebase interactive mode), or to resolve merge conflicts.
- hbn 4y agoI've never used a better git UI than the one built into JetBrains' IDEs (though I always switch it from appearing in the sidebar to appearing in a popup window, like how it used to). They could honestly package it as a standalone app and it'd justify its own existence The merge conflict resolver is so intuitive and easy to use. I have colleagues who come to me for fixing merge conflicts even though I'm pretty mediocre at git in general :p My secret is I do it in IntelliJ
- oefrha 4y agoAtom will live on in the form of Electron, one of the highest impact and most controversial technologies of the recent decade. I still remember the day VSCode was announced, and the binary on macOS (inside ./Contents/MacOS in the app bundle) was literally named Atom.
- alchermd 4y agoAtom was my first text editor when I was getting serious into learning software development. Sharing this neat video for those who hasn't seen it yet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7aEiVwBAdk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7aEiVwBAdk
- andrew_ 4y agoNooooooo. I so much prefer Atom over VSCode. I've read the spin, but this smells like Microsoft finally doing what we all predicted - killing off the competing product.
- wiseowise 4y ago> killing off the competing product. There's nothing competing about Atom. Its fate was sealed when VSCode started gaining traction, and that happened before GitHub acquisition.
- whiskey14 4y agoOh this is sad. As a teacher I loved introducing Atom as a first text editor as out of the box it did nothing but look nice. Then I could gradually add plugins everytime a student said something was annoying. Great for teaching principles before tools/shortcuts. Something which I think IDEs do far too often imo.
- gtsnexp 4y agoI guess this idea of "Sunsetting" a project highlights one of the main differences between Open source and Free Software. A successful Free Software project rarely gets "Sunset".
- likortera 4y agoEven after they promised they'll keep developing it despite of the acquisition: https://www.reddit.com/r/AMA/comments/8pc8mf/im_nat_friedman_future_ceo_of_github_ama/e0a2b2e/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AMA/comments/8pc8mf/im_nat_friedman... Not surprising. When this stuff happens is always lies because you plan for people to forget about stuff as times goes by, which usually happens.
- uneekname 4y agoRIP Atom. I wrote a lot of code in Atom back in the day.
- kylebarron 4y agoI personally found Atom + Hydrogen [0] to be the most productive interactive Python environment I've ever used. I really want to see VSCode adopt some way to run a Jupyter kernel for a Python file (with a notebook UI) and have rich results in line with the code (i.e. not a terminal output off to the right side of the screen). [0] https://github.com/nteract/hydrogen https://github.com/nteract/hydrogen
- amanwithnoplan 4y agoVSCode already does that as of some versions ago. https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2021/11/08/custom-notebooks https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2021/11/08/custom-notebo... https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/datascience/jupyter-notebooks https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/datascience/jupyter-noteb...
- kylebarron 4y agooh I had a typo in my original comment. I meant *without* a notebook UI. i.e. I don't want to see a cell UI like a notebook. I want it to be just a normal Python file where the output shows up in line.
- oxff 4y agoVSCode ate everyone's lunch. It is SO GOOD
- nathansobo 4y agoFounder of Atom here. We're building the spiritual successor to Atom over at https://zed.dev https://zed.dev. We learned a lot with Atom and had a great time, but it always fell short of our vision. With Zed we're going to get it right. Written in Rust, custom native UI framework, engineered to be collaborative. Just starting our private alpha this week, so the timing of this announcement feels quite fitting. Here's a talk I gave last month: https://youtu.be/wXT73bBr83s https://youtu.be/wXT73bBr83s
- aniforprez 4y agoIMO the killer thing that VSCode has over all the other editors is the wealth of extensions and a certain degree of simplicity. What are your plans for Zed in terms of extensibility and are you aligning more towards making something beefy and full-featured like the IntelliJ offerings or something more "lightweight" like VSCode or Sublime?
- nathansobo 4y agoWe plan to make Zed extensible via WebAssembly, but we're taking a different approach than we did with Atom. Our goal is to make Zed fast, stable, and collaborative first, extensible second. We'll be taking a more conservative approach with our APIs to ensure we can preserve our core values even as users add extensions. Our goal is for Zed to have the lightweight and snappy vibe of Sublime with the power of a more full-featured IDE. These objectives are obviously in tension, but I think we can build something that balances them well. A collaborative IDE that feels fast and powerful.
- wpietri 4y agoOoh, this is interesting. It sounds like you learned a lesson here. Could you say more about what prompted the change? I once talked with a Firefox engineer who felt like an initial urge for openness left them with a lot of API surface area that locked them into a lot of design choices. Was it something like that for you as well?
- zanethomas 4y agosad to see it go vscode? i've been trying to avoid it
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- ilovecaching 4y agoEmbrace. Extend. Extinguish. I won't touch VSCode with a 10 foot pole. Pick an editor that will last 40 years and isn't run by a mega-corporation that wants to eat FOSS so they can get us to buy into their subscription ecosystem.
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- jlkuester7 4y agoFriendly reminder that https://vscodium.com/ https://vscodium.com/ offers Free/Libre open source binaries of VS Code without all the M$ telemetry or integrations with proprietary services.
- db39 4y agoI was a big fan of Atom for years. And one thing I wish VS Code could have is the Git UI. It always just clicked better for me.
- ramesh31 4y agoEmbrace, extend, extinguish. It's in their DNA.
- adictator 4y agoCall me old, but I cannot look beyond vi/vim for an editor. A few years ago I had to edit a text file that was 9GB in size. It took a while to open it in vim, but once it was open, it was no different than any 2kb file. No other editor was able to even open the 9GB text file.
- swlkr 4y agoI loved and used atom for years, despite the performance. It was just such a nice editing experience. Also never got on the vscode train and opted for neovim instead (been using vim and bindings since 2012)
- jimnotgym 4y agoSounds like a good decision. I used Atom until everyone was talking about VScode... then I hopped over. I think Electron is an amazing legacy to leave. Like many I would like it to use less resources, but it is still a grest idea.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- franciscop 4y agoTotally understandable, but the justification in the first paragraph of "Why are we doing this now?" seems a bit self-inflicted: • Atom has not had significant feature development for the past several years • (thus) Atom community involvement has declined significantly • (thus) we’ve decided to sunset Atom Feels a bit weird in that sequence to blame the community. Just say that YOU have abandoned the project since Microsoft acquired Github and get done with it, no need to sugarcoat it or others in the way.
- petre 4y agoThis. I might as well try Spacemacs now as Emacs isn't getting 'sunsetted' anytime soon, plus it runs in Lisp. Vim user. It's just that Vim on a GUI doesn't make a lot of sense to me. So I went from Sublime Text to Atom just because Atom was open source. Tried VS Code several times and ditched it, as it was full of MS-isms. It had a bloody Twitter react button in the status bar and telemetry.
- jdaxe 4y agoVSCodium exists which is VS Code without the Microsoft "added features" (telemetry etc.) which sounds like more what you want.
- jw14 4y agoI checked back regularly for years to look for signs of life in Atom. There weren't any. Last blog? 2019. None of the releases did anything interesting. I work in Vue.js and needed that toolchain to work well, it never did with Atom. So they're blaming the community for something they decided years ago and kept deciding every week when no resources were allocated. Also, Zed isn't filling the void Atom left. Rust is interesting. Collaborative editing, not so much. Electron's lack of speed doesn't prevent VS code from fading into my workflow and being the most popular editor. I would still like an alternative because I don't think Microsoft should have the whole market.
- rattray 4y ago> I would still like an alternative because I don't think Microsoft should have the whole market. Asking genuinely, why not Sublime Text? (I haven't tried it or Atom in several years, but used both back in the day).
- emehex 4y agoThis is terrible. While I like VSCode, I exclusively use Atom for programming in Python because of Hydrogen [0], an extension which makes .py scripts feel and behave as though they were Jupyter Notebooks. I hope the nteract/Hydrogen devs are able to save their work and move it over to Zed/VSCode. [0] https://github.com/nteract/hydrogen https://github.com/nteract/hydrogen
- marcodiego 4y agoI had high hopes for atom. At first I thought about it as a FLOSS competitor to sublime. Its slowness (mostly because of electron) was entirely tolerable for me even on 10-year old hardware. I was afraid at how fast VSCode ate it. It is a good thing we have VSCodium.
- Animats 4y agoDo not want a "cloud based text editor". Being reliant on an external service is a huge point of failure. It can go down. It can join the huge list of discontinued Google products. It can have security problems. You can be arbitrarily banned by the service operator. Most cloud-based services only live for a few years.
- KronisLV 4y agoWhat was Atom good for, when compared with something like Visual Studio Code? I recall reading about typing latency and it seemed to come out as one of the slower options: https://pavelfatin.com/typing-with-pleasure/ https://pavelfatin.com/typing-with-pleasure/ I guess it would have occupied a similar place as Brackets, another vaguely similar project? https://brackets.io/ https://brackets.io/ Then again, with how popular VSC has become and with how insanely many extensions there are for it, using any other editor feels a bit... counterproductive at times? Personally, i'm using the following: - CLI: nano (vim works too, I just like the simplicity more) - Simple text editing: Notepad++ or similar (usually whatever is on the system on *nix) - Some scripting, but nothing too serious: Visual Studio Code - Development in larger and more complex codebases: JetBrains products (e.g. IntelliJ IDEA, WebStorm and so on)
- chad_strategic 4y agoI will admit that I'm biased, I hate to use Microsoft products. I hate Bill Gates and I hate Microsoft. I will not be switching to VsCode just on principal. Yes, I'm still using Github, so I guess I'm a walking contradiction. I also understand the economics of this situation why keep Vscode and atom IDE can't co exist, i'm surprised it took so long. This is the second software application that Microsoft has ruined, remember the incredibly awesome wunderlist?
- PascLeRasc 4y ago3rd actually, Sunrise was a fantastic calendar app. Microsoft is a blight on the world.
- chad_strategic 4y agoThanks! Sometimes it feels like I live all alone with my hate for Microsoft/Gates, but I'm glad I'm not alone.
- hbn 4y agoReally? It's hard to find anyone who'd say they overall like Microsoft as a company. VS Code is one of the very few things Microsoft has made that people actually like. I recall reading a comment here recently that they've actually create an entirely new generation of children who hate them by recent changes to Minecraft. Supposedly they forced everyone to migrate their accounts to Microsoft accounts, and in the process wiped a bunch of save files. Microsoft happens to every generation at some point!
- Matthias247 4y agoQuote: > It’s worth reflecting that Atom has served as the foundation for the Electron framework, which paved the way for the creation of thousands of apps, including Microsoft Visual Studio Code, Slack, and our very own GitHub Desktop. This is so true! Atom spearheaded a new generation of exciting apps and set them up for success. That is a huge achievement on its own - so thanks Atom team for everything you have done!
- productceo 4y agoWow! End of an era!
- albertzeyer 4y agoSo I wonder a bit, VSCode has clearly won over Atom. But technically, as far as I know, they are both pretty similar. So where is the difference? Are these just small details which VSCode got better? Or are there bigger things? Or why else did VSCode actually won? I have used both in the past. VSCode seemed a bit snappier, which is an important aspect for an editor. But I'm not sure if this was really the case actually. Or also, why there would be such a difference. Both used Electron, and I assumed both would use similar techniques for the editor.
- aniforprez 4y agoPerformance and extensions being forced to be simpler due to a fast more restrictive API. VSCode was miles ahead in terms of performance and way snappier than Atom was and the extensions on Atom gave frequent troubles cause they had all sorts of weirdness to them
- josephcsible 4y agoI hope that a new editor gets first-class Agda support so that Emacs won't be your only choice for it once Atom is gone.
- eberkund 4y agoI see a lot of people remarking that VS Code's killer feature is its extension system but I am not sure I fully agree. Sure VS Code has a lot of extensions, but many of them offer only basic features or are poor quality. The extensions which deliver the most value are actually the ones supported by large corporations (like the Go extension from Google or the Python extension from Microsoft). If another editor could port these powerful extensions I would care very little about the lack of icon themes and snippet extensions.
- stjohnswarts 4y agoI expected this with the Microsoft takeover. Most "extraneous" non-profitable activities and projects will be killed off. Also MS produces VS which is a successor in a sense to Atom.
- dokem 4y agoLOL this is why you just use vim/emacs/bash and move on with your life.
- stefanos82 4y agoKraken, the company behind https://cryptowat.ch https://cryptowat.ch use the following cross-platform GUI library for Rust https://github.com/iced-rs/iced https://github.com/iced-rs/iced
- rubyist5eva 4y agoWho didn't see this coming after Microsoft bought GitHub?
- DarkContinent 4y agoIs Julia's Juno IDE going to be affected by this?
- eigenspace 4y agoNo, because they already transitioned to VS Code years ago.
- sam0x17 4y agoIn other news, the Atom One Dark color theme is alive and well in the VS Code marketplace. I've used it for 5 straight years. https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=zhuangtongfa.Material-theme https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=zhuangto...
- robinsonrc 4y agoI hope the main thing you leaned is that people want a text editor to start up in less than a second
- spicysugar 4y agoVscodium + LiteXL[0] replaced Atom + Sublime for me. [0]https://lite-xl.com/ https://lite-xl.com/
- mohas 4y agoI think the most essential feature that vscode had over atom was good default features, once I see my coworker struggle for an hour to setup a dev env and I decided it is not going to be the tool of my profession
- 7speter 4y agoI’m old enough to remember when microsoft said that atom developmennt would continue alongside Visual Studio Code after the company bought github…
- gjs278 4y ago
- fungiblecog 4y agoAnother editor bites the dust - another reason to stick with Emacs
- fungiblecog 4y agoIf i had a dollar every time a developer said "we're going to get it right this time"...
- ghostly_s 4y ago
- foxhill 4y ago
- wellsjohnston 4y agoI tried "hacking" on Atom recently for a side project and found it was full of bugs and not performant at all. Next.
- betamaxthetape 4y agoThe video produced to introduce Atom 1.0 [1] is my all-time favourite tech announcement video, and I honestly don't see that ever changing. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7aEiVwBAdk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7aEiVwBAdk
- eftychis 4y agoWhy would I want to learn a new editor, if it is going to be sunset -- there are many great options out there that are unlikely to disappear or be unsupported? Meaning Github's new editor has to offer something unique and great.
- hexo 4y agoGlad that sunsetting of emacs is not going to happen any time soon :)
- bilekas 4y agoI loved Atom when it fisrt came out, was a little heavy on my machine at the time, but it was worth it. Had much easy plugin system than sublime and editplus that I was using. It was a go to for my windows machines where i didn't want to play with my VIM config etc. But when VSCode came along it was over for my time with Atom. Wish the best for the new spiritual successor though zed.dev.
- meanmrmustard92 4y agoRIP. Hydrogen [https://atom.io/packages/hydrogen https://atom.io/packages/hydrogen] running on Atom is the cleanest multi-lingual data science IDE in existence and has been my go-to for years. Haven't found a drop-in replacement elsewhere [vscode's language support is scattered: native python integration, different for R, Julia etc]. Anyone on HN have recs [besides vim slime or send-to-terminal options in other editors, which work but are clunky] ?
- dangjc 4y agoPeople kept asking me why I was still using Atom, and Hydrogen was it. It doesn't seem like there's an exact equivalent in VSCode. For now, I'm just relying on sending blocks of code to the interactive Python terminal. Or using the Jupyter extension. But the former might not work with other languages and the latter requires .ipynb files which maybe you don't want to check into git.
- ihnorton 4y ago> I'm just relying on sending blocks of code to the interactive Python terminal. > [...] > the latter requires .ipynb files which maybe you don't want to check into git. I use `#%%` code blocks in the interactive window for this purpose: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/python/jupyter-support-py https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/python/jupyter-support-py This allows a normal editor workflow, interactive execution, and linear history of executed cells. But the code blocks can still be executed top-to-bottom and exported as a clean notebook for sharing purposes.
- john-titor 4y agoCan someone explain the hype around VSCode to me? I looked into it about a year ago and was immediately turned-off by the overwhelming amount of features that they throw at you right in the 'beginner's tour'. What I appreciate about Atom is that it is very simple right out of the box and does not get in your way. You cold always beef it up with packages later, but that progression is much more pleasant to me than the VSCode approach. The biggest selling point of Atom to me as a Python dev was the Hydrogen package. That tight integration of notebook features within the editor is something I have never seen before and a total game changer. Especially if you are working with data that you might need to visualize a lot. Correct me if I'm wrong, but from what I understand there is no Hydrogen equivalent in VSCode? Sure, there are plug-ins that let you run your code through a jupyter kernel and display the output in a second terminal pane, but that is not the same as the ability to simply highlight a bit of code, run that and have the results displayed immediately on the next line below. Having pyplot figures displayed in such a way is also not possible from what I saw, or did I miss something?
- seoaeu 4y agoThe killer feature of VS Code for me is that when you open a source file for python, or C++, or whatever it pops up a dialogue: “would you like to install the extension for this file type?”. Click that and you’ve got working IDE features for that language with none of the hassle of tracking down which is the right extension, how do I keep my plugins up to date, which dependencies do I have to install first, etc.
- hbn 4y agoIn my experience, it works up to the point where it installs the extensions, and then it does a bunch of processing and still can't figure out how to run the project or what the code means anyway. Plus I now have a slew of new extensions installed, and I'm not sure which are new looking in my list of extensions. IntelliJ has a pretty damn good track record for me, when I import a project it indexes for a minute or so, then it automatically knows the entrypoint to run the project, and has a fantastic understanding of all my code. Cmd+click any symbol and it can show me definitions, usages, implementations, etc. I can hit shift+F6 to rename a symbol, and it hits every usage perfectly (as opposed to every time I've tried to use VS Code to rename something, and it just causes me more problems than if I were to do it manually). I haven't found any other text editor or IDE that works as seamlessly in this regard, and it's a dealbreaker for my productivity.
- samstave 4y agoNothing make me more happy than programmer nerds bitching on HN
- hdivider 4y agoTo the founders and contributors of Atom: thank you. Your work made more impact than you can possibly know. Atom became my absolute #1 editor. For code, and notes of every possible kind. As an entrepreneur, it carried me through so many adventures. The death of a cofounder, great losses and victories, the madness of 2020, a close friend's betrayal, a subsequent rebirth of sorts, and on and on. And always, this trusty piece of software sat there. Ready whenever calamity struck. Thank you, folks. You created a wondrous piece of art and greatly impacted this entrepreneur's way of thinking and organization. Many have gained as a result. Will follow Zed closely!
- tough 4y agoI subscribed to WL, free me from my laggy VSCode pls
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- YetAnotherRando 4y ago
- sykp241095 4y agoAtom has been in my choices, but actually, many development metrics of atom/atom is growing down: https://ossinsight.io/analyze/atom/atom https://ossinsight.io/analyze/atom/atom
- Gentil 4y agoThis article bugs me. I would have liked them to be honest. Just say we prioritized VS Code or that handling two products of the same category is resource hungry and a waste. We all understand. But this article is making it look like it's Atom's fault. They just let it die slowly so people will be pissed but move on. It's a great tactic because "sunsetting" Atom after MS takeover would've pissed the community. This was great for PR for sure. > Atom has not had significant feature development for the past several years, though we’ve conducted maintenance and security updates during this period to ensure we’re being good stewards of the project and product. Because MS made sure it didn't get any?! > As new cloud-based tools have emerged and evolved over the years, Big player being VS Code and Codespaces? > Atom community involvement has declined significantly. Because MS made sure the community was NOT backed with actions? > we are archiving Atom to prioritize technologies that enable the future of software development. This should be the first sentence. Not last.
- OberstKrueger 4y agoAtom might be retiring, but One Dark lives on in every other editor.
- jhoelzel 4y agoDANGER: since everybody and their mom seems to be switching to VS-Code, we are going putting MS into a position where it does Microsoft things and that's dangerous.
- mytailorisrich 4y agoI've moved to VS Code for good partly because I often need to load big log files and Atom simply couldn't do that....
- ionescu77 4y agoHi, thank you for your contributions to Atom @nathansobo. I really enjoy the git/github integration and the window for staging files and writing the commit message. It is clean and easy to read. I still prefer the Atom clean interface to VSCode/JetBrains PyCharm, mostly due to this git readability.
- HouseOfBagels 4y agoGreat, they couldn’t monetize a fucking IDE. I will say without shame, I fucking hate Microsoft.
- HouseOfBagels 4y agoBan me or whatever but Bill Gates is coming after your sperm, retards.
- lozzo 4y agoJust now I was checking the trending repos in github.com (JavaScript/Today) and I got atom on no.5 and more than 50K stars
- lionkor 4y agoProjects rewritten from the ground up in $POPULAR_LANGUAGE are notorious for being more bug-free, faster, and more stable than mature, well tested and widely used software written in $OTHER_LANGUAGE (which also already has an entire community and ecosystem). It's legacy the minute we don't feel like adding any more features to it. I'm being snarky for the sake of clowning on corporations who do this. I'm sure the choice of Rust was made on the shoulders of many existing issues in atom. However, it bothers me incredibly when a product advertises itself as being built with a specific language. If that's your main selling point (it's in the headline for zed.dev), maybe you're about to build something utterly irrelevant.
- mshenfield 4y agoI used Atom for a long time after it was cool. I just loved the idea of an editor I could extend using the standard web tools and frameworks. Overall love this project, and still am a little miffed that VSCode ate their lunch. Best of luck on everything Nathan and the team do.
- theteapot 4y agoI wonder how much of this is about not wanting to have to deal with and be ultimately responsible for the security implications of a plugin system built on top of npm packages and tooling ... It's a great editor but seriously vulnerable.