26 ms·

Atom was archived today

826 points by Bondi_Blue 4y ago

devhead 4y ago
RIP, fav text tool by far. Personally, jetbrains outshines most when working on actual code; sublime for small work, and bbedit for virtual copy/paste formating. edit: thanks M$ for messing up another beloved solution.
saikatsg 4y ago
Dear Atom, thanks for everything!
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
paxys 4y ago
Pour one out. While Atom itself was overtaken by a better editor, its legacy lives on in the form of "Atom Shell" aka Electron (for better or worse).
- p-e-w 4y ago
  For better, certainly. Electron has in particular been an enormous boon for Linux users, because it's so easy to make cross-platform applications now that even companies who wouldn't have bothered otherwise now have a Linux download. No way that apps like Slack would have a Linux desktop version if it wasn't for Electron.
  - skyfaller 4y ago
    Or another way to phrase it is that the experience sucks equally on all platforms, so you might as well switch to Linux.
    - rodw 4y ago
      Everyone believes Electron "sucks" because it's mainly the apps that suck that are noticeably built with Electron. It's the "when you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all" phenomenon. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VofkquwmT40&t=29s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VofkquwmT40&t=29s>
      - Semaphor 4y ago
        When almost every app sucks, I feel like it’s at least partially a platform issue. (Disclaimer: I actually have RAM to spare, in constrained environments the situation might be different) VS Code is pretty much the only larger electron app I think is very well done. Discord is pretty good, but then it starts going downhill. MS Teams is mostly responsive, bottom-of-the-barrel apps like postman feel like you are on a thin client remoting over a slow internet connection. And most electron apps sit between Teams and Postman.
        rodw 4y ago
        Many Electron apps literally are a wrapped or packaged version of some SPA-style web interface, and the UX reflects that, naturally. But - beyond the base Chromium "footprint", which to be fair isn't negligible - you absolutely _can_ build high-performance, resource-conserving (and not degrading-over-time) applications with Electron. It probably can't quite match the fully native UX or performance, but with a little care you can definitely get close enough (especially given how common actual web/browser-based apps are anyway). The trouble is Electron is already a "lazy" way to build desktop apps, so many teams probably don't give it the level of care it requires or deserves. Disclaimer of my own: I maintain a media-rich, processing-intensive and performance-sensitive Electron-based app, so I may be defensive (or arguably informed) about the performance. But I can also consistently achieve 40 to 60 FPS rendering of dynamic graphics (full-screen) and audio (multi-channel) simultaneous with non-trivial, near-real-time input signal processing, on typical hardware, across platforms, just using Electron and standard web APIs. (And I'm just some guy working solo. A larger or more capable team would probably do it better.) The rest of the app's UI/UX is noticeably not native, but that's probably (but not entirely) more the result of _my_ limitations rather than Electron's. Truly native apps are always going to work and perform at least a little bit better (in the general case) but IMO Electron (when done correctly) is at least on par with any other cross-platform framework you can point to. It's a compromise, but it doesn't _have_ to be a major one.
    - eyelidlessness 4y ago
      This is my take, a Mac user since 68k who finds very little besides hardware appealing on the platform anymore. The only reason I’m not running everything in Linux at least in a VM at this point is time to migrate my dev environment. It’s a shame IMO but yep 20Electron is apparently the year everything might as well be Linux on the desktop.
  - paxys 4y ago
    The 1% Linux users may have benefited, but it came at the expense of the other 99% on Windows & Mac who had to give up native performance and UI on all their applications.
    - samtho 4y ago
      Because I totally need native performance on an app that primarily displays text, text entry, buttons, other form controls, and maybe a random image or two.
      - satvikpendem 4y ago
        I do actually, because it's a sad day when displaying a mere paucity of UI elements isn't performant.
      - dmitriid 4y ago
        That's why to do that you need a full-blown browser that consumes enormous amounts of RAM and consumes 17% of CPU to display animated GIFs https://twitter.com/dmitriid/status/1486364312910368769?s=20&t=jzUmquoFz8zCvyK-5MJL0w https://twitter.com/dmitriid/status/1486364312910368769?s=20...
      - rodw 4y ago
        Exactly. The truth is that over that last 15+ years _most_ of the apps that people use _most_ of the time are a perfect and natural fit for the web UI/UX: text, media, hyperlinks, standard form/window controls, with relatively modest standards of performance and responsiveness, etc. Assuming developers avoid resource leaks (and to be fair some notable Electron-based apps tend to be both leaky and long-running) the main drawback of Electron seems to be the non-native look-and-feel. But that _could_ be worked around (for the most part) with some effort, and I suspect most users don't actually care that much. The web browser is still probably the most-used desktop app. The web look-and-feel is familiar and intuitive to users, even if it stands out a little from the UI of native apps. Poor resource management aside, something like Electron is probably good _enough_ for most applications.
        4y ago
- bandrami 4y ago
  > "Atom Shell" aka Electron I'm horribly embarrassed that I only just "got" that joke now
  - Semaphor 4y ago
    Oh wow, and for me, it required your comment. Luckily, I’m not easily embarrassed ;)
  - fractalf 4y ago
    Haha thanks for making me look twice at that
- samtho 4y ago
  Just an aside that had nothing to do with Atom itself, but I didn’t get into Electron while it was still called “Atom Shell” because the name was doing it a bit of a disservice. For some reason, by brain put it into a category of software more akin to bash/zsh and never questioned it again. Did anyone else experience the something similar?
azhenley 4y ago
I had a lot of fun whipping up plug-ins within minutes for Atom! It let me try out ideas very quickly.
- anyfoo 4y ago
  emacs may probably let you do this too, and better. The big problem is: You need to know emacs beforehand, which is seriously a lot, and likely bizarre to any modern person. I do, and I will likely never give it up, but I've been at it since the 90s. In my mind, emacs suffers the same problem as TeX/LaTeX. Some parts of it are very antiquated and just don't fit into the modern world anymore. They'd need an overhaul. But, that overhaul is hard to impossible to do without losing compatibility. And that compatibility is why you simply cannot replace emacs or LaTeX: There is many decades of features, packages, and whole ecosystems in there. Throwing that away would be a giant loss, people will always continue using it. Other editors can't catch up. Maybe if they survive for ~50 years, too? Just to drive home how old emacs is: At one point, the popular joke was that emacs stands for "eight megabytes and constantly swapping". Yep, 8MB large software was so bloated that it was funny and debilitating.
  - deafpolygon 4y ago
    Then the joke evolved to that it couldn't open files 8MB or larger without hanging, at one point.
    - anyfoo 4y ago
      Yeah. I did feel the original joke, though. There's a reason why emacs had this weird "unexec" bootstrap during building that would run emacs, compile all its lisp, and just dump all its memory back onto disk to be the actual executable. My first Linux PC had 8MB RAM, long long after emacs became a thing. If emacs' resident set came even close to half of that or so, "constantly swapping" would have been reality.
  - dima55 4y ago
    They (whoever they are) would be well-served to move to emacs, and stay there forever. I don't know which "antiquated" thing you're referring to, specifically, but it all works quite well. Both back in the day and today.
imbnwa 4y ago
Atom and XUL were the children of 00s pre-occupation with complete extensability in a package. Think Foobar2000 might be the last app standing.
- deafpolygon 4y ago
  It can still be revived, they're still solid platforms - just too hard for people to work with.
p-e-w 4y ago
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.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  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.
  - dylan604 4y ago
    whoa, a whole 4 years ago!! ;-) i want to make a "kids today" joke/comment, but it's more of just the pace of trends/fads not the people per se. you show up at a new job and the people make comments, of course you change. i've never used Atom, so maybe it was a better thing to change, but i've been introduced to some very ingrained workflows that just no longer made sense on so many levels. you can come in guns blazing and try to change everything now, or slowly acclimate to the workflow and then start suggesting changes/updates from inside. if you're hired as a 10x dev, then maybe guns blazing works, but if you're not, i'd suggest the latter.
    - satvikpendem 4y ago
      Somewhat unrelated, but why is it that when someone online writes an emoji with a nose, ie ;) vs ;-), I can immediately tell it's an older person? Was that something that was taught back in the day?
      - 4y ago
ComplexSystems 4y ago
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.
- DDayMace 4y ago
  Sublime is great! Ultra fast. I feel like VSCode will be as sluggish as Visual Studio eventually.
  - dopu 4y ago
    It is so noticeable how different they are in speed. I’ve worked in Sublime for many years now (and continue to for most projects) but will switch to VSCode whenever I want to hack on some Go, since the LSP stuff works so well there. I constantly find myself messing things up due to input latency.
    - MrMid 4y ago
      Have you tried LSP with gopls on Sublime 4 recently? Works great for me.
      - dopu 4y ago
        Took about 10 minutes to set up, and it's working great. Thanks!
    - lozenge 4y ago
      VS Code team did some work on typing latency in the last few months, you might want to give the Insiders version a try.
- rodw 4y ago
  > was never really quite able to get the [VS Code] interface the same way You're at least the 3rd person I've seen make that observation in this thread. I don't get how VS Code made this so hard, isn't it fundamentally built on a fork of Atom's core? The CSS and JS customization seemed more capable and accessible in Atom somehow. I've heard only good things about the Sublime Text UX for literally a decade or more, but is it "hackable" in the way that Atom and VS Code are? Emacs-like hack-ability with less esoteric scripting (and a better UX out-of-the-box) is exactly what attracted me to Atom in the first place.
emadabdulrahim 4y ago
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.
- Sad90sNerd 4y ago
  That's because it was (and is) slow compared to true compiled applications. Just because VSCode has about 1000 tortured dev's making it usable doesn't mean its not fundamentally flawed on its face using a scripting language for text editing. https://medium.com/commitlog/electron-is-cancer-b066108e6c32 https://medium.com/commitlog/electron-is-cancer-b066108e6c32 Spread the TRUTH - praise be compiled programs...
  - satvikpendem 4y ago
    Indeed. I wonder if someone will write a text editor in Flutter so that we have cross platform support but also natively compiled code.
  - fastball 4y ago
    You can compile web tech to V8 bytecode and run it in Electron – how do you feel about compiled programs now?
    - Sad90sNerd 4y ago
      THERE IS NO GOD. I only program in Ada to keep my sanity 0.0
  - herbst 4y ago
    It's been a while when I've used VS code in production but on Linux the issues with Atom have been less from the very start and VS Code simply never delivered the performance increase everyone was talking about. Maybe because I never made it an IDE but used it as editor. On Linux Atom simply was the "better" choice for a long time.
brundolf 4y ago
To add to everything else people are reminiscing about, here's Atom's very fun announcement trailer from 7 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7aEiVwBAdk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7aEiVwBAdk
- dcchambers 4y ago
  In general the marketing and branding of Atom was awesome. The retro-futuristic design worked well with the idea of bringing a text editor into the 21st century. I love that they call their docs the 'flight manual.' It will be missed.
- Sad90sNerd 4y ago
  On its announcement it made my 2014 netbook overheat and lag like an ssh terminal in south Peru. RIP
locofocos 4y ago
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.
- manbart 4y ago
  There’s already an attempt to keep it going https://pulsar-edit.dev/ https://pulsar-edit.dev/
  - krunck 4y ago
    Today they just announced V1.0 of their backend: "This Backend Server supports all documented and undocumented endpoints that were originally available on Atom, and should support all interactions with APM, PPM the Atom application, the Pulsar application, and any other unknown 3rd party services that integrated with the backend. Essentially it should look like nothing has changed." https://github.com/pulsar-edit/package-backend/releases/tag/v1.0.0 https://github.com/pulsar-edit/package-backend/releases/tag/... So that's progress.
- p-e-w 4y ago
  > 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.
- gnramires 4y ago
  If you're on Linux, I recommend Geany as an alternative (also has autosave, etc.). Also my favorite IDE at the moment.
sergiotapia 4y ago
Huge thank you to Atom for birthing VS Code! To this day Atom is the only editor I've written an extension for, because they made it so easy and accessible.
ddhhyy 4y ago
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.
- __ryan__ 4y ago
  What’s preventing this from being done in VSCode? Other than it hasn’t yet? I don’t think it ticks every box for you, but have you tried Jupyter Notebooks in VSCode[0]? [0] https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/datascience/jupyter-notebooks https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/datascience/jupyter-noteb...
  - kylebarron 4y ago
    VSCode doesn't support an API to put outputs inline in the text editor. IIRC there have been longstanding feature requests for it but it would probably have a performance hit. The closest thing is having a separate output window on the right side
    - satvikpendem 4y ago
      Is that not what Jupyter notebook support is about? I can run something and see the output below the code.
      - kylebarron 4y ago
        But with Hydrogen you could do that in a regular Python script without needing to create a notebook or think in terms of cells. There's an example of this in the Hydrogen readme: https://github.com/nteract/hydrogen#hydrogen- https://github.com/nteract/hydrogen#hydrogen-
notpushkin 4y ago
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.
dcchambers 4y ago
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. Farewell friend, you will be missed.
- rodw 4y ago
  >I far preferred the UX and design of Atom, but I eventually caved That's my experience exactly. I still haven't been able to configure VS Code to fully match the experience I want with respect to keybindings and subtle look-and-feel and functionality details. Aside from the infrequent case of hanging when opening very large files I had no real issues with Atom and could have happily kept using it. For what it's worth Pulsar (https://pulsar-edit.dev/ https://pulsar-edit.dev/) appears to be a community-maintained fork of Atom. (For that matter one of the primary Atom creators is working on https://zed.dev/ https://zed.dev/.) But personally I got tired of swimming upstream and just caved to VS Code. (I am a little tempted to go back to emacs, which was my editor of choice before Atom, but that's ends up being an enormous time-sink for me anyway.)
- danwee 4y ago
  I cannot stand VSCode UX/UI. Not sure how this is not an issue for everyone. Maybe I'm just too picky. For this kind of things I don't use VSCode: - The right side bar is "dynamic". Most of the time it's the Explorer showing the directories and files, but when I try to search for something, though, it becomes the Search sidebar. Same for all the potential sidebars (Source Control, Run and Debug, etc.) - Everything is a plugin. That means I need to carefully check who's the author of the plugin, probably check as well the source code to avoid using malware, etc. - Everything is a plugin. That means I need to craft a set of plugins in order to work in certain projects. I prefer JetBrain's approach - No floating windows. Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but I prefer that, for instance, Settings to be opened in its own window, instead of opening a new tab in my editor. Also all the Settings in VSCode are on the same "page" (sure, whenever you scroll, the left-side grouping of Settings is updated accordingly, but imho it's difficult for me to focus on the section I need to work on)
deafpolygon 4y ago
Moment of silence.
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  For the laptop fans…
  - ilyt 4y ago
    Oh, no, those won't be silent when using anything electron
    - speedgoose 4y ago
      I haven’t heard the fan of my M1 laptop since this summer, and I have multiple electron apps almost always running. Now, if I move the mouse a bit fast on my i9 laptop, it’s time for hairdryer mode. I think the silence depends more on the hardware than the software.
      - quickthrower2 4y ago
        Tech has caught up! We need more bloat, web devs!
        speedgoose 4y ago
        You will enjoy WASM.
    - satvikpendem 4y ago
      That's the joke. Now that Atom is dead, laptop fans will be silent.
      - quickthrower2 4y ago
        Only for a minute: enough time to download and install VSCode
bearon 4y ago
Make no mistake... This project, Atom. Provided the runway that others copied, then improved upon (and on and on... with plenty of funding). Atom provided the seed, excitement and vision for what is possible on this platform, and should be proud of that fact.
- oaiey 4y ago
  That is how we all will remember Atom.
- Moxdi 4y ago
  I love this take, this is software in escence, build something, influence is something every developer should strive for
- devjab 4y ago
  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.
- rajeshp1986 4y ago
  People started focussing on text editors again after Atom came out.
  - _cenw 4y ago
    I'd credit Sublime Text with that.
    - throwawayffffas 4y ago
      I second that, Sublime raised the bar and set the new standard, the only advantage VScode now has over sublime is it's open source license.
      - 4y ago
Doorstep2077 4y ago
I remember using Atom back in high school, sad to see it go. It was fun while it lasted. Now primarily using VSCode, I'm curious what the next best IDE will be.
- supreme_berry 4y ago
seba_dos1 4y ago
Took me some good few seconds to realize that it's not about the slightly better RSS - and I have used Atom-the-editor in the past.
robto 4y ago
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. [0]https://tree-sitter.github.io/tree-sitter/ https://tree-sitter.github.io/tree-sitter/
- justaregulardev 4y ago
  The emacs comparison definitely feels apt. Being able to simply use JavaScript and CSS to make changes to the editor made it feel so powerful. Maybe I just need to get around to learning elisp (or find an elisp-JavaScript binding…)
- capableweb 4y ago
  Lots of things came from Atom and it's development, so much I'd still consider it a success although the editor itself didn't live on. Tree-sitter, Electron, "text-editor as a browser app" all became popular ideas thanks to Atom. Is there more things coming from Atom that I'm missing?
Bondi_Blue 4y ago
Here's a few ways to make VSCode (or VSCodium) look and feel a little like Atom: https://medium.com/@samuells/how-i-moved-from-atom-to-vs-code-7c2a1bb9d08c https://medium.com/@samuells/how-i-moved-from-atom-to-vs-cod...
joemama3131 4y ago
Damn! It's been a while since I heard about Atom. Sad this is happening!
- jamesfinlayson 4y ago
  Yes the last I heard was people wishing GitHub would do more with it (though I think those sorts of comments meant that the writing was on the wall).
dym_sh 4y ago
cant wait for react.js to be archived
- satvikpendem 4y ago
  Why? And what's better?
  - nelsonic 4y ago
    https://kit.svelte.dev/ https://kit.svelte.dev/
    - satvikpendem 4y ago
      I don't like any framework that uses templates. I already know JS, let me use that. Also they usually work poorly with editors and TypeScript since they require custom syntax to be supported. I'll stick with JSX.
      - no_way 4y ago
        I like JSX too, it allows multiple composable components in the same file, but Sveltekit support for typescript has been amazing so far, the whole framework has been written with typescript in mind and it shows.
        satvikpendem 4y ago
        That's good to hear. I also used to use Vue before switching to React, which has a similar layout, ie HTML, styles, and script tags in a single file component. It was alright but it had some weird rules, like registering plugins, two way data binding, etc. Biggest thing though is the package support for Vue and other non-React libraries was miserable compared to React, so I switched and I definitely prefer it over any template-based framework.
    - mrweasel 4y ago
      I scrolled down and still saw and npm command. I just check out whenever I see NPM. I really should learn how to use that thing.
monetus 4y ago
Atom was the slippery slope, the shiny new thing, the tailwind that pushed thousands of us into deeper and more varied programming passions. The amity and enmity of using the thing will be spoken of with some fondness for decades, I think.
mechanical_bear 4y ago
I’m still using Atom, Postman, and PuTTY. Does that mean I’m old?
- speedgoose 4y ago
  No, these are fairly recent tools.
deleted 4y ago
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Sad90sNerd 4y ago
treelanko 4y ago
Wow! Been a while since I heard that name. Atom was the cool kids editor back when I was a teenager, surprised to see it go!
diebeforei485 4y ago
I just uninstalled the app. I'll miss it. What's the most popular replacement for a text editor with code support? VS Code? I was looking into Nova, but I'd assume an open-source editor would be updated more frequently and have more themes etc.
- headwayoldest 4y ago
  I've been living with VS Code for the last year at work and it's nice, it feels less like an Electron app than Atom did. I still use Sublime Text at home (and for pesky column edit and other tricks I know in Sublime). Nova is a nice update from Coda 2, but it lacks the plugin community to really shine unless it does everything you want today. I kept opening it up because I wanted to like it, but after a year I let my license lapse.
- supreme_berry 4y ago
pfoof 4y ago
Heh, just a month ago Adobe Brackets (another Atom clone) did the same https://github.com/adobe/brackets https://github.com/adobe/brackets
- maegul 4y ago
  Huh, I’d forgotten about this. Makes me think of Onivim 2 running out of steam. Have we just gone through an era-ending moment with text editors with VS-code coming out on top along with a few old survivors (vim, eMacs and sublime come to mind)?
EamonnMR 4y ago
I loved Atom. Before that it was, oof, Notepad++ or Bloodshed Dev C++ or Code::Blocks. I can't remember what editor I used at work in 2014...
skilled 4y ago
Atom was a success on all fronts. I'd be willing to wager than if you search for code editors for any kind of a front-end language, in the top 100 results (listicles, whatever) you'll find Atom mentioned in more than 50% of them.
Maarius 4y ago
Sad to see, Atom has been my go to editor for the last years. What would you recommend as alternative for the average Ruby / Rails developer? I am looking at Panic Nova, VSCode, Sublime Text and others.
- 9dev 4y ago
  Take a look at Jetbrains‘ RubyMine. It takes development to a new level; You won’t want to go back. It understands your code so well, it’s magical. It can rename stuff anywhere it’s referenced, for example, which is way superior to search/replace in a directory (because you won’t replace unrelated items). It has a Sequelace built in, but with support for practically any database. It can perform debugging inside the editor. It has support for all relevant tooling. It handles deployment. And more. Not related, just a fan :)
- satvikpendem 4y ago
  Definitely VSCode, with some Ruby and Rails extensions and a hefty usage of Copilot too.
dang 4y ago
Related: Atom editor is not dead, but is now Pulsar (viva OSS) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33465854 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33465854 - Nov 2022 (9 comments) To Favor Microsoft VS Code, Microsoft's GitHub Is Killing GitHub's Atom Editor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31717196 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31717196 - June 2022 (19 comments) Ask HN: Why did Atom Text Editor failed? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30733674 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30733674 - March 2022 (8 comments) Atom: Editor window startup is slow - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21740568 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21740568 - Dec 2019 (11 comments) Atom editor still phones home prior to consent dialog - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21642391 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21642391 - Nov 2019 (108 comments) Ask HN: What Happened to GitHub's Atom? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21142934 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21142934 - Oct 2019 (46 comments) Future of GitHub's Atom Editor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17258419 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17258419 - June 2018 (13 comments) Sublime vs. Atom – who will win the editor's war? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11561865 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11561865 - April 2016 (13 comments) Atom text editor 1.7.0 released - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11492203 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11492203 - April 2016 (139 comments) How to make the Atom editor transparent - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10916760 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10916760 - Jan 2016 (55 comments) Atom text editor 1.4 released - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10900355 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10900355 - Jan 2016 (198 comments) GitHub's Atom Switches from the Open Code of Conduct to the Contributor Convent - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10043990 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10043990 - Aug 2015 (57 comments) Atom Editor for Sublime Text Users - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9872614 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9872614 - July 2015 (54 comments) Atom now opens files larger than 2MB - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9690653 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9690653 - June 2015 (59 comments) Ask HN: Why was Atom (text editor) written in JavaScript? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9257087 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9257087 - March 2015 (6 comments) “Implement text editor DOM updates manually instead of via React” - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9117028 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9117028 - Feb 2015 (220 comments) Atom Editor or Sublime Text – which one to pick? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9008352 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9008352 - Feb 2015 (65 comments) Atom now using Io.js - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8991853 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8991853 - Feb 2015 (130 comments) Sublime VS. Atom: Will GitHub's Text Editor Beat the Standing Champion? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8945685 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8945685 - Jan 2015 (70 comments) Atom Shell: Cross-platform desktop application shell - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8793489 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8793489 - Dec 2014 (59 comments) Atom: Editor window startup is slow - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8393648 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8393648 - Oct 2014 (76 comments) Ask HN: Are you using Atom Editor? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7547813 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7547813 - April 2014 (16 comments) Free invites to Atom, GitHub's new text editor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7376063 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7376063 - March 2014 (170 comments) Download Atom editor without an invite - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7328592 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7328592 - March 2014 (114 comments) GitHub's new text editor leaked on Twitter - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7302941 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7302941 - Feb 2014 (249 comments) Others?
squarefoot 4y ago
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?
mshenfield 4y ago
I'm still not convinced VSCode is faster and better. My Atom setup was never slow, the only thing that wasn't instantaneous was code completion. For me, it felt like VSCode came out of nowhere and surpassed Atom for inexplicable reasons.
szastamasta 4y ago
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.
- whalesalad 4y ago
  As an editor day to day yes you are correct. Sublime is the goat as far as performance. VSCode has become my primary editor because I work remotely via SSH but nothing can touch the lightness and latency of subl. I still run it in tandem with vscode for stuff that doesn’t require a remote conn. It’s an order of magnitude quicker than VSCode.
  - europeanguy 4y ago
    > nothing can touch the lightness and latency of subl There's this editor called vim. You should have a look.
    - albrewer 4y ago
      For some people (like me), re-teaching muscle memory is a huge battle that takes years. Switching to an editor where you can't use the mouse as a crutch until you learn it is a non-starter.
      - ectopod 4y ago
        vim has both terminal and gui builds. The latter supports the mouse.
        HouseOfStairs 4y ago
kajaktum 4y ago
Can someone tell me why OSes can't do what browsers do? It seems to me that browsers are the OS of today so why not just skip the middleman and make it first class? It seems to be a layer that exists solely because the 3 competing OSes is incompatible and browsers just happen to be compatible (for how long?).
- IshKebab 4y ago
  Do you mean like ChromeOS? Electron isn't popular just because it's cross-platform, but I think that is a big reason. The only other realistic option is Qt and that's looking increasingly dated.
- nelblu 4y ago
  Not everyone prefers browsers, especially these days when they are consolidating into one engine. Especially with text editors where you will be dealing with local files, a browser based editor won't work well.
- lionkor 4y ago
  nothing these days is really stopping you from making a cross platform native gui app, like with Qt, wxWidgets or similar. The only reason you wouldnt do it is because a lack of skilled programmers, and/or time. Ive built quick little apps in Qt or wxWidgets for my wife, they use a few MB at most, they don't use any cpu unless you click on them (because naturally, theyre suspended), and the code bases are incredibly concise. It really is, as gen z would say, a skill issue. Or, said the other way around: Its simple and easy to use, and as a tradeoff you get no performance.
  - kajaktum 4y ago
    No, what I mean is that our browsers are becoming OSes. So why don't OSes become more like browsers? The way it works now is that each of my tabs have their own VM (tabs) that runs on another VM (browsers) which itself runs on another VM (OS). Why can't tabs just be processes that run directly on the OS (with all its security features). Every time I see any problems/advancements in browsers, I squint my eyes and they look exactly like an OS problems/advancements.
balls187 4y ago
Never got into Atom because Sublime Text was so perfect (I was a textmate user).
taubek 4y ago
It was a really nice editor. I used it before VSC.
rdubrock 4y ago
One dark is still my favorite theme
turing_complete 4y ago
In the future, it will be studied as one of the slowest, worst performing software products mankind has produced.
encryptluks2 4y ago
I really hope that Visual Studio Code at least ports the Markdown Preview Plus extension, which was amazing: https://github.com/atom-community/markdown-preview-plus https://github.com/atom-community/markdown-preview-plus Unfortunately, VS Code extensions are often poor quality.
robert_foss 4y ago
Seems like the Microsoft ways of embrace, extend & extinguish sre still alive and well.
- aembleton 4y ago
  What did they extend this time?
newbieuser 4y ago
goodbye my old friend
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
osbkca 4y ago
So sad :(
NetOpWibby 4y ago
About damn time
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
drummer 4y ago
Anything built on elecyron should be archived asap
gregjw 4y ago
Used to love Atom back in the day, thanks for everything team.
rvieira 4y ago
Such a shame. Atom was (is?) great. The first editor extension I wrote was for it (in Coffeescript, no less. Terrible idea in hindsight). Thanks for the good times.
Raed667 4y ago
This made me think of Brackets [0] made by Adobe. Which hasn't seen new commits in the past 4 months[1]. They seem to have spun-off a new project "Phoenix Code Editor" [2]. [0] https://brackets.io https://brackets.io [1] https://github.com/brackets-cont/brackets https://github.com/brackets-cont/brackets [2] https://github.com/phcode-dev/phoenix https://github.com/phcode-dev/phoenix
junon 4y ago
Wrote some NES map editors using Atom at one point. Was kind of a pain. I didn't use it much after that. I don't use VSCode but it just feels like this started an era of Electron-based everything that slowly consumes all of our machine's resources.
npteljes 4y ago
The thing I remember most about Atom is the privacy issues that it had - first of the text editors that sent telemetry by default. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_(text_editor)#Privacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_(text_editor)#Privacy
Hoasi 4y ago
RIP Atom. It was a great few years using it before switching back to Coda > Nova a while ago after the GitHub acquisition when it became clear development was no longer a priority. Sometimes products reach a natural end of life, but it also highlights the importance of supporting open source.
vegancap 4y ago
Shame, Atom was an absolute game changer back in the day. Pathed the way for new text editors. Fond text editing memories!
danwee 4y ago
I liked way more the UI of Atom than VSCode. I cannot stand VSCode UI.
sangeeth96 4y ago
Brackets and Atom were two of the most influential developer tools in my life. Former made me fall in love with the web and the latter allowed me to ship some of my most impactful projects whilst I was in college. I don't think I'd have managed to finish, let alone start writing them had Atom and its amazing marketplace of extensions not been present. Sure, it was slow as hell on my modest Toshiba laptop but I still loved it. And no denying how it paved way for even bigger projects like the Electron framework and Visual Studio Code. I will cherish those fond memories. Thanks a lot to all the individuals who contributed to Atom and its ecosystem—take a bow!
strzibny 4y ago
I also used Atom a fair bit but moved on to Sublime. RIP.
GTP 4y ago
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.
waitwhatt 4y ago
https://old.reddit.com/r/AMA/comments/8pc8mf/im_nat_friedman_future_ceo_of_github_ama/e0a2b2e/ https://old.reddit.com/r/AMA/comments/8pc8mf/im_nat_friedman... > I’m Nat Friedman, future CEO of GitHub. AMA. > Atom is a fantastic editor with a healthy community, adoring fans, excellent design, and a promising foray into real-time collaboration. At Microsoft, we already use every editor from Atom to VS Code to Sublime to Vim, and we want developers to use any editor they prefer with GitHub. > So we will continue to develop and support both Atom and VS Code going forward. > So, I love the years of collaboration between Microsoft and GitHub that have produced these two beloved editors, and I expect this fruitful relationship to continue! And... no you won't. You make decisions that weren't your's to make.
- asveikau 4y ago
  I was at MS more than a decade ago, and I can attest that nobody cared what editor you used and there were people using everything. Of course there were many problems at MS, but lack of religiosity about text editors was a bright point of their culture.
Narann 4y ago
I used it as a tuned Markdown editor and it was a blast. Had to switch to VSCode and depicts it's very fast, I don't like the experience. Any good Markdown editor to recommend?
- schipplock 4y ago
  Obsidian (https://obsidian.md/ https://obsidian.md/).
passwordoops 4y ago
Not a professional programmer, just a weekend Python LARPer but Atom was my first. Held on until they made the announcement of it's imminent demise. Sad to see it go
leavenotracks 4y ago
Brief comment + total noob question here: I've been using atom for several years now to main a few sites. I have always found it a pleasure to work in, but then admittedly I am probably using a small percentage of the features that it offer. What does it mean that the project (or any project) is archived? Does it mean that it no longer has maintainers? Should we stop using it because security will worsen due to lack of updates? If I should stop using it - what should I try instead (apart from Vi / Emacs / VS Code, which are already well represented in the discussion)? Thanks
- napolux 4y ago
  Are you on Windows? Notepad++ in case
  - leavenotracks 4y ago
    Mostly Debian at home - thanks for reminding me though - I do use Notepad++ at work. I believe it's available as a snap on Linux. I do enjoy the simplicity of N++.
- danyala 4y ago
  I know you've said not to discuss VS Code, but VS Code was pretty much an Atom clone at release, and it would still be a very easy switch. Many of us back then loved Atom and switched simply because VS Code was so similar but could also do a find-and-replace on a large project without crashing.
  - leavenotracks 4y ago
    Thanks for that will give VS Code a spin
francasso 4y ago
Not even at his funeral can poor Atom be at rest, so many comments torturing or ignoring it while praising the killer. I, for one, salute you dear Atom. You have been a worthy contribution to the community. Thanks you for all you have done. RIP
danyadanch 4y ago
F
Communitivity 4y ago
Rest In Peace. The Atom devs did an amazing job, but failed to get enough market share. I used Atom a lot at home, and some at work. Work jumped on VS Code as soon as VS Code came out. I think in part it was the ease of use, but I also think a major factor was that it came from Microsoft, so work immediately accepted it as better than something from people managers didn't recognize. If VS Code didn't have MS funding them and marketing them, then I think the outcome would have been much different. Maybe. The Atom devs did make some design choices that seemed weird. As one commenter noted, Coffeescript is a good example. I personally liked the extreme customizability and plugin ecosystem.
davidy123 4y ago
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.
ghuntley 4y ago
I didn’t quite understand the loss of Atom until I authored https://ghuntley.com/fracture 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.
- krunck 4y ago
  Thanks for the article. 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.
omgomgomgomg 4y ago
What can I say, I had this thing frequently crash with no warning, it did not lose data or anything, but it crashed at least 10 times a day, with 2 projects loaded into it. Apart from that, was a great tool.
ellisv 4y ago
I use Atom daily. There are many times when I need a simple, powerful text editor but not a full blown IDE. I knew this day was coming but didn’t prepare for it.
andrew_ 4y ago
Very sad. I'll continue to use it. I can't abide how vscode is run as a project by Microsoft.
- ryukoposting 4y ago
  What's wrong with how Microsoft runs the VS Code project?
  - tristan957 4y ago
    Biggest issue is the closed source licensing of many of the most popular extensions. Pylance, C# (future), Remote Extensions, etc. In addition, the VSCode marketplace is only licensed for use with the closed source distribution of Visual Studio Code, hence openvsx.org. https://ghuntley.com/fracture/ https://ghuntley.com/fracture/
  - andrew_ 4y ago
    If you spend time in their issues, or try to contribute via issues, a pattern emerges; Microsoft as a corp entity has an iron grip on the development and progress. It's open source only in that you can fork freely. UX and DX improvements are routinely shut down by MS employees, MS employees have a deep, deep sense of ownership and tend to respond defensively, repo maintainers are exclusively MS employees (I'm welcome to be wrong here, I couldn't find any that weren't), platitudes are common responses to issues for legitimate improvement, any comparison to Atom or any other editor is summarily shut down after "good faith" discussion, and development and improvements are beholden to the Microsoft development and release cycle. Now I'll admit I'm fairly cynical wrt VS Code and have a negative view of the team that runs and owns VS Code, and by extension VS Code itself as a product due to the myriad of Microsoft-esc UX and DX forced upon the user. There's a great product in there but Microsoft is a horrible steward.
kevdoran 4y ago
Presses "F" to pay respect
pohl 4y ago
I'm also sad to see it go, but I have high hopes for Lapce https://lapce.dev https://lapce.dev https://github.com/lapce/lapce https://github.com/lapce/lapce
npc12345 4y ago
koinedad 4y ago
Atom was my first editor when I started learning coding…still have the main shortcuts in muscle memory!
saraton1n 4y ago
Wow, that's so odd. I used Atom when I first started learning Java back in 2009, before switching to Eclipse and eventually IntelliJ. I don't think I ever expected that it'd be archived!
swlkr 4y ago
I used atom for years, it was such a nice UX especially compared to vscode. Unfortunately it was slow when I loaded it up with plugins. I moved on to vscode first, hated it, then back to vim, then to neovim, and now finally to helix.
khiqxj 4y ago
now i will never know what purpose this software served
ganarajpr 4y ago
If it was according to Hindu calendar you can perform the shraddha (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%9Ar%C4%81ddha https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%9Ar%C4%81ddha) today for atom .
blablabla123 4y ago
VSCode might be better feature-wise than Atom but I'd choose Atom any time of the day over VSCode if it was still maintained. Just considering CVEs popping up every now and then. Also I found the UX getting slightly less in the way. Otherwise Sublime is my go to "normal" editor but it's not really free...
nathansobo 4y ago
The former Atom team and some new friends are building a new editor over at https://zed.dev https://zed.dev. We're using our own Rust-based UI framework instead of Electron so it's really fast, and real-time collaboration is baked into the core.
2kwatts 4y ago

826 points by Bondi_Blue 4y ago

RIP, fav text tool by far. Personally, jetbrains outshines most when working on actual code; sublime for small work, and bbedit for virtual copy/paste formating. edit: thanks M$ for messing up another beloved solution.

saikatsg 4y ago

Dear Atom, thanks for everything!

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

paxys 4y ago

Pour one out. While Atom itself was overtaken by a better editor, its legacy lives on in the form of "Atom Shell" aka Electron (for better or worse).

p-e-w 4y ago
For better, certainly. Electron has in particular been an enormous boon for Linux users, because it's so easy to make cross-platform applications now that even companies who wouldn't have bothered otherwise now have a Linux download. No way that apps like Slack would have a Linux desktop version if it wasn't for Electron.
- skyfaller 4y ago
  Or another way to phrase it is that the experience sucks equally on all platforms, so you might as well switch to Linux.
  - rodw 4y ago
    Everyone believes Electron "sucks" because it's mainly the apps that suck that are noticeably built with Electron. It's the "when you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all" phenomenon. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VofkquwmT40&t=29s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VofkquwmT40&t=29s>
    - Semaphor 4y ago
      When almost every app sucks, I feel like it’s at least partially a platform issue. (Disclaimer: I actually have RAM to spare, in constrained environments the situation might be different) VS Code is pretty much the only larger electron app I think is very well done. Discord is pretty good, but then it starts going downhill. MS Teams is mostly responsive, bottom-of-the-barrel apps like postman feel like you are on a thin client remoting over a slow internet connection. And most electron apps sit between Teams and Postman.
      - rodw 4y ago
        Many Electron apps literally are a wrapped or packaged version of some SPA-style web interface, and the UX reflects that, naturally. But - beyond the base Chromium "footprint", which to be fair isn't negligible - you absolutely _can_ build high-performance, resource-conserving (and not degrading-over-time) applications with Electron. It probably can't quite match the fully native UX or performance, but with a little care you can definitely get close enough (especially given how common actual web/browser-based apps are anyway). The trouble is Electron is already a "lazy" way to build desktop apps, so many teams probably don't give it the level of care it requires or deserves. Disclaimer of my own: I maintain a media-rich, processing-intensive and performance-sensitive Electron-based app, so I may be defensive (or arguably informed) about the performance. But I can also consistently achieve 40 to 60 FPS rendering of dynamic graphics (full-screen) and audio (multi-channel) simultaneous with non-trivial, near-real-time input signal processing, on typical hardware, across platforms, just using Electron and standard web APIs. (And I'm just some guy working solo. A larger or more capable team would probably do it better.) The rest of the app's UI/UX is noticeably not native, but that's probably (but not entirely) more the result of _my_ limitations rather than Electron's. Truly native apps are always going to work and perform at least a little bit better (in the general case) but IMO Electron (when done correctly) is at least on par with any other cross-platform framework you can point to. It's a compromise, but it doesn't _have_ to be a major one.
  - eyelidlessness 4y ago
    This is my take, a Mac user since 68k who finds very little besides hardware appealing on the platform anymore. The only reason I’m not running everything in Linux at least in a VM at this point is time to migrate my dev environment. It’s a shame IMO but yep 20Electron is apparently the year everything might as well be Linux on the desktop.
- paxys 4y ago
  The 1% Linux users may have benefited, but it came at the expense of the other 99% on Windows & Mac who had to give up native performance and UI on all their applications.
  - samtho 4y ago
    Because I totally need native performance on an app that primarily displays text, text entry, buttons, other form controls, and maybe a random image or two.
    - satvikpendem 4y ago
      I do actually, because it's a sad day when displaying a mere paucity of UI elements isn't performant.
    - dmitriid 4y ago
      That's why to do that you need a full-blown browser that consumes enormous amounts of RAM and consumes 17% of CPU to display animated GIFs https://twitter.com/dmitriid/status/1486364312910368769?s=20&t=jzUmquoFz8zCvyK-5MJL0w https://twitter.com/dmitriid/status/1486364312910368769?s=20...
    - rodw 4y ago
      Exactly. The truth is that over that last 15+ years _most_ of the apps that people use _most_ of the time are a perfect and natural fit for the web UI/UX: text, media, hyperlinks, standard form/window controls, with relatively modest standards of performance and responsiveness, etc. Assuming developers avoid resource leaks (and to be fair some notable Electron-based apps tend to be both leaky and long-running) the main drawback of Electron seems to be the non-native look-and-feel. But that _could_ be worked around (for the most part) with some effort, and I suspect most users don't actually care that much. The web browser is still probably the most-used desktop app. The web look-and-feel is familiar and intuitive to users, even if it stands out a little from the UI of native apps. Poor resource management aside, something like Electron is probably good _enough_ for most applications.
      - 4y ago
bandrami 4y ago
> "Atom Shell" aka Electron I'm horribly embarrassed that I only just "got" that joke now
- Semaphor 4y ago
  Oh wow, and for me, it required your comment. Luckily, I’m not easily embarrassed ;)
- fractalf 4y ago
  Haha thanks for making me look twice at that
samtho 4y ago
Just an aside that had nothing to do with Atom itself, but I didn’t get into Electron while it was still called “Atom Shell” because the name was doing it a bit of a disservice. For some reason, by brain put it into a category of software more akin to bash/zsh and never questioned it again. Did anyone else experience the something similar?

azhenley 4y ago

I had a lot of fun whipping up plug-ins within minutes for Atom! It let me try out ideas very quickly.

anyfoo 4y ago
emacs may probably let you do this too, and better. The big problem is: You need to know emacs beforehand, which is seriously a lot, and likely bizarre to any modern person. I do, and I will likely never give it up, but I've been at it since the 90s. In my mind, emacs suffers the same problem as TeX/LaTeX. Some parts of it are very antiquated and just don't fit into the modern world anymore. They'd need an overhaul. But, that overhaul is hard to impossible to do without losing compatibility. And that compatibility is why you simply cannot replace emacs or LaTeX: There is many decades of features, packages, and whole ecosystems in there. Throwing that away would be a giant loss, people will always continue using it. Other editors can't catch up. Maybe if they survive for ~50 years, too? Just to drive home how old emacs is: At one point, the popular joke was that emacs stands for "eight megabytes and constantly swapping". Yep, 8MB large software was so bloated that it was funny and debilitating.
- deafpolygon 4y ago
  Then the joke evolved to that it couldn't open files 8MB or larger without hanging, at one point.
  - anyfoo 4y ago
    Yeah. I did feel the original joke, though. There's a reason why emacs had this weird "unexec" bootstrap during building that would run emacs, compile all its lisp, and just dump all its memory back onto disk to be the actual executable. My first Linux PC had 8MB RAM, long long after emacs became a thing. If emacs' resident set came even close to half of that or so, "constantly swapping" would have been reality.
- dima55 4y ago
  They (whoever they are) would be well-served to move to emacs, and stay there forever. I don't know which "antiquated" thing you're referring to, specifically, but it all works quite well. Both back in the day and today.

imbnwa 4y ago

Atom and XUL were the children of 00s pre-occupation with complete extensability in a package. Think Foobar2000 might be the last app standing.

deafpolygon 4y ago
It can still be revived, they're still solid platforms - just too hard for people to work with.

p-e-w 4y ago

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.

Gigachad 4y ago
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.
- dylan604 4y ago
  whoa, a whole 4 years ago!! ;-) i want to make a "kids today" joke/comment, but it's more of just the pace of trends/fads not the people per se. you show up at a new job and the people make comments, of course you change. i've never used Atom, so maybe it was a better thing to change, but i've been introduced to some very ingrained workflows that just no longer made sense on so many levels. you can come in guns blazing and try to change everything now, or slowly acclimate to the workflow and then start suggesting changes/updates from inside. if you're hired as a 10x dev, then maybe guns blazing works, but if you're not, i'd suggest the latter.
  - satvikpendem 4y ago
    Somewhat unrelated, but why is it that when someone online writes an emoji with a nose, ie ;) vs ;-), I can immediately tell it's an older person? Was that something that was taught back in the day?
    - 4y ago

ComplexSystems 4y ago

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.

DDayMace 4y ago
Sublime is great! Ultra fast. I feel like VSCode will be as sluggish as Visual Studio eventually.
- dopu 4y ago
  It is so noticeable how different they are in speed. I’ve worked in Sublime for many years now (and continue to for most projects) but will switch to VSCode whenever I want to hack on some Go, since the LSP stuff works so well there. I constantly find myself messing things up due to input latency.
  - MrMid 4y ago
    Have you tried LSP with gopls on Sublime 4 recently? Works great for me.
    - dopu 4y ago
      Took about 10 minutes to set up, and it's working great. Thanks!
  - lozenge 4y ago
    VS Code team did some work on typing latency in the last few months, you might want to give the Insiders version a try.
rodw 4y ago
> was never really quite able to get the [VS Code] interface the same way You're at least the 3rd person I've seen make that observation in this thread. I don't get how VS Code made this so hard, isn't it fundamentally built on a fork of Atom's core? The CSS and JS customization seemed more capable and accessible in Atom somehow. I've heard only good things about the Sublime Text UX for literally a decade or more, but is it "hackable" in the way that Atom and VS Code are? Emacs-like hack-ability with less esoteric scripting (and a better UX out-of-the-box) is exactly what attracted me to Atom in the first place.

emadabdulrahim 4y ago

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.

Sad90sNerd 4y ago
That's because it was (and is) slow compared to true compiled applications. Just because VSCode has about 1000 tortured dev's making it usable doesn't mean its not fundamentally flawed on its face using a scripting language for text editing. https://medium.com/commitlog/electron-is-cancer-b066108e6c32 https://medium.com/commitlog/electron-is-cancer-b066108e6c32 Spread the TRUTH - praise be compiled programs...
- satvikpendem 4y ago
  Indeed. I wonder if someone will write a text editor in Flutter so that we have cross platform support but also natively compiled code.
- fastball 4y ago
  You can compile web tech to V8 bytecode and run it in Electron – how do you feel about compiled programs now?
  - Sad90sNerd 4y ago
    THERE IS NO GOD. I only program in Ada to keep my sanity 0.0
- herbst 4y ago
  It's been a while when I've used VS code in production but on Linux the issues with Atom have been less from the very start and VS Code simply never delivered the performance increase everyone was talking about. Maybe because I never made it an IDE but used it as editor. On Linux Atom simply was the "better" choice for a long time.

brundolf 4y ago

To add to everything else people are reminiscing about, here's Atom's very fun announcement trailer from 7 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7aEiVwBAdk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7aEiVwBAdk

dcchambers 4y ago
In general the marketing and branding of Atom was awesome. The retro-futuristic design worked well with the idea of bringing a text editor into the 21st century. I love that they call their docs the 'flight manual.' It will be missed.
Sad90sNerd 4y ago
On its announcement it made my 2014 netbook overheat and lag like an ssh terminal in south Peru. RIP

locofocos 4y ago

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.

manbart 4y ago
There’s already an attempt to keep it going https://pulsar-edit.dev/ https://pulsar-edit.dev/
- krunck 4y ago
  Today they just announced V1.0 of their backend: "This Backend Server supports all documented and undocumented endpoints that were originally available on Atom, and should support all interactions with APM, PPM the Atom application, the Pulsar application, and any other unknown 3rd party services that integrated with the backend. Essentially it should look like nothing has changed." https://github.com/pulsar-edit/package-backend/releases/tag/v1.0.0 https://github.com/pulsar-edit/package-backend/releases/tag/... So that's progress.
p-e-w 4y ago
> 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.
gnramires 4y ago
If you're on Linux, I recommend Geany as an alternative (also has autosave, etc.). Also my favorite IDE at the moment.

sergiotapia 4y ago

Huge thank you to Atom for birthing VS Code! To this day Atom is the only editor I've written an extension for, because they made it so easy and accessible.

ddhhyy 4y ago

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.

__ryan__ 4y ago
What’s preventing this from being done in VSCode? Other than it hasn’t yet? I don’t think it ticks every box for you, but have you tried Jupyter Notebooks in VSCode[0]? [0] https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/datascience/jupyter-notebooks https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/datascience/jupyter-noteb...
- kylebarron 4y ago
  VSCode doesn't support an API to put outputs inline in the text editor. IIRC there have been longstanding feature requests for it but it would probably have a performance hit. The closest thing is having a separate output window on the right side
  - satvikpendem 4y ago
    Is that not what Jupyter notebook support is about? I can run something and see the output below the code.
    - kylebarron 4y ago
      But with Hydrogen you could do that in a regular Python script without needing to create a notebook or think in terms of cells. There's an example of this in the Hydrogen readme: https://github.com/nteract/hydrogen#hydrogen- https://github.com/nteract/hydrogen#hydrogen-

notpushkin 4y ago

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.

dcchambers 4y ago

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. Farewell friend, you will be missed.

rodw 4y ago
>I far preferred the UX and design of Atom, but I eventually caved That's my experience exactly. I still haven't been able to configure VS Code to fully match the experience I want with respect to keybindings and subtle look-and-feel and functionality details. Aside from the infrequent case of hanging when opening very large files I had no real issues with Atom and could have happily kept using it. For what it's worth Pulsar (https://pulsar-edit.dev/ https://pulsar-edit.dev/) appears to be a community-maintained fork of Atom. (For that matter one of the primary Atom creators is working on https://zed.dev/ https://zed.dev/.) But personally I got tired of swimming upstream and just caved to VS Code. (I am a little tempted to go back to emacs, which was my editor of choice before Atom, but that's ends up being an enormous time-sink for me anyway.)
danwee 4y ago
I cannot stand VSCode UX/UI. Not sure how this is not an issue for everyone. Maybe I'm just too picky. For this kind of things I don't use VSCode: - The right side bar is "dynamic". Most of the time it's the Explorer showing the directories and files, but when I try to search for something, though, it becomes the Search sidebar. Same for all the potential sidebars (Source Control, Run and Debug, etc.) - Everything is a plugin. That means I need to carefully check who's the author of the plugin, probably check as well the source code to avoid using malware, etc. - Everything is a plugin. That means I need to craft a set of plugins in order to work in certain projects. I prefer JetBrain's approach - No floating windows. Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but I prefer that, for instance, Settings to be opened in its own window, instead of opening a new tab in my editor. Also all the Settings in VSCode are on the same "page" (sure, whenever you scroll, the left-side grouping of Settings is updated accordingly, but imho it's difficult for me to focus on the section I need to work on)

deafpolygon 4y ago

Moment of silence.

quickthrower2 4y ago
For the laptop fans…
- ilyt 4y ago
  Oh, no, those won't be silent when using anything electron
  - speedgoose 4y ago
    I haven’t heard the fan of my M1 laptop since this summer, and I have multiple electron apps almost always running. Now, if I move the mouse a bit fast on my i9 laptop, it’s time for hairdryer mode. I think the silence depends more on the hardware than the software.
    - quickthrower2 4y ago
      Tech has caught up! We need more bloat, web devs!
      - speedgoose 4y ago
        You will enjoy WASM.
  - satvikpendem 4y ago
    That's the joke. Now that Atom is dead, laptop fans will be silent.
    - quickthrower2 4y ago
      Only for a minute: enough time to download and install VSCode

bearon 4y ago

Make no mistake... This project, Atom. Provided the runway that others copied, then improved upon (and on and on... with plenty of funding). Atom provided the seed, excitement and vision for what is possible on this platform, and should be proud of that fact.

oaiey 4y ago
That is how we all will remember Atom.
Moxdi 4y ago
I love this take, this is software in escence, build something, influence is something every developer should strive for
devjab 4y ago
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.
rajeshp1986 4y ago
People started focussing on text editors again after Atom came out.
- _cenw 4y ago
  I'd credit Sublime Text with that.
  - throwawayffffas 4y ago
    I second that, Sublime raised the bar and set the new standard, the only advantage VScode now has over sublime is it's open source license.
    - 4y ago

Doorstep2077 4y ago

I remember using Atom back in high school, sad to see it go. It was fun while it lasted. Now primarily using VSCode, I'm curious what the next best IDE will be.

supreme_berry 4y ago

seba_dos1 4y ago

Took me some good few seconds to realize that it's not about the slightly better RSS - and I have used Atom-the-editor in the past.

robto 4y ago

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. [0]https://tree-sitter.github.io/tree-sitter/ https://tree-sitter.github.io/tree-sitter/

justaregulardev 4y ago
The emacs comparison definitely feels apt. Being able to simply use JavaScript and CSS to make changes to the editor made it feel so powerful. Maybe I just need to get around to learning elisp (or find an elisp-JavaScript binding…)
capableweb 4y ago
Lots of things came from Atom and it's development, so much I'd still consider it a success although the editor itself didn't live on. Tree-sitter, Electron, "text-editor as a browser app" all became popular ideas thanks to Atom. Is there more things coming from Atom that I'm missing?

Bondi_Blue 4y ago

Here's a few ways to make VSCode (or VSCodium) look and feel a little like Atom: https://medium.com/@samuells/how-i-moved-from-atom-to-vs-code-7c2a1bb9d08c https://medium.com/@samuells/how-i-moved-from-atom-to-vs-cod...

joemama3131 4y ago

Damn! It's been a while since I heard about Atom. Sad this is happening!

jamesfinlayson 4y ago
Yes the last I heard was people wishing GitHub would do more with it (though I think those sorts of comments meant that the writing was on the wall).

dym_sh 4y ago

cant wait for react.js to be archived

satvikpendem 4y ago
Why? And what's better?
- nelsonic 4y ago
  https://kit.svelte.dev/ https://kit.svelte.dev/
  - satvikpendem 4y ago
    I don't like any framework that uses templates. I already know JS, let me use that. Also they usually work poorly with editors and TypeScript since they require custom syntax to be supported. I'll stick with JSX.
    - no_way 4y ago
      I like JSX too, it allows multiple composable components in the same file, but Sveltekit support for typescript has been amazing so far, the whole framework has been written with typescript in mind and it shows.
      - satvikpendem 4y ago
        That's good to hear. I also used to use Vue before switching to React, which has a similar layout, ie HTML, styles, and script tags in a single file component. It was alright but it had some weird rules, like registering plugins, two way data binding, etc. Biggest thing though is the package support for Vue and other non-React libraries was miserable compared to React, so I switched and I definitely prefer it over any template-based framework.
  - mrweasel 4y ago
    I scrolled down and still saw and npm command. I just check out whenever I see NPM. I really should learn how to use that thing.

monetus 4y ago

Atom was the slippery slope, the shiny new thing, the tailwind that pushed thousands of us into deeper and more varied programming passions. The amity and enmity of using the thing will be spoken of with some fondness for decades, I think.

mechanical_bear 4y ago

I’m still using Atom, Postman, and PuTTY. Does that mean I’m old?

speedgoose 4y ago
No, these are fairly recent tools.

deleted 4y ago

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deleted 4y ago

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Sad90sNerd 4y ago

treelanko 4y ago

Wow! Been a while since I heard that name. Atom was the cool kids editor back when I was a teenager, surprised to see it go!

diebeforei485 4y ago

I just uninstalled the app. I'll miss it. What's the most popular replacement for a text editor with code support? VS Code? I was looking into Nova, but I'd assume an open-source editor would be updated more frequently and have more themes etc.

headwayoldest 4y ago
I've been living with VS Code for the last year at work and it's nice, it feels less like an Electron app than Atom did. I still use Sublime Text at home (and for pesky column edit and other tricks I know in Sublime). Nova is a nice update from Coda 2, but it lacks the plugin community to really shine unless it does everything you want today. I kept opening it up because I wanted to like it, but after a year I let my license lapse.
supreme_berry 4y ago

pfoof 4y ago

Heh, just a month ago Adobe Brackets (another Atom clone) did the same https://github.com/adobe/brackets https://github.com/adobe/brackets

maegul 4y ago
Huh, I’d forgotten about this. Makes me think of Onivim 2 running out of steam. Have we just gone through an era-ending moment with text editors with VS-code coming out on top along with a few old survivors (vim, eMacs and sublime come to mind)?

EamonnMR 4y ago

I loved Atom. Before that it was, oof, Notepad++ or Bloodshed Dev C++ or Code::Blocks. I can't remember what editor I used at work in 2014...

skilled 4y ago

Atom was a success on all fronts. I'd be willing to wager than if you search for code editors for any kind of a front-end language, in the top 100 results (listicles, whatever) you'll find Atom mentioned in more than 50% of them.

Maarius 4y ago

Sad to see, Atom has been my go to editor for the last years. What would you recommend as alternative for the average Ruby / Rails developer? I am looking at Panic Nova, VSCode, Sublime Text and others.

9dev 4y ago
Take a look at Jetbrains‘ RubyMine. It takes development to a new level; You won’t want to go back. It understands your code so well, it’s magical. It can rename stuff anywhere it’s referenced, for example, which is way superior to search/replace in a directory (because you won’t replace unrelated items). It has a Sequelace built in, but with support for practically any database. It can perform debugging inside the editor. It has support for all relevant tooling. It handles deployment. And more. Not related, just a fan :)
satvikpendem 4y ago
Definitely VSCode, with some Ruby and Rails extensions and a hefty usage of Copilot too.

dang 4y ago

Related: Atom editor is not dead, but is now Pulsar (viva OSS) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33465854 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33465854 - Nov 2022 (9 comments) To Favor Microsoft VS Code, Microsoft's GitHub Is Killing GitHub's Atom Editor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31717196 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31717196 - June 2022 (19 comments) Ask HN: Why did Atom Text Editor failed? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30733674 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30733674 - March 2022 (8 comments) Atom: Editor window startup is slow - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21740568 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21740568 - Dec 2019 (11 comments) Atom editor still phones home prior to consent dialog - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21642391 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21642391 - Nov 2019 (108 comments) Ask HN: What Happened to GitHub's Atom? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21142934 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21142934 - Oct 2019 (46 comments) Future of GitHub's Atom Editor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17258419 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17258419 - June 2018 (13 comments) Sublime vs. Atom – who will win the editor's war? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11561865 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11561865 - April 2016 (13 comments) Atom text editor 1.7.0 released - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11492203 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11492203 - April 2016 (139 comments) How to make the Atom editor transparent - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10916760 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10916760 - Jan 2016 (55 comments) Atom text editor 1.4 released - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10900355 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10900355 - Jan 2016 (198 comments) GitHub's Atom Switches from the Open Code of Conduct to the Contributor Convent - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10043990 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10043990 - Aug 2015 (57 comments) Atom Editor for Sublime Text Users - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9872614 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9872614 - July 2015 (54 comments) Atom now opens files larger than 2MB - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9690653 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9690653 - June 2015 (59 comments) Ask HN: Why was Atom (text editor) written in JavaScript? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9257087 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9257087 - March 2015 (6 comments) “Implement text editor DOM updates manually instead of via React” - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9117028 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9117028 - Feb 2015 (220 comments) Atom Editor or Sublime Text – which one to pick? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9008352 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9008352 - Feb 2015 (65 comments) Atom now using Io.js - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8991853 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8991853 - Feb 2015 (130 comments) Sublime VS. Atom: Will GitHub's Text Editor Beat the Standing Champion? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8945685 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8945685 - Jan 2015 (70 comments) Atom Shell: Cross-platform desktop application shell - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8793489 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8793489 - Dec 2014 (59 comments) Atom: Editor window startup is slow - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8393648 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8393648 - Oct 2014 (76 comments) Ask HN: Are you using Atom Editor? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7547813 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7547813 - April 2014 (16 comments) Free invites to Atom, GitHub's new text editor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7376063 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7376063 - March 2014 (170 comments) Download Atom editor without an invite - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7328592 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7328592 - March 2014 (114 comments) GitHub's new text editor leaked on Twitter - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7302941 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7302941 - Feb 2014 (249 comments) Others?

squarefoot 4y ago

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?

mshenfield 4y ago

I'm still not convinced VSCode is faster and better. My Atom setup was never slow, the only thing that wasn't instantaneous was code completion. For me, it felt like VSCode came out of nowhere and surpassed Atom for inexplicable reasons.

szastamasta 4y ago

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.

whalesalad 4y ago
As an editor day to day yes you are correct. Sublime is the goat as far as performance. VSCode has become my primary editor because I work remotely via SSH but nothing can touch the lightness and latency of subl. I still run it in tandem with vscode for stuff that doesn’t require a remote conn. It’s an order of magnitude quicker than VSCode.
- europeanguy 4y ago
  > nothing can touch the lightness and latency of subl There's this editor called vim. You should have a look.
  - albrewer 4y ago
    For some people (like me), re-teaching muscle memory is a huge battle that takes years. Switching to an editor where you can't use the mouse as a crutch until you learn it is a non-starter.
    - ectopod 4y ago
      vim has both terminal and gui builds. The latter supports the mouse.
      - HouseOfStairs 4y ago

kajaktum 4y ago

Can someone tell me why OSes can't do what browsers do? It seems to me that browsers are the OS of today so why not just skip the middleman and make it first class? It seems to be a layer that exists solely because the 3 competing OSes is incompatible and browsers just happen to be compatible (for how long?).

IshKebab 4y ago
Do you mean like ChromeOS? Electron isn't popular just because it's cross-platform, but I think that is a big reason. The only other realistic option is Qt and that's looking increasingly dated.
nelblu 4y ago
Not everyone prefers browsers, especially these days when they are consolidating into one engine. Especially with text editors where you will be dealing with local files, a browser based editor won't work well.
lionkor 4y ago
nothing these days is really stopping you from making a cross platform native gui app, like with Qt, wxWidgets or similar. The only reason you wouldnt do it is because a lack of skilled programmers, and/or time. Ive built quick little apps in Qt or wxWidgets for my wife, they use a few MB at most, they don't use any cpu unless you click on them (because naturally, theyre suspended), and the code bases are incredibly concise. It really is, as gen z would say, a skill issue. Or, said the other way around: Its simple and easy to use, and as a tradeoff you get no performance.
- kajaktum 4y ago
  No, what I mean is that our browsers are becoming OSes. So why don't OSes become more like browsers? The way it works now is that each of my tabs have their own VM (tabs) that runs on another VM (browsers) which itself runs on another VM (OS). Why can't tabs just be processes that run directly on the OS (with all its security features). Every time I see any problems/advancements in browsers, I squint my eyes and they look exactly like an OS problems/advancements.

balls187 4y ago

Never got into Atom because Sublime Text was so perfect (I was a textmate user).

taubek 4y ago

It was a really nice editor. I used it before VSC.

rdubrock 4y ago

One dark is still my favorite theme

turing_complete 4y ago

In the future, it will be studied as one of the slowest, worst performing software products mankind has produced.

encryptluks2 4y ago

I really hope that Visual Studio Code at least ports the Markdown Preview Plus extension, which was amazing: https://github.com/atom-community/markdown-preview-plus https://github.com/atom-community/markdown-preview-plus Unfortunately, VS Code extensions are often poor quality.

robert_foss 4y ago

Seems like the Microsoft ways of embrace, extend & extinguish sre still alive and well.

aembleton 4y ago
What did they extend this time?

newbieuser 4y ago

goodbye my old friend

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

osbkca 4y ago

So sad :(

NetOpWibby 4y ago

About damn time

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

drummer 4y ago

Anything built on elecyron should be archived asap

gregjw 4y ago

Used to love Atom back in the day, thanks for everything team.

rvieira 4y ago

Such a shame. Atom was (is?) great. The first editor extension I wrote was for it (in Coffeescript, no less. Terrible idea in hindsight). Thanks for the good times.

Raed667 4y ago

This made me think of Brackets [0] made by Adobe. Which hasn't seen new commits in the past 4 months[1]. They seem to have spun-off a new project "Phoenix Code Editor" [2]. [0] https://brackets.io https://brackets.io [1] https://github.com/brackets-cont/brackets https://github.com/brackets-cont/brackets [2] https://github.com/phcode-dev/phoenix https://github.com/phcode-dev/phoenix

junon 4y ago

Wrote some NES map editors using Atom at one point. Was kind of a pain. I didn't use it much after that. I don't use VSCode but it just feels like this started an era of Electron-based everything that slowly consumes all of our machine's resources.

npteljes 4y ago

The thing I remember most about Atom is the privacy issues that it had - first of the text editors that sent telemetry by default. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_(text_editor)#Privacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_(text_editor)#Privacy

Hoasi 4y ago

RIP Atom. It was a great few years using it before switching back to Coda > Nova a while ago after the GitHub acquisition when it became clear development was no longer a priority. Sometimes products reach a natural end of life, but it also highlights the importance of supporting open source.

vegancap 4y ago

Shame, Atom was an absolute game changer back in the day. Pathed the way for new text editors. Fond text editing memories!

danwee 4y ago

I liked way more the UI of Atom than VSCode. I cannot stand VSCode UI.

sangeeth96 4y ago

Brackets and Atom were two of the most influential developer tools in my life. Former made me fall in love with the web and the latter allowed me to ship some of my most impactful projects whilst I was in college. I don't think I'd have managed to finish, let alone start writing them had Atom and its amazing marketplace of extensions not been present. Sure, it was slow as hell on my modest Toshiba laptop but I still loved it. And no denying how it paved way for even bigger projects like the Electron framework and Visual Studio Code. I will cherish those fond memories. Thanks a lot to all the individuals who contributed to Atom and its ecosystem—take a bow!

strzibny 4y ago

I also used Atom a fair bit but moved on to Sublime. RIP.

GTP 4y ago

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.

waitwhatt 4y ago

https://old.reddit.com/r/AMA/comments/8pc8mf/im_nat_friedman_future_ceo_of_github_ama/e0a2b2e/ https://old.reddit.com/r/AMA/comments/8pc8mf/im_nat_friedman... > I’m Nat Friedman, future CEO of GitHub. AMA. > Atom is a fantastic editor with a healthy community, adoring fans, excellent design, and a promising foray into real-time collaboration. At Microsoft, we already use every editor from Atom to VS Code to Sublime to Vim, and we want developers to use any editor they prefer with GitHub. > So we will continue to develop and support both Atom and VS Code going forward. > So, I love the years of collaboration between Microsoft and GitHub that have produced these two beloved editors, and I expect this fruitful relationship to continue! And... no you won't. You make decisions that weren't your's to make.

asveikau 4y ago
I was at MS more than a decade ago, and I can attest that nobody cared what editor you used and there were people using everything. Of course there were many problems at MS, but lack of religiosity about text editors was a bright point of their culture.

Narann 4y ago

I used it as a tuned Markdown editor and it was a blast. Had to switch to VSCode and depicts it's very fast, I don't like the experience. Any good Markdown editor to recommend?

schipplock 4y ago
Obsidian (https://obsidian.md/ https://obsidian.md/).

passwordoops 4y ago

Not a professional programmer, just a weekend Python LARPer but Atom was my first. Held on until they made the announcement of it's imminent demise. Sad to see it go

leavenotracks 4y ago

Brief comment + total noob question here: I've been using atom for several years now to main a few sites. I have always found it a pleasure to work in, but then admittedly I am probably using a small percentage of the features that it offer. What does it mean that the project (or any project) is archived? Does it mean that it no longer has maintainers? Should we stop using it because security will worsen due to lack of updates? If I should stop using it - what should I try instead (apart from Vi / Emacs / VS Code, which are already well represented in the discussion)? Thanks

napolux 4y ago
Are you on Windows? Notepad++ in case
- leavenotracks 4y ago
  Mostly Debian at home - thanks for reminding me though - I do use Notepad++ at work. I believe it's available as a snap on Linux. I do enjoy the simplicity of N++.
danyala 4y ago
I know you've said not to discuss VS Code, but VS Code was pretty much an Atom clone at release, and it would still be a very easy switch. Many of us back then loved Atom and switched simply because VS Code was so similar but could also do a find-and-replace on a large project without crashing.
- leavenotracks 4y ago
  Thanks for that will give VS Code a spin

francasso 4y ago

Not even at his funeral can poor Atom be at rest, so many comments torturing or ignoring it while praising the killer. I, for one, salute you dear Atom. You have been a worthy contribution to the community. Thanks you for all you have done. RIP

danyadanch 4y ago

Communitivity 4y ago

Rest In Peace. The Atom devs did an amazing job, but failed to get enough market share. I used Atom a lot at home, and some at work. Work jumped on VS Code as soon as VS Code came out. I think in part it was the ease of use, but I also think a major factor was that it came from Microsoft, so work immediately accepted it as better than something from people managers didn't recognize. If VS Code didn't have MS funding them and marketing them, then I think the outcome would have been much different. Maybe. The Atom devs did make some design choices that seemed weird. As one commenter noted, Coffeescript is a good example. I personally liked the extreme customizability and plugin ecosystem.

davidy123 4y ago

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.

ghuntley 4y ago

I didn’t quite understand the loss of Atom until I authored https://ghuntley.com/fracture 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.

krunck 4y ago
Thanks for the article. 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.

omgomgomgomg 4y ago

What can I say, I had this thing frequently crash with no warning, it did not lose data or anything, but it crashed at least 10 times a day, with 2 projects loaded into it. Apart from that, was a great tool.

ellisv 4y ago

I use Atom daily. There are many times when I need a simple, powerful text editor but not a full blown IDE. I knew this day was coming but didn’t prepare for it.

andrew_ 4y ago

Very sad. I'll continue to use it. I can't abide how vscode is run as a project by Microsoft.

ryukoposting 4y ago
What's wrong with how Microsoft runs the VS Code project?
- tristan957 4y ago
  Biggest issue is the closed source licensing of many of the most popular extensions. Pylance, C# (future), Remote Extensions, etc. In addition, the VSCode marketplace is only licensed for use with the closed source distribution of Visual Studio Code, hence openvsx.org. https://ghuntley.com/fracture/ https://ghuntley.com/fracture/
- andrew_ 4y ago
  If you spend time in their issues, or try to contribute via issues, a pattern emerges; Microsoft as a corp entity has an iron grip on the development and progress. It's open source only in that you can fork freely. UX and DX improvements are routinely shut down by MS employees, MS employees have a deep, deep sense of ownership and tend to respond defensively, repo maintainers are exclusively MS employees (I'm welcome to be wrong here, I couldn't find any that weren't), platitudes are common responses to issues for legitimate improvement, any comparison to Atom or any other editor is summarily shut down after "good faith" discussion, and development and improvements are beholden to the Microsoft development and release cycle. Now I'll admit I'm fairly cynical wrt VS Code and have a negative view of the team that runs and owns VS Code, and by extension VS Code itself as a product due to the myriad of Microsoft-esc UX and DX forced upon the user. There's a great product in there but Microsoft is a horrible steward.

kevdoran 4y ago

Presses "F" to pay respect

pohl 4y ago

I'm also sad to see it go, but I have high hopes for Lapce https://lapce.dev https://lapce.dev https://github.com/lapce/lapce https://github.com/lapce/lapce

npc12345 4y ago

koinedad 4y ago

Atom was my first editor when I started learning coding…still have the main shortcuts in muscle memory!

saraton1n 4y ago

Wow, that's so odd. I used Atom when I first started learning Java back in 2009, before switching to Eclipse and eventually IntelliJ. I don't think I ever expected that it'd be archived!

swlkr 4y ago

I used atom for years, it was such a nice UX especially compared to vscode. Unfortunately it was slow when I loaded it up with plugins. I moved on to vscode first, hated it, then back to vim, then to neovim, and now finally to helix.

khiqxj 4y ago

now i will never know what purpose this software served

ganarajpr 4y ago

If it was according to Hindu calendar you can perform the shraddha (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%9Ar%C4%81ddha https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%9Ar%C4%81ddha) today for atom .

blablabla123 4y ago

VSCode might be better feature-wise than Atom but I'd choose Atom any time of the day over VSCode if it was still maintained. Just considering CVEs popping up every now and then. Also I found the UX getting slightly less in the way. Otherwise Sublime is my go to "normal" editor but it's not really free...

nathansobo 4y ago

The former Atom team and some new friends are building a new editor over at https://zed.dev https://zed.dev. We're using our own Rust-based UI framework instead of Electron so it's really fast, and real-time collaboration is baked into the core.

2kwatts 4y ago