Atom text editor's sunset
“A hackable editor for the 21st Century”, they said.
How it was at the beginning
In 2014-2015 ( I’ve found snapshots of atom.io website for 2014 year on waybackmachine, but Wikipedia says that it was released in 2015), Github released Atom ( I personally can’t recall when I first heard of Atom) - “A hackable editor for the 21st Century”. It quickly became very popular, because… I don’t know why, I never liked it. Anyway, it’s the fact. Atom was a loud name. None of “Best editors for…” types of articles and blog posts hadn’t mentioned Atom as a honorable member of their lists. It was built using web technologies ( that wasn’t so popular as now ), it was free, and a language for its extension was Javascript - one of the most popular languages. Because of electron, Atom was RAM expensive for a text editor ( especially in comparison to Sublime Text, Emacs, Vim or Notepad++ ), but for most users it wasn’t an issue, because Atom was in trend and beside that it had some really nice features - for free and out of the box.
Microsoft bought Github
In 2018, Microsoft acquired Github. It was obvious that Microsoft won’t support Atom because it had its own product - VSCode, which is a mainstream editor/IDE now. I think that VSCode has drained a lot of ideas and features from Atom:
- Technology (Electron)
- Extension language
- Built-in interface for working with git repositories
- Collaborative editing (In Atom , it was called “Teletype”, in VSCode, it’s the “Live Share” feature)
Over the years, VSCode was actively evolving ( not always in a good direction ) and became more and more popular across developers. Let’s see at stackoverflow developer survey results.
- 2022 - 1st place (74.48%); Atom - 12 place (9.35%)
- 2021 - 1st place (71.06%); Atom - 10 place (12.94%)
- 2020 - I have not found info about tools for this survey
- 2019 - 1st place (50.7%); Atom - 10 place (13.3%)
- 2018 - 1st place (34.9%); Atom - 9 place (18.0%)
- 2017 - 5 place (24%); Atom - 7 place (20%)
- 2016 - 13 place (7.2%); Atom - 9 place (12.5%)
- 2016 - Not presented; Atom - 5 place (2.8%)
In 2019, the next year after acquiring Github, VSCode made a huge jump - from 34 to 50%.
By the way, Wunderlist service ( a todo app) was shut down the same way - it was bought by Microsoft and later closed in favor of Microsoft todo.
Sunset
In the summer of 2022, Github published a blog post, where they announced that they’re sunsetting Atom.
Pulsar
Community has forked Atom and reincarnated it as Pulsar editor.
It’s mostly an Atom editor (that’s good), just with a new name. According to the Goals page, Pulsar’s main goal is to keep Atom and its huge package base alive and up to date. It’s a great idea.