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.<p>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.<p>Of course, the GitHub acquisition was the last straw, but to be fair Atom was already pretty dead by then.<p>While the Atom project ultimately failed, it did give us Electron and Tree-Sitter, two technologies that will certainly outlive it.
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$.<p>It was the first editor I’ve seen to choke when opening 1M file (it even had a warning that it’s a too big file - lol). There simply was not enough RAM in the world for this memory hog.<p>I’m not really sad to see it go. It was another free toy of a big company that people used not to spend 60$ on real thing made by small company and waste thousands of dollars on lost productivity and time.
Make no mistake... This project, Atom. Provided the runway that others copied, then improved upon (and on and on... with plenty of funding).<p>Atom provided the seed, excitement and vision for what is possible on this platform, and should be proud of that fact.
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).
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.<p>[0]<a href="https://tree-sitter.github.io/tree-sitter/" rel="nofollow">https://tree-sitter.github.io/tree-sitter/</a>
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.<p>Farewell friend, you will be missed.
To add to everything else people are reminiscing about, here's Atom's very fun announcement trailer from 7 years ago: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7aEiVwBAdk">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7aEiVwBAdk</a>
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.<p>Multiple concurrent kernels, the ability to connect any .py file to any running kernel, sharing variables and imports across multple .py files, inline matplotlib output that persists on-screen and inline with the code even when running other code cells... the list goes on. I'm really fond of this setup. I use it daily--it's an essential component of my day job--and intend to do so for the foreseeable future. VS Code does seem to be the way of the future but there have just been too many friction points for me to leave Atom.
I'm a happy user of Atom as my daily driver for basic note taking and scratch pads. Even though it's being sunset, I look forward to using it for years to come.<p>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.
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.<p>I also tried VSCode, but was never really quite able to get into the interface the same way. For a while I tried customizing the interface with plugins like CustomizeUI, but Microsoft broke those recently, and I've been happier with Sublime.
I was a noob when Atom was new and I remember thinking it was unusably slow. Took a minute to realize that I had loaded my entire computer's directory, not just the project I was working on.
By looking at the other comments, I see the seemingly unavoidable discussion over which is the best text editor/IDE. My opinion on the matter is the following: <i>the best</i> text editor/IDE(/many other tools) doesn't exist. What exists is the best tool <i>for you</i>. 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 <i>for me</i>, I forget about the last two words and it becomes <i>the best tool</i>. Each one of us is the most productive when it's using its own favorite tool, but it doesn't mean that if I convince someone else to switch to my preferred tool, then that person will be more productive. Each one of us has to see for him/herself which tool suits him/her best. It is fine if we suggest other people to try our tools for some reasons, but it makes little to no sense to argue that our favorite tool is objectively the best one.
I tried Atom a few years ago and was impressed by the features, but it was such a resource hog that I ditched it immediately. As someone with web development experience amounting to zero, it seems strange to me that nobody is asking about the feasibility of porting it to less resource hungry Electron alternatives (Tauri? Neutralino? ...?). Tauri has made the front page lately and everyone praises it for being a much lighter alternative to Electron, so using it would seem the natural step, or am I missing something?
I'm not a huge fan of Microsoft, but they hired Erich Gamma and that was a brilliant move. He is an engineer I have tremendous respect for, with obvious vision. He was key in VisualAge for Java, which was a Java IDE, written in Smalltalk, which supported refactoring down to the smallest level (including file operations). He was obviously a key designer for VSCode. From its earliest days, I could see how they were sketching in facilities for advanced features in an open way, and it has maintained its development well.
I didn’t quite understand the loss of Atom until I authored <a href="https://ghuntley.com/fracture" rel="nofollow">https://ghuntley.com/fracture</a> about VSCode. Now I deeply care about ensuring programming languages do not outsource their LSP development to Microsoft and enable them to capture the ecosystem as is happening in python.
I've moved to VS Code (or rather Codium, the OSS build of Code) long time ago, but still keep the Atom keybindings and icons (both available in the extension gallery). RIP.
I'm also sad to see it go, but I have high hopes for Lapce<p><a href="https://lapce.dev" rel="nofollow">https://lapce.dev</a><p><a href="https://github.com/lapce/lapce">https://github.com/lapce/lapce</a>
This made me think of Brackets [0] made by Adobe. Which hasn't seen new commits in the past 4 months[1].<p>They seem to have spun-off a new project "Phoenix Code Editor" [2].<p>[0] <a href="https://brackets.io" rel="nofollow">https://brackets.io</a><p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/brackets-cont/brackets">https://github.com/brackets-cont/brackets</a><p>[2] <a href="https://github.com/phcode-dev/phoenix">https://github.com/phcode-dev/phoenix</a>
<a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/AMA/comments/8pc8mf/im_nat_friedman_future_ceo_of_github_ama/e0a2b2e/" rel="nofollow">https://old.reddit.com/r/AMA/comments/8pc8mf/im_nat_friedman...</a><p>> I’m Nat Friedman, future CEO of GitHub. AMA.<p>> 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.<p>> So we will continue to develop and support both Atom and VS Code going forward.<p>> 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!<p>And... no you won't. You make decisions that weren't your's to make.
The former Atom team and some new friends are building a new editor over at <a href="https://zed.dev" rel="nofollow">https://zed.dev</a>. 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.
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?).
The thing I remember most about Atom is the privacy issues that it had - first of the text editors that sent telemetry by default.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_(text_editor)#Privacy" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_(text_editor)#Privacy</a>
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.<p>Sometimes products reach a natural end of life, but it also highlights the importance of supporting open source.
Here's a few ways to make VSCode (or VSCodium) look and feel a little like Atom:<p><a href="https://medium.com/@samuells/how-i-moved-from-atom-to-vs-code-7c2a1bb9d08c" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/@samuells/how-i-moved-from-atom-to-vs-cod...</a>
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.<p>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.
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.<p>I will cherish those fond memories. Thanks a lot to all the individuals who contributed to Atom and its ecosystem—take a bow!
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.
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.
I used atom for years, it was such a nice UX especially compared to vscode.<p>Unfortunately it was slow when I loaded it up with plugins.<p>I moved on to vscode first, hated it, then back to vim, then to neovim, and now finally to helix.
Brief comment + total noob question here:<p>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.<p>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?<p>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)?<p>Thanks
Heh, just a month ago Adobe Brackets (another Atom clone) did the same <a href="https://github.com/adobe/brackets">https://github.com/adobe/brackets</a>
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.
Huge thank you to Atom for birthing VS Code!<p>To this day Atom is the only editor I've written an extension for, because they made it so easy and accessible.
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...
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.<p>edit: thanks M$ for messing up another beloved solution.
I really hope that Visual Studio Code at least ports the Markdown Preview Plus extension, which was amazing:<p><a href="https://github.com/atom-community/markdown-preview-plus">https://github.com/atom-community/markdown-preview-plus</a><p>Unfortunately, VS Code extensions are often poor quality.
Related:<p><i>Atom editor is not dead, but is now Pulsar (viva OSS)</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33465854" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33465854</a> - Nov 2022 (9 comments)<p><i>To Favor Microsoft VS Code, Microsoft's GitHub Is Killing GitHub's Atom Editor</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31717196" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31717196</a> - June 2022 (19 comments)<p><i>Ask HN: Why did Atom Text Editor failed?</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30733674" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30733674</a> - March 2022 (8 comments)<p><i>Atom: Editor window startup is slow</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21740568" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21740568</a> - Dec 2019 (11 comments)<p><i>Atom editor still phones home prior to consent dialog</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21642391" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21642391</a> - Nov 2019 (108 comments)<p><i>Ask HN: What Happened to GitHub's Atom?</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21142934" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21142934</a> - Oct 2019 (46 comments)<p><i>Future of GitHub's Atom Editor</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17258419" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17258419</a> - June 2018 (13 comments)<p><i>Sublime vs. Atom – who will win the editor's war?</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11561865" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11561865</a> - April 2016 (13 comments)<p><i>Atom text editor 1.7.0 released</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11492203" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11492203</a> - April 2016 (139 comments)<p><i>How to make the Atom editor transparent</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10916760" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10916760</a> - Jan 2016 (55 comments)<p><i>Atom text editor 1.4 released</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10900355" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10900355</a> - Jan 2016 (198 comments)<p><i>GitHub's Atom Switches from the Open Code of Conduct to the Contributor Convent</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10043990" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10043990</a> - Aug 2015 (57 comments)<p><i>Atom Editor for Sublime Text Users</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9872614" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9872614</a> - July 2015 (54 comments)<p><i>Atom now opens files larger than 2MB</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9690653" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9690653</a> - June 2015 (59 comments)<p><i>Ask HN: Why was Atom (text editor) written in JavaScript?</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9257087" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9257087</a> - March 2015 (6 comments)<p><i>“Implement text editor DOM updates manually instead of via React”</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9117028" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9117028</a> - Feb 2015 (220 comments)<p><i>Atom Editor or Sublime Text – which one to pick?</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9008352" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9008352</a> - Feb 2015 (65 comments)<p><i>Atom now using Io.js</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8991853" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8991853</a> - Feb 2015 (130 comments)<p><i>Sublime VS. Atom: Will GitHub's Text Editor Beat the Standing Champion?</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8945685" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8945685</a> - Jan 2015 (70 comments)<p><i>Atom Shell: Cross-platform desktop application shell</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8793489" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8793489</a> - Dec 2014 (59 comments)<p><i>Atom: Editor window startup is slow</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8393648" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8393648</a> - Oct 2014 (76 comments)<p><i>Ask HN: Are you using Atom Editor?</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7547813" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7547813</a> - April 2014 (16 comments)<p><i>Free invites to Atom, GitHub's new text editor</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7376063" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7376063</a> - March 2014 (170 comments)<p><i>Download Atom editor without an invite</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7328592" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7328592</a> - March 2014 (114 comments)<p><i>GitHub's new text editor leaked on Twitter</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7302941" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7302941</a> - Feb 2014 (249 comments)<p>Others?
If it was according to Hindu calendar you can perform the shraddha (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%9Ar%C4%81ddha" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%9Ar%C4%81ddha</a>) today for atom .
Wrote some NES map editors using Atom at one point. Was kind of a pain. I didn't use it much after that.<p>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.
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.
I just uninstalled the app. I'll miss it.<p>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.
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.
Not even at his funeral can poor Atom be at rest, so many comments torturing or ignoring it while praising the killer.<p>I, for one, salute you dear Atom. You have been a worthy contribution to the community. Thanks you for all you have done.<p>RIP
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!
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.<p>Apart from that, was a great tool.
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.<p>Any good Markdown editor to recommend?
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.<p>Sad to see it go
I use Atom daily. There are many times when I need a simple, powerful text editor but not a full blown IDE.<p>I knew this day was coming but didn’t prepare for it.
Such a shame.<p>Atom was (is?) great. The first editor extension I wrote was for it (in Coffeescript, no less. Terrible idea in hindsight).<p>Thanks for the good times.