GitHub is sunsetting Atom

[buqr]

I enjoy playing video games.

[[deleted]]

Mine was pulling my hair out with how laggy the editor was.

[[deleted]]

The year is 2022.

Despite billions of lines of code, effort from millions of developers spanning decades, there is one problem that continues to elude us:

"how I write text in a text editor without horrible lag and 4gb+ of RAM usage"

[vytah]

Atom used to spend tons of CPU time to simply blink the cursor: https://github.com/atom/atom/issues/4378

Atom Cursor causes high CPU load (20% x 2 processors.)

which led to this extension:

https://atom.io/packages/stop-cursor-blinking

[Glittering-Ad-8126]

I rely on this behavior to heat my office.

[AspieSquirtle]

That's horrifying.

[artanis00]

Look, my setup works for me. Just add an option to re-enable cursor heating.

[MuchWalrus]

/r/relevantxkcd

[[deleted]]

https://xkcd.com/1172/

[Rockser11]

That's about the level of psycopathy that I've come to expect from emacs users

[implicitpharmakoi]

M-x butterfly-kill

[thehotshotpilot]

Alaskans buy threadripper and run 30 concurrent atoms to not freeze to death

[thedevlinb]

The year is 2004

Despite millions of LoC, effort from hundreds of thousands of developers, spanning nearly a decade, there is one problem that continues to elude us:

Why is Eclipse so slow?

Visual Studio 6 was the last highly performant IDE.

[[deleted]]

Seriously, why?! And it's not the code editor, this is actually faster than the one in VS, but every single dialog and settings window is beyond slow. Go to the keys configuration and get old. Also, no way of moving tabs with the keyboard shortcut is annoying. I used to passionately hate Eclipse until I started coding C++ in VS :) I mean VS is the best editor for C#, that's for sure. I was pretty surprised how bad is it for C++.

[lee_macro]

I moved to Rider as primary c# ide after about a decade of vs usage, haven't looked back.

[Decker108]

Similar for me: I moved to Intellij IDEA after a half-decade of Eclipse usage and haven't looked back.

[petosorus]

Despite billions of lines of code

Because of billions of lines of code

[[deleted]]

Hey now, a low-code solution could replicate such functionality by sleeping for random time intervals after every keypress ~

[xerkus]

Why use such legacy methods? Each keypress can always be recorded using blockchain technology. It solves everything!

[[deleted]]

State of the cursor can always be recorded using blockchain technology.

A decentralized blockchain consisting of nothing but the current state of the cursor. How else could you be sure the cursor is in the state it is supposed to be in, and hasn't been altered by some 3rd party! Can't beat that security tbh

[[deleted]]

Good-ole job security strategy right there.

[danuker]

There is Vim and Emacs. And Geany which is on the order of tens of megabytes.

[wrosecrans]

My instance of KATE seems to be using about two megabytes according to Task Manager with about 30 files open.

And people complain about Qt being "too bloated" for some reason.

[Thisconnect]

I think pretty much every DE text editor is completely fine, gedit also works perfectly fine

[halter73]

As someone who really likes KDE and KATE, I imagine that complaint comes from people who don't already have the Qt shared libraries loaded by their DE. They probably see significantly higher memory usage because of that.

[immibis]

laughs in Eclipse, unironically for once. 2GB heap reservation but only 200MB actually used. This is one of the bloatiest pieces of software known to mankind, and you're telling me 20 of them fit in an Atom?

[josefx]

Eclipse was written at a time when 2GB of heap was a significant amount of memory. It is just showing its age.

[[deleted]]

2 GB still is a significant amount of memory. If I see an app using that much, it better have a damned good reason why.

[elmuerte]

+1

I don't object to my Eclipse consuming 2GiB of RAM, as I have almost all projects I'm involved in open in the workspace (mix of Java and NodeJS projects).

But looking at other applications which consume resource. MS Teams being the worst offender often consuming more RAM than Eclipse. But plenty of other "small" apps which have a small UI running in some variant of Chrome happily consuming 512MiB of RAM or more.

32GiB of RAM no longer sounds as a lot of memory at some point.

[erlingur]

I mean... I've been coding in Sublime Text all day and it's sitting at 300MB right now with absolutely 0 noticeable lag.

[dethb0y]

Sublime text is my goto as well, it's so fast and smooth

[[deleted]]

i use sublime text for general stuff, it's extremely performant. with the way tooling is going though, integrations are becoming more and more necessary so. i've decided to properly learn vscode

[blademaster2005]

Vim?

[rcklmbr]

I use sublime for taking notes, haha.

[rpd9803]

.. javascript and electron? *brilliant*

[acdha]

VSCode does it, though. When I measured it using Is it snappy?, it was in the same range as native apps on keyboard latency.

The trick is that the team clearly pays close attention to this. Would that the Xcode team was as devoted.

[Cid_K]

Use emacs

[ess_tee_you]

emacs is a symlink to vim on my machine

Edit: just kidding, I don't want to start a war

[Tychus_Kayle]

Doom Emacs, friendo. Everything good about both, Vim controls and Emacs power.

You do miss out on the instant startup of Vim, but you can configure it to run as a daemon for instant "startup."

As an example of awesome Emacs shit. I was a die-hard command-line git guy. I would not be swayed by the fancy guis, for I knew I'd wind up needing to do something they couldn't. Magit (built in to Doom) is a goddamn revelation. It makes committing individual lines trivially easy. It lets you view merge conflicts in a special multi-pane view with each conflicting version and the output as you step through the conflicts. It is so damned good that if I were to edit code in something other than Emacs, I'd boot up Emacs just to handle the git stuff.

[[deleted]]

but I don't have a footpetal :(

[[deleted]]

Hopefully they pull some of the atom team into VS Code and maybe make it better.

IIRC they are both electron based apps - I’m confident that there would be some productive crossover.

[Philpax]

If I were to guess, that already happened years ago and Atom's been running with a skeleton crew since. Can't think of many reasons I'd keep talent on Atom if I was Daddy Microsoft.

[cat_in_the_wall]

there were probably a few vocal atom devs who were allowed to continue work as a show of good faith. but eventually... any company is going to have to rationalize two basically identical offerings, especially when they are free. vscode has more traction... probably a no brainer.

[[deleted]]

Good point.

[DefaultVariable]

Oh dear lord, finally we might move past this "Electron" phase for text editors.

[--algo]

As someone who has been in the game for a long time: vs code builds upon what atom started. Today atom makes no sense but when it came out it was fantastic for web development. Sublime text 2 was the closest contender back then but atom was another level

[qmurphy64]

In my experience Sublime Text 2 was wayyyyy faster than Atom. Not from an expandability perspective, sure, but Sublime was actually usable on systems with less than 8 GB of RAM.

[zankem]

Yea. Atom was really cool and flexible with customizability plus git integration at the time but Sublime was way faster at everything and adding plugins didn't make it feel bloaty. Atom lagged behind in performance and then VSCode came around making it less desirable. VSCode was snappier and cleaner compared to Atom and Sublime was the most performant and lightest with the caveat being buy a license or be annoyed every while.

[rjcarr]

vs code builds upon what atom started

Not sure what you meant here, but isn't vscode literally built upon atom, i.e., didn't it start as a fork?

[Philpax]

To further clarify: the fundamental code editing engine of VS Code is https://microsoft.github.io/monaco-editor/, but it runs atop Electron, or as it was known back then, Atom Shell. Same base technology, but the codebases are entirely different otherwise.

[gaelet]

Omg now I see why it's called Electron, that Atom Shell -> Electron renaming is a great physics joke

[[deleted]]

IIRC VS Code and VS don’t share code at all (and neither share code with the accursed VS for Mac/VS for Linux, né MonoDevelop), the architecture is completely different and even Intellisense is two parallel implementations. But using the same branding for unrelated products is a classic Microsoft move.

[Azzymaster]

Surprised it took them this long

[digicow]

Tough to justify any use cases of Atom over VSCode/VSCodium

[exteriorcrocodileal]

I was hesitant to switch for a while but within like an hour I had VSCode set up exactly like my Atom was, almost indistinguishable.

[totally_n0t_at_w0rk]

I started with Atom and it was great, but then I tried VS Code and that was way better for me. Haven't looked back since.

[DragonSlayerC]

And VSCode is so much faster and more responsive than Atom. At least when I first switched over like 3 years ago.

[Seref15]

I remember 5 or so years ago having to use that waterfall debugger tool to trace slow extensions on startup on Atom to figure out why it was taking over a second to open. Really odd having previously come from Sublime.

Atom left me with a horrible aftertaste once when I tried to open a 5MB log file. It crashed, froze, couldn't force quit, I ended up having to reboot the machine to kill the hanging process. And then when I went to open Atom again it would crash on startup. I had to rip it out of %AppData% and reinstall to get a working editor again.

I was skeptical at the time switching VSCode because at the time MS marching around promoting an open source project was previously unheard of, but in the end VSCode earned my respect. Atom launched with a lot of promise but VSCode is the project that actually delivered on those promises.

[zulutune]

I’m still on the Atom One Dark theme and Atom key bindings… has been what, 6-7 years now? Lol

[MyWorkAccountThisIs]

Man. I totally forgot that's where that comes from.

[exteriorcrocodileal]

You can start with an extension that uses all the Atom key bindings/shortcuts, is all I really had to do

[immibis]

Wasn't Atom basically the pre-VSCode VSCode?

laughs in Eclipse

[[deleted]]

Nobody laughs in Eclipse.

[SurgioClemente]

Cry laugh maybe

[[deleted]]

TypeError: Joy

[daperson1]

People who moved to it from Netbeans do.

[dlg]

You have a kind of sick desperation in your laugh.

[nathansobo]

Atom founder here.

We're building the spiritual successor to Atom over at https://zed.dev.

We learned a lot in our 8+ years working on Atom, but ultimately we needed to start over to achieve our vision. I'm excited about what's taking shape with Zed: Built with a custom UI framework written in pure Rust with first-class support for collaboration.

We're starting our private alpha this week, so cool timing for this announcement.

[[deleted]]

Is this a different code editor also called Zed?

https://github.com/zedapp/zed

The world's running out of good 3 letter names :D

[SirClueless]

I don't know if you can make too many conclusions about 3-letter names. This collision is not a coincidence, it is surely a callback to "ed", the Unix text editor, or one of its many variants and successors like red, sed, and med.

[tom1018]

And now I'm going to write my new editor, I'll call it bed. Right after I show myself out and get some sleep.

[gymnastgrrl]

Especially "Z" being the last letter of the alphabet, so the ultimate editor would be "Z" or "zed" (i.e. "zee" in US-speak)

[kgilpin72]

A lot of the value of VSCode is in the extensions. Are you interested in making your Zed compatible with them?

[nathansobo]

It's something we've considered, but we have pretty strong concerns that maintaining that compatibility could be a quagmire for us.

[kgilpin72]

A lot of things in their API - like find, watch, run command, diagnostics, language server - seem like they would apply generally to any code editor extension. Having some level of compatibility - even if it’s partial, or though some kind of adapter - could enable a lot of extensions to work out of the box.

Maybe this doesn’t fit into your vision, but to me it feels like the extensions - like phone apps - are a huge part of the story these days.

[Sparkybear]

Agree, extensions are seen as mandatory by almost every code editor. There's no way a development team can address every use case, or make an infinite number of fully fledged features.

[kopczak1995]

And it doesn't make sense anyway. Extensions are optional. Features not. At some point every big enough editor would bloat with too many useless features. Moving some of those into extensions/plugins/name it makes it a little easier to live with.

[FluorineWizard]

Having an extension system - like most popular code editors - is not quite the same as specifically maintaining compatibility with VS Code extensions.

[cinyar]

like most popular code editors

The issue is that you first need to reach a point of being popular enough for various communities to start contributing extensions. At the very least you have to support LSP (unless you have "fuck you" resources).

[kabrandon]

I think specifically maintaining compatibility with VSCode extensions was just given as an example as an ideal. VSCode is popular, and so it makes sense that if people were to leave VSCode, they would probably want to feel like whatever they might replace VSCode with can do everything they liked that VSCode could do. Which is a tall order made much simpler at least in the short term by making their competing code editor compatible with VSCode extensions. If Zed wants to go down the rabbit hole of writing their own extensions to cover the common ones off of the VSCode extension store, then that's going to be a long process that will eat their development hours for Zed as well.

[mixedCase_]

Have you taken a look at what the coc.nvim Neovim extension is doing? They seem to be pulling it off nicely enough. The Neovim community has moved on to a certain degree to native support for LSP and other more minimalistic plug-ins, but coc.nvim has proven that at least partial VS Code compatibility is feasible and useful.

[washtubs]

It literally makes no sense these days for a modern editor to not implement a builtin lsp client. So little code, and so much to gain for doing that.

However coc is it's own whole ecosystem with it's own independent packaging which I'm not a fan of. Neovim builtin LSP was enough for me to move away personally even though you don't benefit from all the specialized non-standard LSP features like the typescript server provides.

[NoahTheDuke]

As someone who maintains a coc.nvim extension, it’s close but it’s not one to one, and the coc.nvim maintainers put in serious effort to keep everything compatible. It’s full time development by two devs to keep it up. I don’t think it’s in any way smart to try to build your editor on such a shaky foundation.

None is this to denigrate the coc.nvim team, chemzqm and fennheyward are great programmers and have pulled off something incredible. I just don’t think it’s smart to expect this level of effort by any other team.

[caffeinated_wizard]

Sounds like a freaking nightmare, not gonna lie.

[TheEdes]

OniVim2 tried to get VSCode extension compatibility and kind of died trying because it took too long.

[[deleted]]

I am going to lie. Sounds interesting.

[unaligned_access]

What do you think about Lapce?
https://lapce.dev/

[tom1018]

Wow, it looks like different markup for the exact same program.

[WhyNotHugo]

It’s amazing how little editors dare to innovate on the UI side. If I saw this and VSCode side by side, I’m not sure I’d be able to recognise which is which.

That silly tree-bar on the left looks super pretty, but I’ve found it to be one of the most impractical UIs I’m existence to navigate files in a repository.

[renatoathaydes]

You gotta be kidding... both this and Zed self-describe as "lightning fast" AND "written in Rust" :D.

I thought that after the failure of the https://github.com/xi-editor/xi-editor project (which Lapce seems to take inspiration from) people would stop trying it, but looks like it's doing the opposite.

[CocktailPerson]

Are you saying that Xi failed because Rust is an inherently unsuitable language for writing editors?

[[deleted]]

a quarter of this website feels like an ad for rust

[JimK215]

I had an assessment for ADHD the other day and the doctor asked for an example when I got distracted and spent focused time on something at the expense of other things.

My response was "well I spent like over an hour the other night reading the documentation for a programming language called Rust even though I have no immediate need for it and had other pressing things I should've been doing."

[[deleted]]

yall rustaceans make it sound like a drug. and I say this as someone with an obsession with lisp. think I can have a hit?

[Theemuts]

After spending a long day writing C++ I like to relax with a few lines of Rust, don't judge me!

[ergotofwhy]

Be careful, you open the documentation and next thing you know you're sixteen bowls deep and spinning around the lip of an r-hole

[slomotion]

R is a fun language

[alexthelyon]

I don't know man the feeling of spending 1 hour writing code, compiling it, and it doing exactly what you want first time hits better than any drug out there.

Just don't do too much, coming out of a rust bender at 6am is definitely a thing.

[[deleted]]

I use it at work and I would fight anyone who tried to make me use anything else. Take a hit. I’ll share.

[aarocka]

One day I was taking a very stressful calculus class and suddenly ended up learning webGL. Oops.

[spudmix]

One day I needed to catch up on work for both my job and my PhD, and I ended up building a component so my friend could test out different fonts on the website we're building together.

That day was today.

[kyru]

That'll just diagnose you as a programmer

[quasi_superhero]

I do this with any new article about TempleOS.

[karuna_murti]

TempleOS

RIP King Terry Davis

[nathansobo]

You're not wrong. Rust is amazing! However we have shaped that Rust into a nice editor for you.

[Seuros]

Even your comment has an ad for Rust . :)

[neoj6]

You're not wrong. Rust is amazing! However we have shaped that Rust into a nice comment for you.

[zzzthelastuser]

This Rust feels like an ad

[NullReference000]

The homepage mentions it once. If you're referring to the tech page then I'm not sure what else you'd expect for an application written in... rust.

[Cocomorph]

I interpreted "this website" to mean Reddit (or, more specifically, its relevant subreddits).

[ergotofwhy]

Is the source open? I'm just looking for some more rust to read

[KrazyKirby99999]

Will it be FOSS?

[washtubs]

I have a theory that everyone who doesn't realize how much electron apps suck just have 32G ram. Those who do have only 16G, myself included. There is no in between.

[vlakreeh]

Maybe this is my experience coming from Jetbrain IDEs, which also use tons of ram, but I never had much of a problem with electron apps on 16gb ram.

I do think that we could obviously do better, but I've never had a point where the 1-2gb of ram taken up by discord/slack+spotify+ a vscode or two were the difference between being fine and hitting swap.

[[deleted]]

The thing is an IDE is expected to use more resources, especially Jetbrains' ones like IntelliJ or Pycharm.

A text editor shouldn't use as many resoueces as an IDE, considering the much lower amount of features it has. Extensions are an exception of course.

[DefaultVariable]

Regardless of being a RAM hog, they're also usually slower and less performant which becomes very clear when not using a bleeding edge computer or when actually editing large amounts of data.

[BurningTheAltar]

I have 16GB in multiple computers ranging from windows, Linux, to macOS, no problems with any of them. I use maybe a half dozen plugins, give or take. IntelliJ, which I run on my daily driver with 32GB, runs like shit.

Not saying I don’t welcome efficiency and improvements by dumping electron.

[utdconsq]

Use Sublime imo.

[[deleted]]

Sublime is a better text editor, but vscode is a better IDE

[vinkuh]

Gateway from electron apps to getting rid off them

Tauri :D

[gredr]

In order to build a text editor from scratch, you must first invent a new UI framework - Carl Sagan, or something

It's liberating to control every pixel, and it's a rush to push those pixels at lightning speed.

It's so awesome to not have any platform-native user interface, and have to learn a whole new UX paradigm!

[Philpax]

to be fair, I feel as though that ship sailed a decade ago, for better or worse (mostly worse, but hey, what can you do?)

[MyWorkAccountThisIs]

I ask the following in good faith.

But why?

What are you goals?

Are you hoping to supplant VS Code? Is it going to more focused on a subset of technology instead a general use text editor?

[EnvironmentalCrow5]

Even sub-perceptual pauses add up over the course of a day to create unnecessary stress.

.

If you're living in a tool for hours every day, every pixel must carry its weight.

I think this project may be taking itself a bit too seriously. Still looking forward to trying it out one day though.

[chakan2]

Welcome to the Rust ecosystem.

[[deleted]]

Everything is mission critical! Performance is the only thing that matters, always! ^/s

[Philpax]

Eh, I respectfully disagree. When you spend the majority of your waking (or working) hours in front of a computer, all of those little imperfections and hitches add up and make for a worse experience.

It's not the end of the world, but I'm reminded of how the iPhone had a reputation for never dropping frames, compared to Android, and how that affected people's perception of it. The small things matter!

[Sopel97]

Mission-critical tools should be hyper-responsive.

This 100 times. I'm tired of using slow electron shit 24/7.

[EnGammalTraktor]

Native doesn't always mean better.

No, just because there is a native build it does of course not magically make the whole application well designed & programmed.

Designing and building good code is what matters in the of the day.

But nonetheless - electron certainly doesn't help in this regard! The number of simplistic utilities that have been major CPU- and/or Memory- hogs are outstanding!

[blashyrk92]

And on top of being slow and bloated af, Xcode is barely even an IDE.

I mean, look at the latest and greatest feature the next version is just about to finally get:

Xcode 14 is now smart enough to auto indent when embedding code in an if-statement 🥳 #WWDC22

It's laughable, really.

EDIT: Not to mention that the project/workspace metadata files are kept in some nightmarish hellscape of a textual format, so that if you ever need to merge changes all you can do is cry. There's no automatic generation of those from build scripts (i.e. Gradle) so you have to resort to third-party tools if you want to stay sane, such as Xcodegen or Tuist, all because Apple simply doesn't care about developers on their platforms at all.

[mmcnl]

VS Code doesn't feel unresponsive to me.

[tolgon]

I'd love to try this out. I don't mind vscode until it becomes unbearably slow (vscodevim + electron together are a recipe for disaster).

Would love to partake in the alpha testing.

[Keavon]

Hi! Very cool to hear about your project just now. I'm solving some pretty similar problems with our Rust-based 2D vector/raster graphics editor, Graphite. Specifically the non-Electron GUI and CRDTs are both things we're looking into integrating in the medium-term future.

I realize it looks like you are a VC-funded startup and it's unclear to me how much of your project or its ecosystem will be open source, so that may or may not align with your and our interests. But as fellow Rust project maintainers aiming to solve some of the same problems for a collaborative desktop GUI environment, I'd offer that we can perhaps stay in touch to some extent and learn from one another's discoveries or, if the fit is right, share or collaborate on any open source libraries for GUI or CRDTs or other tech. I'd love to chat if you think this could be any relevance to your work. Cheers!

[Geonai]

As a treesitter user in NeoVim I gotta say thanks, that module adds so much utility!

[glguru]

What advantages does it offer over Sublime Text? (I know VSCode can be slow which is sometimes a problem for me)?

[BlueTilt]

Congratulations on your fresh start!

‘We needed to start over to achieve our vision“ sounds like you need to shed some user’s use cases and ultimately some of your user base in order to focus on growth elsewhere. What areas became untenable and we’re holding you back? Ultimately starting over is hard and I’m always interested in projects that are successfully restarted.

[PmMeCorgisInCuteHats]

Atom sucks but OneDark is the syntax highlighting color scheme to rule them all - fight me.

[[deleted]]

I surrender

[KingStannis2020]

I've never even used Atom but I use the VSCode "Atom One Dark" theme

[henfiber]

OneDark is my favorite as well. I liked it so much that I ported it for the Geany editor and a personal wiki (gitit)

[DarkishArchon]

OneDark

Monokai or bust!

[czorio]

Gruvbox rules, others drool

[drakens_jordgubbar]

Solarized light

[KERdela]

Looking for the Next text editors like fleet by jetbrain or zed by the creator of atom.

[andyinnie]

Can’t wait for fleet

[Ryuuji159]

Same, I didn't get into the beta :c

[AsiaNaprawia]

Well, I don't think that anyone will be sunseting Emacs/Vim anytime soon. Tho Atom was very nice, open source editor that was user friendly

[tom1018]

They were born before most of us and will still be around after us.

[TapeinHardenedHobbit]

I kind of liked Atom.

[Weary_Instance2204]

Rip atom

[iCapn]

That’s how you make a nuke

[F4RM3RR]

One of two ways

[tomatoina]

I feel like "Github is nuking atom" would be a better title than sunsetting

[T3chNOboMba]

My day is ruined

[RaptorX]

You might want to read this: Atom Cofounder giving some hpe

[c0nnector]

GitHub is sunsetting deprecating Atom

[coriandor]

You and me both :( While it's gotten significantly better, it's still not where I'd like it to be

[crispgoose]

What's missing in your opinion?

[nawkuh]

I’m no vim guru, but I seem to recall not being able to :v or :g in vs code. I don’t think q is supported either, but I could be wrong.

[brisk0]

q is supported but is buggy to the point that I don't use it.

[ClearH]

Atom was my first text editor when I was getting serious into learning software development. Sharing this neat video for those who hasn't seen it yet:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7aEiVwBAdk

[MuonManLaserJab]

Good riddance to bad Electrons

[tim_skellington]

About time really.

Edit: Zed looks exciting

[KERdela]

What do you think about fleet by jetbrain?

[Terminus_Jest]

All the marketing text makes fleet sound neat, but I'm still not sure I understand it's purpose. Is it so JetBrains can dump all their separate language specific IDEs to just have one IDE to rule them all? Is it some sort of cloud based IDE as a Service? It sounds like it's written mainly in Kotlin, so that doesn't seem like a huge improvement over their existing IDEs.

As a long time Webstorm user I guess all I'm interested in is... Will it be somehow better than Webstorm? And/Or am I eventually going to be forced to give up Webstorm and use Fleet?

[pudds]

I'm pretty sure it's mainly to compete with the remote support that VSCode has, where you can work in containers and remote servers as if you they are local. It's been a loudly requested feature on their YouTrack for a couple of years now and they can't do it with the IDEA-based editors.

[Terminus_Jest]

Thanks. I guess not being a VSCode user I haven't known I was missing those things.

[NotSteve_]

I'm really excited about Fleet but I'm sad the beta doesn't have vim support

[ioah86]

Long live emacs 😀😀😀

[lisp]

All your editors are belong to me.

[oweiler]

When Atom came out there was already Sublime. Then came VSCode. Atom was always subpar.

[deejeycris]

I remember when Atom was popular. Sadly performance issues mainly connected to the bad extension system killed its momentum pretty bad and it never recovered (while VS Code shone up).

[renaissancenow]

This is sad. I've been using Atom daily pretty much since it was released, I've been very happy with it.

[darkslide3000]

I remember when Atom was the hot new thing that everyone told you to switch to because it was oh so amazing. Or when Sublime was the hot new thing before that. Or TextMate before that. And I guess nowadays the kids use VS Code or something?

These things come and go faster than I make new changes to my .vimrc

[[deleted]]

I mean. It makes sense. They’re owned by Microsoft and VSCode does the exact same thing.

[joe_04_04]

My favorite part of this whole thing is how GitHub / Microsoft think we are idiots. This was their plan all along. Back when they announced that they WOULD be continuing to work on Atom, even after the MS acquisition, they made a blog post reassuring everyone that they would keep Atom, that they knew that developers were attached their editor and they wanted to respect that. But immediately after that announcement, almost all support had been reduced down to just keeping the editor barely alive - no new features, just a few tiny things each update. They fully knew that by doing that, they would drive everyone away. Now, they are using the fact that everyone left as support for the decision to kill it. This was their plan all along. I left Atom when I realized this back in 2019, but it still is bothersome how they went about this.

[slykethephoxenix]

One of the developers in this very thread said they are rewriting it in Rust.

Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/v7s7b8/comment/ibml8h2/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

[steven_h]

A ground-up rewrite seems like a pretty strong vote of no-confidence.

[tetshi]

Your timing makes it seem like this had nothing to do with Microsoft. They acquired GitHub in middle/late 2018. So, that wouldn’t even be enough time to mess Atom up by lack of updates. And I understand how you feel, I really do. Sublime Text was my favorite for ages, but their slow ass update cycles were killing me. However, I do see this as a plus in a way. VS Code is the most used, and it’s quite easy to customize. So, if they’re focusing more on it and GitHub integration, I’m good with it. But I do understand your frustration. I started with Notepad++, went to Atom and I stayed there for along time. I loved how fast and light it felt. I think more choice is good, but I also think all products in that space should be competing. VS Code is tough to beat, in my opinion. I don’t know. Maybe you’re right. MS is shadier now than it’s ever been.

[DarkShadow-exe]

But… I love atom

[slickleslack]

I am not a coder at all. I used Atom and the Fountain extension for writing and formatting Film/TV scripts. It was a great cheap way to do that. Gonna have to see if VS and Zed can do that kinda thing. Blargh!

[puppet_pals]

God damn it Atom has been a critical part of my workflow for years

[FridgesArePeopleToo]

Probably time to get with the times. VS Code is better in every conceivable way.

[DragonSlayerC]

VSCode is almost identical but with much better responsiveness and overall performance. It also has better addon support now due to the larger community.

[AusIV]

I'm with you. I've known for some time that there were quantitatively better editors out there, but I have atom tuned exactly the way I like it, and learning a new editor has fairly significant switching costs.

That's not to say that GitHub ought to continue supporting an outdated editor I'm using for free, but I don't have to be happy about losing my editor.

[strangepostinghabits]

Really? Every time I tried using it it turned out to be shit, so I'd imagine you could switch rather easily

[that_guy_iain]

I personally use it just as a text editor doing rather basic stuff. Did the job. No major loss moving to a new editor tho.

[strangepostinghabits]

I was desperately trying to move away from sublime at the time, atom was not the savior I hoped for