What Happened to GitHub's Atom?
When Microsoft acquired GitHub, there was speculation (and fear on my behalf) that GitHub would end up axing Atom in favor of Visual Studio Code.
Taking a look at the commit activity for Atom on github.com [1] shows that since the end of June 2019, development has basically stopped completely. Does anyone have any insight as to what is happening here? Has GitHub abandoned Atom development?
Before you angrily shout that "Visual Studio Code" is better, or "just use VS code", please recall the current situation with Google Chrome mono-culture. Say what you will about Atom, but (especially in the last twelve months) the product had become very fast and in my opinion, provided a much better user experience that VS code.
[1] https://github.com/atom/atom/graphs/commit-activity
I went from Sublime Text to Atom, then back to Sublime, as Atom was painfully slow in large projects. After a short break from the tech world, I came back to find that VS Code had taken over, and I couldn't be happier. It "just works" and offers a great experience out of the box.
It turned out the Atom is garbage, basically. It was supposed to be a better version of Sublime Text, and open source, but never got close to feature or performance parity.
I stopped using it because it is a pain. I watched the multi-line regex issue in Atom for years, and no progress was made.
VS Code didn't have multi-line regex when it launched. It does now though.
I still use Atom and it works great for me. Just because someone isn't blasting code in it constantly doesn't mean it's dead (infact I usually prefer it to constant, chaotically high levels of change). How often does rsync change and does that prevent anyone from using it?
That said if I was going to switch to something I would probably go back to sublime (which I have a license for). Microsoft is dumping a lot of money on the coding space right now and I'm really not interested in finding out why the hard way.
The thing that drives me batty with both of these Electron editors is that it is apparently not possible to pop out a child window for one file without launching another whole instance.
As somebody that grew up with Windows when MDI was all the rage, it is weird that this doesn't work.
For all the people going with "just use vscode"
at least use VSCodium as it is a community-driven, freely-licensed binary distribution of Microsoft’s editor VSCode
https://vscodium.com/
I'm sorry that everyone is telling you "just use VS code"!
I'd be curious to see the download numbers of Atom since VS Code's meteoric rise a few years ago. As an ex-atom user, I was initially hesitant to move over as I found VSCode "awkward", but many quality of life patches sold me on it and haven't been back
I personally prefer Sublime as well, and I looked into VSCode, but the VSCode monoculture also means that VSCode has the best plugins. When it comes to graphical editors, Sublime's golang and Rust extensions are so bad.
I used to write most of my codes in Atom, but it was too slow when your project gets bigger. Then I shifted to VS Code on a colleague's suggestion.
Github abandoned Atom before the the MS acquisition.
Atom was built to showcase electron, with no other goals in mind at the time.
Remember that vscode is an atom fork... afterwards MS put a lot more resources and seriousness into it though!
I never moved to Atom. Never understood the big hype about it. For people who moved, why did you?
Just use a real text editor that doesn’t embed Google Chrome just to write code. There are tons of quality ones.
I value a technically inferior alternative insofar as it provides an "out"
from a corporate entity. Sadly, using Firefox doesn't really mitigate
Google's grip on my data since I'm still searching via the big G. I don't see
the point of Atom as it's also Microsoft-bound, identical to vscode in
ethos, and as you point out, gets far fewer man-hours of development. I am an
emacs user.
At some point, either before or after the acquisition, GitHub found out about emacs and realized they were wasting their time.
It sounds like a typical Microsoft strategy, they want to dominate markets and nowadays it’s by offering free services and products and sometimes buying up the competition.
It couldn't compete technically with vscode, just as firefox can't compete technically with chrome. Users will just follow what's better.
I honestly don't get why people use Atom or even VS code for that matter. Vim and emacs come shipped with many systems, have good plugins, and are waaaay faster; not to mention no telemetry!
VS code is a better editor than atom, just like Chrome is better browser than others (imho based on number of browser downloads).
I don't know if it would make sense for the company to keep two competing(free) products. It would be great to see download statistics and see if Atom makes sense anymore for MS