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Sunsetting Atom

github.blog

431–440 of 880 posts

Re: Sunsetting Atom

#431

Founder of Atom here. We're building the spiritual successor to Atom over at https://zed.dev . We learned a lot with Atom and had a great time, but it always fell short of our vision. With Zed we're going to get it right. Written in Rust, custom native UI framework, engineered to be collaborative. Just starting our private alpha this week, so the timing of this announcement feels quite fitting. Here's a talk I gave l…

I think Atom was perfect, for what it's worth. I've always found it to be faster than VS Code.

Re: Sunsetting Atom

#432

Founder of Atom here. We're building the spiritual successor to Atom over at https://zed.dev . We learned a lot with Atom and had a great time, but it always fell short of our vision. With Zed we're going to get it right. Written in Rust, custom native UI framework, engineered to be collaborative. Just starting our private alpha this week, so the timing of this announcement feels quite fitting. Here's a talk I gave l…

Cool project.

Since it's not mentioned on the website, what will be your roadmap regarding security?

I feel that all IDEs have security handled as an afterthought, VSCode made some progress but it's far from being there.

I just want to be able to use a code formatting / language extension without having to worry about it subverting my whole computer in a future update.

vscode is halfway there with containerized development, but apparently they didn't intend that to be security measure and they make it clear to only run trusted extensions. I'm guessing there are ways to access host files through the bridge.

It's obvious that we still have to trust extension authors, but an IDE with the correct security sandboxing can limit the blast zone if it gets compromised (leaking a source file vs getting a rootkit installed and ending up releasing compromised updates to production)

Re: Sunsetting Atom

#433
post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm, curious how this will compare to Jetbrains’ fleet editor. Of course, they share the problem that I can’t yet use either :)

We're pure Rust and hopefully faster. But yeah, plenty of competition in the space!

I work on the linux kernel using CLion and the IDE is still fast. I would not be interested in a non-Java IDE for the performance.

Re: Sunsetting Atom

#434

“Sunsetting” an open source project seems… unfitting? Hand it off to the community, look for new maintainers, donate it to the Apache Retirement Home for Veteran Projects, sure. But saying that you’ve decided to “sunset” or “archive” it, telling users to plan for their migration, seems counter to the notion that open source software forms part of a commons - something that Github, of all companies, should understand.

It's not an open source project - it never was, it's commercial, corporate project releasing code licensed as Open Source.

Re: Sunsetting Atom

#435
post #165
post #2

It's what kickstarted Electron which eventually gave us VSCode, Slack, and lots of HN comments about memory usage. It also had the sweetest default theme of any code editor. RIP.

Electron is both an amazing enabling technology, and also an artifact of the sad state of affairs for computing platforms. One could imagine a world where strong standards have been established which would allow you to easily deploy lean native applications across a wide variety of platforms. Instead we ended up in this bizzare world where if you want to maintain a desktop GUI app, you either need a large team to sup…

Agreed. I know Electron isn't ideal, but as a Linux user, I have a pretty hard time complaining. In the pre-electron world, something like Slack for linux either wouldn't exist, or would be several versions behind other platforms and have some goofy UI that didn't match the rest of your desktop. At least we have it and it works.

Re: Sunsetting Atom

#436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. Correct me if I'm wrong, but most projects started by some form of organization end up being dead after handing them off to the community. That is, unless they make their code from the ground up to be as most readable and modular as possible. I remember many projects made by Sun Microsystems that just died when Oracle took over, even if the code is still there.

There are some things worse than death, like what MySQL experienced: being turned into a zombie designed to eat the brains and infect people who used to use it when it was truly free, all in the name of tricking people into switching to Oracle's expensive SQL server.

MySQL has been and continues to be a major success for Oracle, and in 8.0+ and beyond the feature set, correctness, and performance have improved substantially; MySQL continues to evolve and currently is in a good spot. It is even more attractive in modern times thanks to systems like Vitess, which add major features (online schema change, excellent horizontal scaling) that give alternatives a run for their money. What are you even talking about?

Re: Sunsetting Atom

#437
I will admit that I'm biased, I hate to use Microsoft products. I hate Bill Gates and I hate Microsoft.

I will not be switching to VsCode just on principal. Yes, I'm still using Github, so I guess I'm a walking contradiction.

I also understand the economics of this situation why keep Vscode and atom IDE can't co exist, i'm surprised it took so long.

This is the second software application that Microsoft has ruined, remember the incredibly awesome wunderlist?

Re: Sunsetting Atom

#438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have graphics, but I could see a mode where you `scp` a headless moon lander version of Zed up to a remote server to do remote development. VS Code has a feature like this but I hadn't used it much before switching to Zed full-time.

> VS Code has a feature like this but I hadn't used it much before switching to Zed full-time. Please check it out — being able to edit / run / debug code on a linux server using a mac desktop over ssh, and having the whole experience be as seamless as edit / run / debug locally, is a huge win — it's pretty much _the_ reason that I’m currently using VSCode 90% of the time despite being a huge JetBrains fan (to the po…

Is what VS Code does different from using an SFTP mount plugin like remote-edit on Atom?

Re: Sunsetting Atom

#439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humble question, I don't mean to sound confrontational, I ask of genuine curiosity: Why not contribute to VS Code instead? For Julia, Atom+Juno was excellent. It was the first time I could select+run on a proper IDE (I was coming from python+notebook). To me this was revolutionary. Then I discovered VS Code, so Atom+Juno stopped making sense. You seem to be a very competent developer, so why not just contribute to VS…

Our goal is to build something substantially better than VS Code.

What would you say are planned to be the primary selling points over VSCode?

Re: Sunsetting Atom

#440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I come from an era where the more fully featured your IDE, the less likely you were to truly understand what was going on under the hood. I strongly recommend everyone spend their first ~5 years coding in vim or some other basic text editor (preferably through the terminal), before leaning on an IDE to solve their problems for them. That said, VSCode is now my go-to IDE, and I haven't opened WebStorm in probably ~6 m…

There are languages, like C#, Java, and Kotlin, where the language design basically assumes an IDE is being used. It's just not practical or useful to deal with imports and their structure. Sure you can look them up on javadocs and copy/paste the import path. But at that point why not just use an ide? Why learn a skill you'll basically never use or need?

I wrote Java for multiple years in vim with no extensions installed.
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