Embrace, extend, extinguish. It's in their DNA.
Sunsetting Atom
311–320 of 880 posts
Re: Sunsetting Atom
#312It'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.
Does anyone remember brackets? I cant remember if brackets or atom came first but I remember switching from sublime to brackets to atom. Good times, I heard DHH is still using TextMate.
I worked on Brackets full time at Adobe. It came before Atom and had a bit of a different target (designers-who-code vs. developers in general). Brackets was great fun, but it too ultimately needed to be sunsetted.
Brackets was the foundation of Adobe Edge Code, which was part of Creative Cloud, so there were some bigger plans there.
Re: Sunsetting Atom
#313Founder 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…
> custom native UI framework Cool project, but this is clearly a contradiction. wxWidgets? That offers a native UI. Wherever possible it uses the UI controls from the underlying OS/system to render the interface. Looking at the project page it describes "a GPU-powered UI framework that met our needs." That's not a native UI. That's a non-native UI compiled to native code, ala something like Flutter.
Sure, cross-platform UI that's on the metal is a more accurate description.
Re: Sunsetting Atom
#314I like Atom and use it occasionally. But I use VS Code day-in and day-out. The decision makes sense. If VS Code were not exceptionally good, Atom might have had more of an opportunity. But "yet another good option" is not enough to drive investment, sustain a community, and spin an ecosystem.
Maybe I’m misremembering but didn’t VSCode begin as a fork/skin of atom?
Atom created Electron, VS Code is built on Electron
Re: Sunsetting Atom
#315I like Atom and use it occasionally. But I use VS Code day-in and day-out. The decision makes sense. If VS Code were not exceptionally good, Atom might have had more of an opportunity. But "yet another good option" is not enough to drive investment, sustain a community, and spin an ecosystem.
Atom predated VS Code and was the impetus for Electron, which VS Code uses. You may know this, but this comment makes it seem like they tried and didn't have an opportunity. They literally invented what the majority of new "desktop" apps uses to render UIs, they just couldn't compete with Microsoft (before they were bought out, after which of course Microsoft wasn't going to invest seriously in it). Edit: Fixed typo…
While Electron had a huge impact, before Atom team developed atom-shell (which became Electron), there was NodeWebkit (now nw.js). I actually shipped a Windows app written with it and Angular.js, without using Windows for development or building.
Re: Sunsetting Atom
#316Founder 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…
Should development ever wind down, you already have the advantage of being able to announce it as "Zed's dead, baby" instead of clunky corporate euphemisms.
Fabulous point. Always good to have solid contingency plans.
Re: Sunsetting Atom
#317Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> One could imagine a world where strong standards have been established w And yet this didn't happen and Electron did. The "free market" of FOSS development settled on Electron as the winner for cross-platform development.
Indeed.
Imagine a world where everything had to be deployed to the JVM and all progress depended on Sun/Oracle. Or god help us, IE/VBScript.
Re: Sunsetting Atom
#318Call me old, but I cannot look beyond vi/vim for an editor. A few years ago I had to edit a text file that was 9GB in size. It took a while to open it in vim, but once it was open, it was no different than any 2kb file. No other editor was able to even open the 9GB text file.
Re: Sunsetting Atom
#319Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> One could imagine a world where strong standards have been established w And yet this didn't happen and Electron did. The "free market" of FOSS development settled on Electron as the winner for cross-platform development.
Electron piggybacked on the established (and enforced) open standards of the web to make up for a fragmented proprietary mess of software standards.
Re: Sunsetting Atom
#320I know a lot of people love vscode but are there any people who have tried something like IDEA/WebStorm/PHPStorm/etc that then went back to vscode? I had to help a developer setup deploys to a dev server from vscode the other day and I wanted to pull my hair out. I'll admit it's at least in part due to not using vscode myself but I was a heavy Sublime Text user which is very similar to vscode when it comes to how you…
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