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Sunsetting Atom

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341–350 of 880 posts

Re: Sunsetting Atom

#341

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…

Any screenshots to share?

Re: Sunsetting Atom

#342
post #79

Really begs the question what Visual Studio Code did right and what Atom did wrong.

MS poured developers at VS Code which resulted in it blowing away Atom pretty soon in terms of performance. Soon devs started migrating to VSC, plugin ecosystem started accreting, and gradually people just forgot about Atom. It is not that Atom did anything horrendously wrong. If the same dev effort had been put into it that VSC got, am pretty sure it could've become almost as good now. Maybe even better in certain r…

I don’t think that’s true. I used VSCode when it was first released and the team was just a dozen people in Switzerland. The performance was blazing.

Re: Sunsetting Atom

#343

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…

zed sounds like a great project. What are your thoughts on the existing Rust GUI frameworks? Naturally the core editor widget will need to be custom no matter what, but for the rest of the UI, have you considered using one of the Rust GUI frameworks already being developed?

Re: Sunsetting Atom

#344

Even though Atom was much "lighter" than VS Code in terms of UI, VS Code had so much more development resources thrown at it that it was ultimately much speedier than Atom. IIRC, even Brackets was faster. I see people complaining about the death of Atom, but in the past few years there just hasn't been a use case where Atom was the best choice.

Seriously, who actually uses Atom anymore? Before VSCode was a thing, I used it but then I got into Vim, Neovim, and now VSCode with the Vim plugin.

Exactly. I used Atom for a while, but then it started getting so slow. My coworker mentioned I should try VSCode, and it did everything I wanted Atom to do but faster.

Re: Sunsetting Atom

#345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, cross-platform UI that's on the metal is a more accurate description.

Did you consider using Flutter? If yes, what made you choose against it?

It's been a few years since I used Flutter, but doesn't it still require you to use the related language Dart? I liked the idea of it, and I thought the tight integration between Flutter and Dart allowed them to do some cool things. But I wasn't a huge fan of the language itself. And I think it's a lot to ask prospective extension-writers to learn a new language.

Re: Sunsetting Atom

#346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We plan to make Zed extensible via WebAssembly, but we're taking a different approach than we did with Atom. Our goal is to make Zed fast, stable, and collaborative first, extensible second. We'll be taking a more conservative approach with our APIs to ensure we can preserve our core values even as users add extensions. Our goal is for Zed to have the lightweight and snappy vibe of Sublime with the power of a more fu…

Ooh, this is interesting. It sounds like you learned a lesson here. Could you say more about what prompted the change? I once talked with a Firefox engineer who felt like an initial urge for openness left them with a lot of API surface area that locked them into a lot of design choices. Was it something like that for you as well?

Very much so. As the first Electron app we were so excited about people being able to do anything they imagined. It was cool but ended up really constraining us. This time we really want to drive our API based on the most important things people actually need to extend. We need to navigate the trade-offs more intelligently.

Re: Sunsetting Atom

#347

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…

Atom was the first editor I wrote plugins to and contributed to core. I prefer it over VSCode, as it does less, and it's easy to customize for web devs. Sad to see it go, but it's for the best :(

Re: Sunsetting Atom

#349

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…

Add a really good vim mode and I’m there.

Re: Sunsetting Atom

#350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe don't edit on a server. Have you heard of git?

There is no need to act like this. Of course I've heard of git and we use it, we just don't use local (on the computer we develop on) dev environments, we have a mix of developer-specific VMs and local physical hardware due to the nature of our business.

I’d write the SFTP stuff as a script and invoke it as needed via a VS Code task.

I have a few workflow-type things like this that I normally do via the CLI, but now I’ve added them as tasks to VS Code for convenience. I can also create the task at the project level and check in the JSON config so that teammates can use those same tasks.

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