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Sunsetting Atom

github.blog

381–390 of 880 posts

Re: Sunsetting Atom

#381

I think the writing was on the wall for a long time. Since it is only happening in 6 months, I wonder if the community will try to transition/fork it. Do you know if there is still enough interest?

I don't think so, even if I use Atom as my primary editor there's a bunch of other great open source ones and even some non-OSS, and migration is trivial, so there's likely no need.

Re: Sunsetting Atom

#382

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…

Amazing! Sounds like a great foundation! Curious about UI execution in Rust

We plan to start blogging about this pretty soon.

Re: Sunsetting Atom

#383

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…

Hmm, curious how this will compare to Jetbrains’ fleet editor.

Of course, they share the problem that I can’t yet use either :)

Re: Sunsetting Atom

#384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're deploying via VS Code? If so, that's a weird pattern. I've been using VS Code for years to write JavaScript/TypeScript, Python, Go, Terraform, and CSS. My settings file is 60 lines, 42 of which are "for file extension X use autoformatter Y" configs. When I first switched to VS Code I was frustrated trying to make it conform to random expectations I had. Eventually I learned that it's easier to embrace VS Code'…

Yeah almost an anti pattern.

No almost about it, it's an anti-pattern and I personally would consider it a "worst practice". If you're deploying from an IDE it means you lack visibility, feedback, and automation fundamentals. What I do like is developer ownership and being able to see a change all the way through to production but having a system of record without manual intervention is always preferred.

Re: Sunsetting Atom

#385

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…

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.

Re: Sunsetting Atom

#386

“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.

The code isn't being sunsetted, and anyone who wants to take it and keep working on it is free to do so. But winding down the project is still a major event, and I think that it is appropriate to call that sunsetting. The existing project organization will go away. The team will presumably dissolve, with any people being paid to work on it going on to other things. I've seen this happen enough times to know that it i…

There had been at least one attempt to fork and revive Atom since, as the post mentions, Atom hasn’t seen feature additions in many years.

The problem, as I understand it, is that Atom’s relationship with electron makes it very difficult to work on the core of the editor. Namely, while VS Code is downstream from Electron, and can get feature benefits just by updating their Electron version, Atom is upstream from Electron, and new Electron features needed to be more manually integrated.

Re: Sunsetting Atom

#387
post #383

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…

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!

Re: Sunsetting Atom

#388

Even after they promised they'll keep developing it despite of the acquisition: https://www.reddit.com/r/AMA/comments/8pc8mf/im_nat_friedman... Not surprising. When this stuff happens is always lies because you plan for people to forget about stuff as times goes by, which usually happens.

They continued for 4+ years. That's not lying, that's time passing.

Re: Sunsetting Atom

#389

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 chance of collaboration with https://lapce.dev/ ?

Re: Sunsetting Atom

#390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Atom practically invented the kind of extensions that VSCode had, and even several years into VSCode's life Atom far outstripped it in Extensions. Perf became the biggest problem however, which VSCode took over.

That's not my recollection, at least. I was more of an Atom fan than a Code fan in the middle of the last decade, mostly due to aesthetics, as shallow as that probably sounds -- but it felt like Code surpassed Atom in terms of community activity head-spinningly fast, like in its second year. I also think the sibling comment is right; TextMate never had the huge collection of plugins later editors did, but you can ver…

Same, but if you're staring at an editor all day it has to look good. Atom did and still looks way better than VScode. VScode looks like a Microsoft product.

You can also customize Atom easier than VsCode. Why even build on web technologies if you don't let your users change things. For instance you have to have an extension to custom load CSS and it's kind of a hassle. Heck even Sublime has an easier interface to change the text editor in real time. You don't really need to do much as it already looks good though.

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