Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Sunsetting Atom

github.blog

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

741–750 of 880 posts

Re: Sunsetting Atom

#741

Post by ahkurtz »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #202
civilized wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GitHub is owned by Microsoft, the company that invented "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish". We should be counting down the days till they sunset VS Code to focus on VS Code "Pro".

I know that perception of Microsoft will never go away in the open source community, and maybe it shouldn’t, although I’m not convinced Microsoft of 2022 is particularly worse (or particularly better) than most other companies operating simultaneously in open source and proprietary spaces. The context of “embrace, extend and extinguish” has kind of been diffused over the years, though; it never meant “buy a product a…

No, they didn't buy GitHub to shut Atom down. But they did create VSCode to cut off GitHub's growing expansion of their business through Atom. They could have just extended Atom with Azure plugins etc, but instead they essentially forked it and poured tons of resources and hundreds of developers into it. That effort helped suppress the valuation of GitHub, so that they could buy it for cheaper (or at all?).

The revenue generating upsell for VSCode is already here and it IS GitHub Codespaces. They are going to add features you can't live without based off code synthesis (sky's really the limit here) and gate those off saying it can't run locally because it's too resource intensive. They'll charge you (or your company) by the second for all usage.

It would be much harder or impossible for them to do this if Atom and an independent GitHub had been further entrenching in this space for the last decade.

Many of the biggest developer tooling projects big corp are building now existentially threaten smaller developers and apps, by design.

Don't give Microsoft a pass here.

Re: Sunsetting Atom

#742

Post by theonething »

enahs-sf wrote: post #419
frostwarrior wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Emacs, vim Unlike VSCode, Emacs and Vim have a learning curve. And turning them into full blown IDEs makes their usage even more complex. > Sublime Sadly, Sublime is sort of dead. > TextMate TextMate: Text editor for macOS

At risk of dating myself, I am still rocking with sublime text and vim.

I'm still rocking with just vim.

Re: Sunsetting Atom

#743

Post by theonething »

BeetleB wrote: post #636
can16358p wrote: post #575

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I don't know about the plugin ecosystem of Vim/Emacs, I definitely agree with the learning curve part. In Emacs/Vim I can't even escape the program if I don't know a keyboard shortcut. In Vscode even if I forgot Cmd+W/Q I can simply click the close button. Not to mention that all the shortcuts are just globally used shortcuts in all the other software. While I respect praising by the community of Vim/Emacs, I r…

> In Emacs/Vim I can't even escape the program if I don't know a keyboard shortcut. Or, you know, you could just click on the File menu and click on Quit.

You've never run them in a terminal?

Re: Sunsetting Atom

#744

Post by theonething »

bstar77 wrote: post #640
aniforprez wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO the killer thing that VSCode has over all the other editors is the wealth of extensions and a certain degree of simplicity. What are your plans for Zed in terms of extensibility and are you aligning more towards making something beefy and full-featured like the IntelliJ offerings or something more "lightweight" like VSCode or Sublime?

NeoVim can compete on this front. See LunarVim for a heavily extended experience.

woah, as a long time vim user who's been too lazy to switch, this might push me over the edge.

Re: Sunsetting Atom

#745

Post by spartanatreyu »

distances wrote: post #574
rjh29 wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO the killer thing is performance, VSCode starts fast and is smooth to write with. It blew away the older set of Electron-based editors. They work tirelessly on performance every release and it shows imo. Allowing extensions without destroying perf isn't easy either.

I said basically the same in a sibling comment but I can't agree with you. VS Code doesn't start fast enough and it's not smooth to write with. It's not exactly bad but you definitely feel the slight delays and slowness all the time . I went back to Sublime exactly to get faster startup and smoother writing than what VS Code was offering. So I'm pretty excited to see how Zed turns out!

Sublime test starts faster and smoother than vscode, but it's plugins leave too much to be desired compared to a good vscode setup.

I was a massive sublime text 2 user with a living document I would share on how to set everything up just right, but now I only ever use it to open the odd 100+mb sql dump if I want to search for something and have it be syntax highlighted.

Re: Sunsetting Atom

#746

Post by wpietri »

gman83 wrote: post #470
wpietri wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you know Java or JavaScript, Dart is extremely easy to pick up.

Sure, there's a whole class of languages that are enough like one another that if you know one you have an advantage picking the other one up.

On the other hand, it looks like Rust is only moderately more popular than Dart: https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/

But I can see why they'd steer away from a language controlled by one company, especially one notorious for killing off projects.

Re: Sunsetting Atom

#748

Post by jdaxe »

petre wrote: post #666
franciscop wrote: post #374

Totally understandable, but the justification in the first paragraph of "Why are we doing this now?" seems a bit self-inflicted: • Atom has not had significant feature development for the past several years • (thus) Atom community involvement has declined significantly • (thus) we’ve decided to sunset Atom Feels a bit weird in that sequence to blame the community. Just say that YOU have abandoned the project since Mi…

This. I might as well try Spacemacs now as Emacs isn't getting 'sunsetted' anytime soon, plus it runs in Lisp. Vim user. It's just that Vim on a GUI doesn't make a lot of sense to me. So I went from Sublime Text to Atom just because Atom was open source. Tried VS Code several times and ditched it, as it was full of MS-isms. It had a bloody Twitter react button in the status bar and telemetry.

VSCodium exists which is VS Code without the Microsoft "added features" (telemetry etc.) which sounds like more what you want.

Re: Sunsetting Atom

#749

Post by Gentil »

This article bugs me. I would have liked them to be honest. Just say we prioritized VS Code or that handling two products of the same category is resource hungry and a waste. We all understand. But this article is making it look like it's Atom's fault. They just let it die slowly so people will be pissed but move on. It's a great tactic because "sunsetting" Atom after MS takeover would've pissed the community. This was great for PR for sure.

> Atom has not had significant feature development for the past several years, though we’ve conducted maintenance and security updates during this period to ensure we’re being good stewards of the project and product.

Because MS made sure it didn't get any?!

> As new cloud-based tools have emerged and evolved over the years,

Big player being VS Code and Codespaces?

> Atom community involvement has declined significantly.

Because MS made sure the community was NOT backed with actions?

> we are archiving Atom to prioritize technologies that enable the future of software development.

This should be the first sentence. Not last.

Re: Sunsetting Atom

#750

Post by quixoticelixer- »

digisign wrote: post #726
vlunkr wrote: post #617

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's just an example. You want some more? https://www.electronjs.org/apps

Not a very good one then, and never heard of any of those. The big ones like Slack do run in a browser because the whole point is to access an online service.

You haven't heard of Discord or Visual Studio Code?
Post reply on HN