If you are a hardcore Atom fan and would never think to use something like VS Code, then I have some bad news. GitHub officially announced that as of December 15, 2022 it will archiving Atom and all projects under the Atom organization.
And for those unfamiliar with the name, Atom was an IDE that GitHub introduced in 2014 as an advanced text editor specifically catered towards programmers.
You can put it in the same category as Notepad++ or Sublime Text. At least when it first came out, because Atom later on garnered some pretty advanced features.
What kind of features you may ask? Well, for one, the ability to share you coding environment with other developers in real time, also known as Teletype.
It also featured a built-in package manager and GitHub integration as well. Essentially, it had all of the features that make VS Code so great right now.
Why is it special?
Atom is interesting in one particular way though. Because you see Atom is built entirely in HTML, JS, CSS and Node.js and it is a desktop application. But it runs on Electron, a framework used to build cross platform applications.
And Atom helped to serve as the foundation of that framework.
Electron now powers huge apps, such as VS Code, Slack, Figma and Twitch. And that's important to remember, even once the lights turn off and the download link is gone.
Why is it leaving?
According to GitHub, this abrupt end is mainly so that the company can shift focus to their other development projects, such as GitHub Codespaces and VS Code online, which totally makes sense from a financial and corporate perspective.
As of 2018 Microsoft, developers of VS Code, acquired GitHub for a very large sum of money. Meaning that at that point the company as a whole had maintenance on two competing IDE's.
Not to mention that Atom is essentially a free and open-sourced product.
More specifically though, as GitHub has stated in its blog, there hasn't really been a feature add to the IDE in some time now. Aside from security patches and updates in order to stay compliant with new software standards, there hasn't really been anything that might convert a new user over to the editor.
And with everything shifting over to the cloud, one could say that Atom was definitely becoming the legacy editor.
Will I miss Atom?
I've probably downloaded and installed every IDE known to humankind during the past 20 years, and many that no longer exist and younger developers have never heard of. And that includes Atom.
But I never quite transitioned myself over completely to using it on the daily. That honor goes to Visual Studio (not VS Code).
As a .NET developer, I'm pretty much reliant on using Visual Studio for my development. But as React developer, I've found myself using VS Code primarily.
Not so much because it can handle React better than Atom. But more so because VS Code is generally more popular, meaning that it's typically the first IDE developers jump to.
And that might also be why Atom is having to say goodbye right now. I've personally only known a handful of developers that had ever heard of it at all. VS Code has done a great job during the past few years in its ability to get out to the masses. But Atom has done its work in the shadows almost.
Yes, I will miss Atom for what it was and for what it attempted to do and more importantly for what it did in fact do for future software. And I don't plan on uninstalling it from my machine. It will sit there in my hard drive as a relic of the past.
And one day I will look back and be reminded that alot of what I use in my development, is probably in part thanks to this IDE.
Walter Guevara is a software engineer, startup founder and currently teaches programming for a coding bootcamp. He is currently building things that don't yet exist.
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