In June 2022, Microsoft's GitHub announced that they will be cancelling the Atom text editor later this year. (Initially November 16, but that got pushed to December 15.)
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. As new cloud-based tools have emerged and evolved over the years, Atom community involvement has declined significantly. As a result, we've decided to sunset Atom so we can focus on enhancing the developer experience in the cloud with GitHub Codespaces.
This is a tough goodbye. It's worth reflecting that Atom has served as the foundation for the Electron framework, which paved the way for the creation of thousands of apps, including Microsoft Visual Studio Code, Slack, and our very own GitHub Desktop. However, reliability, security, and performance are core to GitHub, and in order to best serve the developer community, we are archiving Atom to prioritize technologies that enable the future of software development.
If you are an Atom user, or are looking to give it a fresh look, you might want to check out Pulsar, the community fork that was created in response to GitHub's cancelling of the Atom project. They say in their documentation:
Why Pulsar?
There are a lot of text editors out there; why should you spend your time learning about and using Pulsar? Editors like Sublime and TextMate offer convenience but only limited extensibility. On the other end of the spectrum, Emacs and Vim offer extreme flexibility, but they aren't very approachable and can only be customized with special-purpose scripting languages.
We think we can do better. Our goal is a zero-compromise combination of hackability and usability: an editor that will be welcoming to an elementary school student on their first day learning to code, but also a tool they won't outgrow as they develop into seasoned hackers.
DistroTube promoted the project last week [video] with some words of encouragement.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 16, @11:15AM (4 children)
"We think we can do better."
Someone has to say it, so here goes--
Come on, are you really smarter than RMS (EMACS) or Bill Joy (Vi)? Love them or hate them, in their prime these two could program circles around just about anyone.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 16, @12:06PM
TBH I'd love to see that... AI?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Thexalon on Friday December 16, @01:32PM (1 child)
And I'll just add that once you practice a bit with either Emacs or Vim, you can be very efficient. Compare, for instance, "%s/foo/bar/g[Enter]" with other editors giving you something like "Alt-F [down] [down] [enter] [navigate to search box] foo [tab] bar [tab] [space to check the box saying to not ask for each replacement] [tab] [tab] [space]", for instance.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 3, Informative) by garfiejas on Friday December 16, @03:10PM
I used to be a Emacs/Jove person (BSD), but back before the commercial internet, the commercial (AT&T) UNIXs I supported only had vi.
So now when looking for an editor (recently moved from Atom -> VSCodium https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium [github.com] - VSCode without any telemetry and under an MIT license) it has to have a VI/VIM extension and Markdown Preview; for some of the VSCodium extensions they're the same devs as for Atom...
The vi extensions make a graphical editor pretty awesome, try it :-)
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 16, @05:56PM
IME the smartest programmers very often make the dumbest user interfaces.
But besides which, anyone who thinks they "can do better" absolutely should try. Either they'll succeed, in which case humanity can benefit from an advance in the state of the art; or they'll fail, and we will all (or at least those paying attention) have learned something.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 16, @12:15PM (9 children)
Tick tick tick
(Score: 2) by looorg on Friday December 16, @02:37PM (7 children)
I have not used Pulsar, but following the link to that video and seeing it in action I must say that it looks pretty much like every other IDE out there these days. All the same features, the same layout etc etc. So what is it that sets this apart from any of the other umpteen alternatives? Why should I run Pulsar over them? I don't know.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 16, @05:50PM (6 children)
Usually, because you've tried them all and this one fits your needs and ethical requirements adequately enough.
I've been one of those Atom holdouts. It does what I need it to do, is FLOSS, and (having been abandoned) is not really beholden to Microsoft. A solid community continuation of the codebase is something I've been waiting for, and was wondering about earlier today in fact.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Saturday December 17, @04:35PM (5 children)
That might be a suitable criteria for some. Not saying it's anything wrong with that. But I do wonder why each and every IDE are starting to look more or less the same now, not sure if it's Visual Studio that is setting the standard or where it came from. I guess it's in some regard an evolution of past IDE:s. For most things I find it a bit to fancy for my taste. Linenumbers and colourcoding is enough for me, preferably just one window or one window with a bar below for some output. All the other stuff .. yicks ...
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Sunday December 18, @09:49PM (4 children)
The two so-calld IDE's I use are
* emacs and shell, and
* DrRacket.
emacs instead of vi because long long ago I got accustomed to the keystrokes of the PerfectWriter on DOS, and later dscovered tat emacs had pretty well the same keystrokes. Complete accident.
DrRacket because it's very helpful when programming in Racket, a variant of Scheme. What it provides is "Linenumbers and colourcoding" "just one window" and "one window with a bar below for some output." It happens also to give me error messages that oftern make sense, but that's provided by the underlying Racket implementation, not IDE.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Monday December 19, @12:40AM (3 children)
I'm not familiar with the language. But as a user-interface for an IDE that looks all right to me. I'll add it to the list of things I should take a look at eventually. Thanks.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Tuesday December 20, @11:23PM (2 children)
What's special about Racket is that the first line of a program file identifies the languages the rest is written in. Hence progrmmers can easily design and choose specialised languages for different parts of a program. Most of these languages are still full of parentheses; but custom parsing is possible. One of these languages is Scribble, for text mark-up. Running a scribble program produces a text document. Another of these languages is Algol 60, so I've been told.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Thursday December 22, @01:59PM (1 child)
It looked quite interesting. I had a brief look at it. Someone even wrote a language module for 6502 assembler, going to have a look at that. It actually looks interesting compared to the somewhat convoluted setup I have now with emulators, assemblers and having to assemble and prepare things with some java glue before it can get sent over to old hardware. It also had language things ready for Latex and a few other useful things. Going to have to give it a spin and see how the macro things works for a few things I work on during the holidays to see if I can get into it but it looks good so far. Thanks a bunch for the recommendation.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Saturday December 24, @02:09AM
Have fun! At least, I hope it's fun you'll be having!
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 16, @05:45PM
Run natively on Linux?
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Friday December 16, @08:32PM
Standards [xkcd.com]
"So let's throw out all those other alternatives, because they have learning curves. *shudder* Instead, we'll make our own tool that definitely won't have its own learning curve."
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"