
Ask HN: What Happened to GitHub's Atom? - jonny383
When Microsoft acquired GitHub, there was speculation (and fear on my behalf) that GitHub would end up axing Atom in favor of Visual Studio Code.<p>Taking a look at the commit activity for Atom on github.com [1] shows that since the end of June 2019, development has basically stopped completely.  Does anyone have any insight as to what is happening here? Has GitHub abandoned Atom development?<p>Before you angrily shout that &quot;Visual Studio Code&quot; is better, or &quot;just use VS code&quot;, please recall the current situation with Google Chrome mono-culture. Say what you will about Atom, but (especially in the last twelve months) the product had become very fast and in my opinion, provided a much better user experience that VS code.<p>[1] https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;atom&#x2F;atom&#x2F;graphs&#x2F;commit-activity
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robotstate
I went from Sublime Text to Atom, then back to Sublime, as Atom was painfully
slow in large projects. After a short break from the tech world, I came back
to find that VS Code had taken over, and I couldn't be happier. It "just
works" and offers a great experience out of the box.

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jonny383
Out of curiosity, when did you leave and when did you return?

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denkmoon
It turned out the Atom is garbage, basically. It was supposed to be a better
version of Sublime Text, and open source, but never got close to feature or
performance parity.

I stopped using it because it is a pain. I watched the multi-line regex issue
in Atom for years, and no progress was made.

VS Code didn't have multi-line regex when it launched. It does now though.

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kyledrake
I still use Atom and it works great for me. Just because someone isn't
blasting code in it constantly doesn't mean it's dead (infact I usually prefer
it to constant, chaotically high levels of change). How often does rsync
change and does that prevent anyone from using it?

That said if I was going to switch to something I would probably go back to
sublime (which I have a license for). Microsoft is dumping a lot of money on
the coding space right now and I'm really not interested in finding out why
the hard way.

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aaomidi
I mean...vscode is MIT licensed.

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recov
Only if you grab it from github -
[https://code.visualstudio.com/License/](https://code.visualstudio.com/License/)

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geowwy
The biggest contributors stopped contributing around 2016. It seems like they
achieved what they wanted and put it in maintenance mode.

[https://github.com/atom/atom/graphs/contributors](https://github.com/atom/atom/graphs/contributors)

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thrower123
The thing that drives me batty with both of these Electron editors is that it
is apparently not possible to pop out a child window for one file without
launching another whole instance.

As somebody that grew up with Windows when MDI was all the rage, it is weird
that this doesn't work.

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null4bl3
For all the people going with "just use vscode"

at least use VSCodium as it is a community-driven, freely-licensed binary
distribution of Microsoft’s editor VSCode

[https://vscodium.com/](https://vscodium.com/)

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geoah
I don’t really mind the telemetry vscode sends. There are only so many ways
the developers of an application can get feedback on usage and performance
patterns.

Metrics are important in any service or product you build as it allows you to
better understand your user and adjust your product or roadmap.

I also remember the option to disable the telemetry has been added but it
still reported the fact that you disabled it which I think they’d fix but cant
find the github issue :/

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qwerty456127
Telemetry makes sense but I mind individual apps making any network
connections and sending/receiving whatever is not essential to solving the
actual task I use them for, let alone send data about me in a black-box
manner. There should be a centralized system service apps would pass telemetry
to for it to send it further and all the data should be in human-readable
format.

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breeny592
I'd be curious to see the download numbers of Atom since VS Code's meteoric
rise a few years ago. As an ex-atom user, I was initially hesitant to move
over as I found VSCode "awkward", but many quality of life patches sold me on
it and haven't been back

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fourthark
I'm sorry that everyone is telling you "just use VS code"!

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nemothekid
I personally prefer Sublime as well, and I looked into VSCode, but the VSCode
monoculture also means that VSCode has the best plugins. When it comes to
graphical editors, Sublime's golang and Rust extensions are so bad.

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thescribbblr
I used to write most of my codes in Atom, but it was too slow when your
project gets bigger. Then I shifted to VS Code on a colleague's suggestion.

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jimmyvalmer
I value a technically inferior alternative insofar as it provides an "out"
from a corporate entity. Sadly, using Firefox doesn't really mitigate Google's
grip on my data since I'm still searching via the big G. I don't see the point
of Atom as it's also Microsoft-bound, identical to vscode in ethos, and as you
point out, gets far fewer man-hours of development. I am an emacs user.

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yellowapple
> Sadly, using Firefox doesn't really mitigate Google's grip on my data since
> I'm still searching via the big G

That's rather easy to fix.

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orange8
I wouln't say vs code is better (these are all personal tastes things), but it
was already way more popular than atom long before ms bought github.

[https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=...](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=%2Fm%2F0134xwrk,%2Fm%2F0_x5x3g,%2Fm%2F0b6h18n)

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Stevvo
Github abandoned Atom before the the MS acquisition.

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rumblefrog
Atom was built to showcase electron, with no other goals in mind at the time.

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kirb
If I recall correctly Atom was originally developed on top of node-webkit
before they decided to fork and create Atom Shell based on Chromium. The
catalyst that pushed Atom Shell to become the Electron project we know and
love was Slack investing in getting it up to snuff to replace their existing
desktop apps at the time.

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itimetrack
Remember that vscode is an atom fork... afterwards MS put a lot more resources
and seriousness into it though!

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kaushikt
I never moved to Atom. Never understood the big hype about it. For people who
moved, why did you?

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blablabla123
It's free, Cross-Platform and a "normal" editor, so at work it enables to work
with others on the same computer. When I tried VSCode, I found the UX a bit
unusual and I think I run into bugs IIRC, but I might give it a try again.

(I think I would pay for Sublime if they'd open-source it with some premium
package or so because it's much faster.)

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bananamerica
Just use a real text editor that doesn’t embed Google Chrome just to write
code. There are tons of quality ones.

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adamscybot
To be fair to VSCode it's the most slick and speedy electron app I've seen by
miles. I forget often that its backed by it.

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kidsthesedays1
At some point, either before or after the acquisition, GitHub found out about
emacs and realized they were wasting their time.

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cjohansson
It sounds like a typical Microsoft strategy, they want to dominate markets and
nowadays it’s by offering free services and products and sometimes buying up
the competition.

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Scarbutt
It couldn't compete technically with vscode, just as firefox can't compete
technically with chrome. Users will just follow what's better.

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d-d
I honestly don't get why people use Atom or even VS code for that matter. Vim
and emacs come shipped with many systems, have good plugins, and are waaaay
faster; not to mention no telemetry!

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jonny383
I'm a vim user for a lot of things, but there's some things that are just not
as good. For example, auto-completion is definitely better in VS Code or Atom.
Although, vim is improving in this respect with things like coc.nvim, they are
still a _nightmare_ to setup.

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troycarlson
Ever tried YouCompleteMe? I love it for Ruby, Python, JavaScript.

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jonny383
I've used YouCompleteMe extensively for a couple of years. The only language I
thought it was nearly as good as these "full" web editors was TypeScript.

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namanaggarwal
VS code is a better editor than atom, just like Chrome is better browser than
others (imho based on number of browser downloads). I don't know if it would
make sense for the company to keep two competing(free) products. It would be
great to see download statistics and see if Atom makes sense anymore for MS

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Tajnymag
Chrome is better than Firefox? You are joking, right?

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namanaggarwal
I think you missed the full comment. I said in terms of downloads which is the
primary factor for companies investing in them. This might be an unpopular
opinion considering the negative votes on my comment, but numbers speak
otherwise

