Dec 16, 2022 at 4:17 PM The day has come, Atom is officially discontinued
Back in June 2022, Microsoft-owned GitHub officially announced the end of support for its open-source text editor Atom, and their plans to archive the Atom repository in favor of their other famous editor Visual Studio Code.
Since its launch in 2011, Atom has gained a devoted fanbase thanks to being highly customizable, easy to use, and probably even more due to its open-source nature and having an impact on the Electron framework foundation, which ironically, influenced the development of commercial projects such as Microsoft Teams and Visual Studio Code itself.
In this case, continuing to use Atom despite the official end of support doesn't seem like the best idea considering that there will be no more security updates, deprecated redirects that supported downloading Electron symbols and headers will no longer work, teletype not working anymore, and many other reasons. So, the logical idea would be to make the switch to Visual Studio Code or Github Codespaces as Microsoft-expected, but you can also opt for another quite popular alternative within the community if you don't want to be tied to VSC (or Microsoft) for whatever reason.
Pulsar Editor is probably the most talked and appealing Atom fork among the community right now, despite still being fairly new and needed to polish things up. The fork has been gaining popularity partly by removing telemetry from the code base, making it a free "no strings attached" community editor, but also some of the standout features of Pulsar includes a clean and deeply customizable interface, cross-platform editing, built-in package manager and multiple panes support. Pulsar is still in early-stages but you can keep an eye on their roadmap to check the latest improvements, and may want to consider giving Pulsar a try.
It is also worth mentioning other interesting alternatives such as VSCodium, a freely-licensed binary distribution of Microsoft’s editor VS Code, JetBrains Fleet or the highly anticipated "Atom's spiritual successor" project from the Atom's founder, Nathan Sobo, titled Zed, which will be written in Rust instead of using the Electron framework (Join the waitlist here)
Farewell, and thanks for so much Atom! 👋
