GitHub will archive all projects under the Atom org on December 15, 2022. Why?

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.

Atom was co-founder and long-time CEO Chris Wanstrath’s baby. We first heard its story from project lead Nathan Sobo on The Changelog back in 2017. Here’s what he had to say about the end of Atom’s era:

As Atom’s sun sets, Zed’s sun is rising. We’re not done here.

Music Time brings the power of the Spotify player to your code editor. Control your music, view and create playlists, favorite and repeat songs, and discover new music without context switching to the Spotify web or desktop app.

Music Time is free and works with VS Code, Atom, and JetBrains IDEs. Some of its features require Spotify premium, but the personalized song recommendations work with the free version of Spotify as well. It even has a cool vizualizer so you can see your most productive songs.

May 7th, 2020: A discussion appears on Atom’s forum…

I use Atom for a few years now and was worried back then about the acquisition of Github from Microsoft. And now I read about Github Codespaces, which is powered by Visual Studio Code.

I’m a little concerned about this. Do you still support Atom? And do you support Atom in the future? If there are other opportunities of embedding a Editor or innovating would you also choose VS Code over Atom?

What is the future of Atom? Will you slowly move to VS Code and Atom will be on the support line?

All good questions. There’s been no official (or unofficial, that I’ve seen) response from GitHub just yet.

We’ve been following Atom for years now. Many great developers have put their efforts into the editor. But it’s hard to withstand the gravitational pull of VS Code. Even more so now that Microsoft owns GitHub? 🤔

A syntax theme, icon package, and UI theme for your favorite editor (maybe).

An exciting new project from Nathan Sobo and team:

an experimental Electron-based text editor informed by what we’ve learned in the four years since the launch of Atom … this project is a testbed for rapidly iterating on several radical ideas without risking the stability of Atom

Xray’s priorities are high performance, collaboration, extensibility, and web compatibility. Needless to say, we’ll be keeping our 👀 on this project over the coming months.

We’re not new to Solarized, but Solarized Minimal is new to us.

Solarized Minimal aims to create a more homogeneous and subtle use of the Solarized palette by assigning colors primarily through the root groups described in the TextMate documentation.

Supports:

• Atom - atom-solarized-minimal-light and atom-solarized-minimal-dark)
• Visual Studio Code: (vscode-solarized-minimal)

Nathan Sobo, founding member of the Atom editor team at GitHub, joined the show take us all the way back to the beginning of Atom to learn where it came from, the founding team, the problem it solves, on through to shipping 1.0 and beyond.