Microsoft GitHub announces that it will "retire" the Atom code editor! Future focus shifts to VS Code

Are you still using GitHub's Atom text editor? Now I have bad news for you - Atom is about to "retire"!

GitHub officially announces the "retirement" of the Atom code editor

On June 8, Pacific Time, the official GitHub blog officially posted: "Today, we announced that we will archive Atom on December 15, 2022, and archive all projects under the organization."

GitHub said it had decided "...to retire Atom to further our commitment to bring fast and reliable software development to the cloud through Microsoft Visual Studio Code and the GitHub code space".

I believe that many people will be "shocked" when they see this news, although of course they are shocked, and maybe not many people are "sad" about it.

A few years ago, Microsoft acquired GitHub. Since Microsoft has an exclusive electronic-based text editor in Visual Studio Code (VS Code for short), if it encounters a last resort, it is likely to choose to keep its own one, and another one. will be "eliminated".

Of course, the main reason for Atom's "elimination" is not from Microsoft's official "preference", but among the two editors, VS Code is indeed more popular and widely used.

Atom has been receiving maintenance and security updates over the past few years, but as GitHub notes, "significant feature development" has stalled, so the "end" of an era is a foregone conclusion.

Why is GitHub "killing" Atom?

As we all know, community participation is critical to the development of open source projects, and it is a key driver of the growing open source community. And as a focused cloud-based development tool, a desktop application, Atom really doesn't have a viable future in today's cloud-centric computing world.

At the same time, cloud-hosted VS Code is part of the future, which is a shame.

Although Atom will no longer be a text editor, it still leaves behind a considerable "legacy" - Electron.

Electron (originally named Atom Shell) is an open source framework developed by GitHub, a cross-platform application support framework that has been "spit out" due to its resource-adding features, and is currently being used by hundreds of millions of computer users.

Since Atom technology is closely related to the Electron project (formerly known as Atom Shell), bits of the project are used as the basis for many popular programs, including VS Code itself. In addition, Electron lays the foundation for many programs like Slack, WordPress Desktop, Discord, Skype, Facebook Messenger, and, more ironically, GitHub Desktop.

"Atom hasn't had major feature development over the past few years, although we've done maintenance and security updates during that time to ensure we can manage our projects and products well," GitHub said. Over the years, tools for the cloud have emerged and evolved, and participation in the Atom community has dropped significantly. Therefore, we have decided to retire Atom so that we can focus on enhancing the developer experience on the cloud with GitHub Codespaces."

As part of the future of cloud development, GitHub Codespaces debuted a few years ago as a full-featured cloud-hosted development environment that provides a "full VS Code experience" directly within GitHub.

Of course, GitHub officials have also made it clear that Atom will not be officially archived until the end of this year, that is, December 15th (the official website of atom.io will also be sealed), so in the foreseeable future, Atom will continue to work normally. However, for the next 6 months, users will see a "This app will be retired soon" notification in the app.

Will you miss Atom? Maybe everyone has already migrated to other text editors, of course, if you have a relevant opinion on this, you are welcome to let us know in the comments.

About Atom

Atom is a cross-platform text editor (open source code editor) specially launched by github for programmers. It has a simple and intuitive graphical user interface, supports CSS, HTML, JavaScript and other web programming languages, supports macros, and automatically completes split screen function, integrated file manager.

Reference link: https://visualstudiomagazine.com/articles/2022/06/09/atom-sunsetting.aspx