Lost to VS Code! GitHub’s fourth year of acquisition by Microsoft “killed” code editor Atom

Author | Peng Huizhong Editor in Charge | Tu Min

Produced | CSDN (ID: CSDNnews)

GitHub has announced that it plans to shut down Atom on December 15, 2022. Atom is a cross-platform text editor launched by GitHub in 2011 for programmers. The original intention of GitHub was to provide developers with a deeply customizable yet easy-to-use text editor, so that more people could use it. This open source text editor has influenced many widely used commercial applications such as Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code, Slack and GitHub Desktop. However, it is about to usher in the countdown to “retirement” with only 6 months left .

Source GitHub

GitHub’s “bet” on the cloud

GitHub said it did so to develop cloud-focused software.

“While the goal of growing a community of software creators remains, we’ve decided to retire Atom to further our commitment to delivering responsive and reliable software through Visual Studio Code and GitHub Codespaces, a cloud-based development environment that integrates with Visual Studio Code. to the cloud,” GitHub explained on Wednesday.

In June 2018, when Microsoft acquired GitHub, then-CEO Nat Friedman assured the GitHub community that Atom was alive and well!

Friedman once said: “Atom is a great editor with a healthy community, loyal fans, great design, and experimentation with real-time collaboration. At Microsoft, we’ve used everything from Atom to VS Code to With all editors from Sublime to Vim, we want developers to be able to use whatever editor they like on GitHub. So we’ll continue to develop and support Atom and VS Code.”

However, after four years of development, Atom has stagnated. According to GitHub, aside from maintenance and security updates, the project has had no major feature development in several years. With the emergence and development of new cloud-based tools over the years, participation in the Atom community has dropped significantly. The business of installing software locally is now looking less attractive than cloud-based applications.

A GitHub spokesperson has said: “We want to focus on investing in our core ‘stake’ for the next few years, which is to focus on enhancing the developer experience in the cloud. There are many strong Atom alternatives to meet a variety of needs, VS Code has also gained a huge market share, so we are confident in this change.

What will happen when Atom is retired?

Talking about the impact of Atom’s retirement on the GitHub developer ecosystem, a GitHub spokesperson responded: “This should have no impact. GitHub’s API will continue to be supported and enable developers to communicate with GitHub among thousands of other products. Integrations. We also maintain our own suite of applications, including GitHub Desktop, GitHub Mobile, and GitHub CLI.”

Atom is the foundation of the Electron framework. Atom’s presence continues to be felt through the Electron framework. Electron.js also still underlies applications like Discord, Skype, Slack, Trello, and Visual Studio Code. But technology changes. Microsoft has previously said that it intends to break away from Electron in Teams. Other cross-platform frameworks such as Flutter, Tauri or Microsoft’s recently announced .NET Multi-platform App UI (.NET MAUI) may gain traction.

Given the time and effort, GitHub has given users and contributors 6 months to migrate, and plans to continue to put this decision in place for the rest of the time. On December 15, 2022, it will archive the atom/atom repository and all other repositories remaining in the Atom organization.

Still, it looks like the Atom could linger for a while beyond the December 15, 2022 retirement date. Because even though GitHub intends to archive the Atom repository, the code is open source and available to anyone who wants to support the project.

The text and pictures in this article are from CSDN