After acquiring GitHub back in 2018, Microsoft became owner of two open source code editor projects, their own Visual Studio Code and GitHub’s Atom editor. Maintaining two competing projects didn’t make a ton of sense and recently the winner was announced, Visual Studio Code will live on, and Atom editor will be sunset with it’s repositories set to read only by the years end.
Details from the announcement:
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.
This is a tough goodbye. It’s worth reflecting that Atom has served as the foundation for the Electron framework, which paved the way for the creation of thousands of apps, including Microsoft Visual Studio Code, Slack, and our very own GitHub Desktop. However, reliability, security, and performance are core to GitHub, and in order to best serve the developer community, we are archiving Atom to prioritize technologies that enable the future of software development.
Key Links
You can learn more about the termination of the Atom Editor and learn a bit about it’s importance in history in the video below.