Atom

» see atom.io as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

An engineer changes text editors about as often as they change banks. That is the whole shape of this story. Atom arrived in 2014 with something genuinely new, and it needed a large number of people to move house before a better version of the same idea turned up. The better version turned up in 2015 and it was built on Atom's own runtime.

GitHub announced it on 26 February 2014, invite-only at first, and open sourced the whole thing under MIT on 6 May. The pitch was in the tagline: a hackable editor for the 21st century. Underneath it was a web browser. The interface was HTML and CSS, the extension language was JavaScript, and the consequence was that a web developer could reach into the editor and change how it behaved without learning Emacs Lisp or Vimscript or a plugin API written in 1994.

Version 1.0 landed on 25 June 2015. The package ecosystem grew fast, Facebook built Nuclide and later Atom IDE on top of it, and Teletype let two people edit the same buffer over a peer-to-peer connection years before that became a normal feature. For about three years it was the obvious recommendation for anyone who did not already have an editor they were married to.

My own habits were formed long before any of this, back when the editor on a machine was whatever the machine already had and the idea of choosing one felt like a luxury. That is probably why I find the Atom story more interesting than sad. It was a serious attempt to make the most conservative decision a programmer makes into an open one.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it shipped ~

The most important thing GitHub built during Atom was not Atom. To run a browser as a desktop application they wrote a shell called Atom Shell, then renamed it Electron and released it separately in 2015. Slack runs on it. So does Visual Studio Code, which is the part of this that matters.

Every complaint anyone has ever made about a chat app using two gigabytes of memory traces back to a decision made to get a text editor working. Electron is now more consequential than most commercial frameworks of its generation, and it exists as a side effect.

~ the slow part ~

Atom's reputation problem was startup time and memory, and the reputation was earned. Opening a large file was an event. Later versions got much faster, and Tree-sitter parsing in particular fixed the syntax highlighting that had been the worst of it, but reputations in developer tools set like concrete and nobody re-benchmarks an editor they already gave up on.

Microsoft shipped VS Code in 2015 on the same Electron base and did the unglamorous work Atom did not: a language server protocol that gave every language proper completion, a debugger, and an extension marketplace with money behind it. Same runtime, same broad idea, much more engineering. By 2018 the argument was effectively over.

~ what it became ~

Microsoft bought GitHub in 2018. Nat Friedman said publicly that Atom would continue, and for a while it technically did, but a company does not fund two competing editors indefinitely and everyone involved could read the situation. Development slowed, then stopped in everything except name.

The people scattered usefully. Nathan Sobo, who had led Atom, went off to build Zed in Rust rather than JavaScript, which reads as a direct answer to the criticism his previous editor never quite shook. A community fork called Pulsar picked up the codebase and still maintains it, so Atom in the strict sense is not gone. It is just no longer anybody's default.

~ the day it died ~

GitHub posted the end-of-life notice on 8 June 2022 and gave six months. The repositories were archived on 15 December 2022. Package installs from the official registry stopped working shortly after, which is the moment an editor built entirely around packages actually stops being the thing it was.

The tidy version of this obituary is that Atom lost to a better product. The truer version is that Atom's own runtime was handed to a competitor with more engineers, and the competitor used it to build the editor Atom was trying to be. Open sourcing Electron was the right decision and it was also the fatal one.

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