Atom is a cross-platform, free, open-source text and source code editor, built on Electron, with support for plug-ins and embedded Git Control, developed by GitHub. Due to its flexibility and customization ability, Atom has been a popular choice for developers in the last eight years. But, unfortunately, his life cycle has come to an end.
Microsoft acquired GitHub in June 2018. However, despite early claims that it would continue the development of the Atom editor, Microsoft changed its course six months ago. As we informed you earlier, in the middle of this year, the company announced that the Atom project would be discontinued on December 15, 2022, in favor of Visual Studio Code.
The day has come, and unfortunately, it is already a fact. When you browse the Atom GitHub repository, you will get the message, “This repository has been archived by the owner on Dec 15, 2022. It is now read-only.“
It means that the users of the project are not able to modify the Git repository of the project. That is, developers can make no changes to the existing code base. In other words, the project is now only available for historical purposes and could be cloned to fork it into another project.
The situation is the same on the project’s main website – https://atom.io. When you try to open it, the domain redirects to the official GitHub blog, which informs you about its end of existence.
What else can we say than that this is a sad day for the Open Source community? However, as is nearly always the case, the end of an era is usually followed by the beginning of a new one. And a new beginning comes in the form of the rising star of Atom’s replacement, Pulsar.
The team behind Pulsar is a community that came about naturally after the announcement of Atom’s Sunsetopen in new window and decided that they needed to do something about it to keep their favorite editor alive.
Pulsar is Atomโs natural successor, attempting to fill the void left by Atom while expanding its capabilities. It is a free community-led project built on Electron, providing features offered by Atom, such as a built-in package manager, smart autocompletion, file system browser, multiple panes, etc., and building on top of them.
Like Atom, Pulsar is a cross-platform application that users can install on Windows, Linux, and macOS. In addition, Linux users can download RPM and DEB installation files and the popular distro-independent AppImage format.
Finally, the Pulsar project is still in its early stages, and application bugs may have yet to be fixed. For more information, you can visit the project’s GitHub repository.
