GitHub Sunsets Atom, the Open-Source Text Editor Introduced in 2011

GitHub has announced that it will sunset Atom, the text editor it created in 2011 for software development. The company has published a blog post saying that it will archive the Atom repository and all the other repositories remaining in the Atom organization on December 15, 2022. The open-source text editor has inspired and influenced widely used commercial applications such as Slack, Microsoft Visual Studio Code, and GitHub Desktop.

The company claims that it has taken this decision to focus more on cloud-based software. “While that goal of growing the software creator community remains, we’ve decided to retire Atom in order to further our commitment to bringing fast and reliable software development to the cloud via Microsoft Visual Studio Code and GitHub Codespaces,” the blog post claimed. GitHub Codespaces is a cloud-hosted development environment that integrates Visual Studio Code.

Atom was the foundation for the Electron framework, which paved the way for numerous popular applications. However, GitHub claims that Atom community involvement has now substantially reduced as new tools have emerged over the years. The text editor has not yet seen any significant feature development for the past several months apart from maintenance and security patches.

“When we introduced Atom in 2011, we set out to give developers a text editor that was deeply customizable but also easy to use — one that made it possible for more people to build software,” GitHub wrote in the blog post. “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.”

Atom’s influence will continue to be felt through the Electron framework. Electron.js still serves as the basis for Discord, Skype, Slack, Trello, and Visual Studio Code, among other apps. Microsoft previously said it intends to move away from Electron in Teams. And it looks like other cross-platform frameworks like Flutter, Tauri, or Microsoft’s recently announced .NET Multi-platform App UI (.NET MAUI) may soon gain traction.

It’s not the end for Atom, essentially. Once archived, the code will still be available for developers to inspect and build on. Moreover, one of the project’s core contributors, Max Brunsfeld, is leading an effort to launch a spiritual successor called Zed, which will launch in private alpha this week.