Why Github Kills Atom Text Editor | Is Atom Text Editor Getting Retired ?

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Today I have a bad news about the Atom text editor and I know most of them are aware of but In any case if you don’t know what I’m talking about is … read till end and you will get to know it

Introduction

One of the most unfortunate things that can happen to you as a software developer is when you become reliant on a piece where it must be vital for your work for your life. Then this piece of software that you're relying on ceases to exist, it dies, it goes away, and that's what's happening with the atom text editor atom created by the good folks over at GitHub.

Since 2011 The Atom is the Only and very first electron app which is made by the developer ; it was kind of the proof of concept that electron works and of course, out of that many, many hundreds of thousands probably of these electron apps have has created over the years and it's an essential piece of technology that allows people to develop cross-platform applications.

Images from Unplash

cross-platform meaning you can make an application using the electron framework and it should work on Windows, Mac and Linux

Atom is Sun Setting What does it mean ?

So Atom has an extraordinary place in history as being the very first electron app, but atom also has a very special place in the hearts of many Developers and Users of it because atom is a text editor and text editors are a very personal thing, especially for people that are very serious about text editing.

So if you know a professional writer, experienced editor, or developer, a text editor is almost like an extension, and most people have been using Atom since its birth in 2011, but in fact I would not to say that those people being betrayed by Atom. The GitHub team seems to have visited the GitHub blog yesterday. This post has Sunset Atom. The blur at the top of this post indicates that Atom and all projects under the Atom organization are archived and formally sunset on December 15, 2022.

Explanation of Sun Setting

sun setting

Now here is this is interesting term called “Sun setting” Atom, so what they're doing ? and the answers is simple, they're just abandoning the project, right however no longer are going to develop or Update Atom.

They will go ahead and archive all the repositories and end the sunset like a real sunset setting. You know the sun goes down slowly, so instead of us canceling the project today, on December 15th, we give you about six months for that sunset cycle to happen, okay, and then on the next day. December 15, we all leave, and then . We check in the repository and atom is now complete.

This GitHub post about the sunset atom is not very long. It's only about three or four paragraphs. Well, the first paragraph about the atom was created in 2011 as the first electronic application, yes, and then why do we close it?

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It seems that the GitHub team, since it was acquired by Microsoft, has focused on other things, it was a surprise and a lot of atom users were worried about that, so Microsoft bought GitHub about four years ago. before today four years basically, or this week it was really.

Short History

Atom text editor history in short

I think earlier in June, I think like 4th, or 5th, June the news broke that Microsoft had’ reached an agreement to acquire GitHub, you know, several billion dollars and those who used the text atom. the editor then even got worried because Microsoft of course still maintains its text editor based on the code of another electronic application to an odd extent, so they now have these two very similar products each other under Microsoft's banner and why keep both why keep two things that basically do the same thing and even then people think Microsoft will probably kill atom and go with vs code. Originally Microsoft said no, that's not going to happen. We are going to keep maintaining atom.

You know we have no plans on shutting this down, and that was true. I mean, they waited four years to shut it down. Still, you could see this coming because, honestly, atom saw almost no development since Microsoft bought GitHub.

In this post, the folks over at Github admit that they say new cloud-based tools have emerged and evolved over the years, and the atom community involvement has declined significantly. As a result, we've decided to sunset atom to focus on enhancing the developer experience in the cloud with GitHub code spaces if you wish you could read there official post - Offical Github Blog

Online Code Spaces Or Cloud Based IDE

different online ide and code spaces 

Now. I'm not that familiar with code spaces, but I actually did look up the code spaces web page here on GitHub, and essentially this is your cloud-based IDE, so this is your cloud-based vs code.

Essentially it's vs code in the cloud, which I guess if you're into, you know, cloud-based things I wouldn't say I like this kind of stuff doing everything in the cloud, but I know for a lot of people, it actually does have some real-world benefits, but because essentially they're working on vs code, and then this code space which is essentially cloud-based vs code, you know these people that work for Github, and by extension, they work for Microsoft they don't have time to fool with atom toward the bottom of the post they go on to write that the Github team recognizes that atom is used by a large number of people within the community and that migrating people from atom to another solution that's going to take a lot of time and energy, and they state that quote we are committed to helping users and contributors plan for the migration.

So when they talk about the migration, I'm assuming Github is going to start heavily pushing all of these atom users over to vs code and to the cloud-based editor which is Github code spaces now as somebody that has used computers and computer software for most of my life I've been in this situation before where you know pieces of software that I rely on are no longer there one day right they go away the company behind them, they go away, or they decide to kill a project and move on to something else, and it's frustrating, and yeah, for those that are using atom, I feel your pain on this.

Proprietary and Licensing

all about licensing the code

I will say that going forward, I think more people should think about the pieces of software that they rely on and try to protect themselves from being in a situation like these atom users are in right now, where one day, the piece of software that they rely on goes away it's one of the reasons.

After all, obviously, atom is a piece of free and open-source software, but proprietary software especially can disappear on you one day because it's not a community project. Proprietary software can only be developed by one person or one organization, the proprietor of that proprietary software, so if that one organization decides that's it, that's it, there's nothing you can do about it.

The licensing of that proprietary software prevents you from ever doing anything with that essentially dead project now but even free and open-source software like atom, sometimes this happens when projects just the community around it loses interest, and that's kind of what happened with atom there were two problems with atom, so atom started in 2011 and back then by far the most popular ide text editor for programming and development was sublime text.

all about Sublime text

sublime text short history

The sublime text was and is proprietary software, so atom was essentially created to be a free and open-source sublime text, and because of that, a lot of people within the free and open-source software community gravitated to atom but eventually, atom kind of fell out of favor partly because sublime text kind of fell out of favor nobody was looking for a sublime text clone anymore because eventually vs code was created by Microsoft and vs code became the text editor the ide that everyone was using and then once Microsoft bought GitHub the writing was on the wall anybody that was paying attention we knew this was going to happen like on day one that was one of the first things people asked us what the hell's going to happen to atom that's because in the back of our minds we all knew there's no way in hell Microsoft is going to develop both vs code and

an atom at the same time, it makes no sense. It's a duplication of effort one of them had to go, and obviously, the one that had to go would be the much more inferior product if we're being honest because Atom was slow. It was kind of buggy. Even the GitHub team in this post mentioned some reliability issues even today with Atom, especially in the early days, so if you're an atom user, where do you go from here? the GitHub team will tell you to try out vs code vs code. Technically it's free in open source software, but the way most people install it through the binary that Microsoft distributes is that its proprietary software.

Talking about the Vim and Emacs editor

vim vs emacs editor

It's licensed under a proprietary license. Again, if you are using atom because of free and open-source, then vs code the official vs code is probably not what you want to try out a truly free and open-source fork of vs code known as vs sodium. However, even if you move to vs code, ultimately, you're still putting yourself in a little bit of danger because you're still dependent on this corporation that maintains this piece of software.

It's not a community project, so what you want, you should move to a truly free and open source community project, and one that you know will never disappear overnight on you. There are two that immediately come to mind. I often tell you guys about vim and emacs. If you are a professional programmer developer, you owe it to yourself to investigate those particular text editors because they're extensible, extremely extensible, and more extensible than an atom or vs code could ever dream of.

You can build these things into an idea. You can build them into whatever the hell you want to build them. You can make them do practically anything, and there's a learning curve. Still, that learning curve is worth it because you essentially write your text editor nobody can ever take that away. You'll never wake up one day, and vim and/or emacs are gone.

They've been around since the beginning of time. They're never going to go away on you, so yes, there's a little bit of a time sink and an investment time investment learning Vim or Emacs, but ultimately I think it's worth it just for the peace of mind that you know it's always going to be there for you now.

💡 Everyone, Peace  Microsoft has a long history of buying and killing companies.

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Conclusion

So Guys and Girls what is your thought on this ? Do you use Atom text editor before or now also current atom is you default text editor for programming please let me know what you think about it by commenting down below and a share would be a appreciable if you like my article Thanks for reading, and please do share this article if you enjoyed it 🤞💜

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