Microsoft killed Atom the day they took over Github - they haven't had the balls to say anything publicly, but just go look at the commit graphs in the Atom repos. Here's a summary: https://twitter.com/DuncanLock/status/1177747512905461760
I have both 'nightly' versions on my laptop, Atom Nightly and VSCode Insiders, and the commit activity in the former pales in comparison with the latter.
Eventually moved onto VSCode. As a former Atom hardcore fan, this was an emotional hit.
I was a big fan of Atom as well. It pains me to see MS taking over every single default developer tool. I have been watching a single VSCode issue for years now, hoping that some simple functionality which was key to my workflow (and exists in Atom) could finally be implemented. It’s free so I shouldn’t complain, I suppose!
Cramming literally everything into that tiny sidebar and making you constantly resize it when you switch between files, search, git is one of VSCode's larger UX blunders.
If Microsoft can sustain so many teams working on To-Do apps https://twitter.com/4Lou/status/1265723231396417536?s=20 that they need a chart to illustrate how your To-Dos will move between apps, I think Microsoft can afford to put a small team towards maintaining Atom while a larger team works on VS Code and separately Visual Studio. There are different target audiences, and unless Atom and VS Code end up borrowing architecture ideas from each other, and introduce API compatibility, I don’t see that changing in the near future. Generally speaking, Microsoft cares enough about existing customers and backwards-compatibility that I could see them maintaining it until there’s more overlap in UI. There’s another option too, that GitHub is large enough they might prefer using Atom internally over VS Code by enough developers to support the project in the spare time of the developers using Atom instead. So I’d say Atom is only discontinued if it breaks due to lack of developer use and interest, like just about any open source project. I mean, has Bower been discontinued? https://bower.io/ No, but yes? ;-)
Like with Bower, they're probably waiting for enough interest in Atom to drop off before they tell people to migrate to VS Code. With the example of Bower, there are still way too many projects using it in the wild. I predict it's going to be another 8 years or so before they decide to actually put Bower to sleep.
For those of you that have moved on from Atom, but didn’t go to VS Code, where did you end up? Sublime Text is probably where I’ll head (back to), but curious if there are other options people are happy with. Have tried VS Code multiple times, but it just feels kludgy to me.
I agree with you - the Atom UI/UX is much better than VSCode in lots of ways. I'm currently slowly getting used to the pain of VSCode and am about 80% VSCode & 20% Atom currently.
VSCode seems to be the next best option, with the most momentum, etc...
Atom is slowest editor I've ever used. Visual Studio would have to do pretty badly to reach that level. Atom is good in other ways. It's very extensible. But my cursor actually had noticeable lag.
Erm, I hate to break it to you, but VSCode and Atom are both Electron-based, so they're not exactly light on resources either... If you are going to have a whole browser engine running, I guess it makes sense to at least make a full-blown IDE out of it rather than a simpler editor (or a glorified chat app like Slack)
Is there any crossover in contributors from atom to VSCode since the acquisition?
If I were working on Atom when GitHub got acquired, I’d be eager to switch to contributing to VSCode just from a career perspective. It seems like there is more potential for cross organization collaboration and growth there.
does anyone know a simple app that allows hyperlinking within notes? I want to create a roam-style knowledge base, but atom is a bit too heavy for my purposes. I prefer to keep things cross-compatible and future proof with .txt or .rtf, but to my knowledge, neither allow hyperlinking to documents
Zim Wiki is what you're looking for. It does a good job at linking different notes/pages and stores everything in a directory structure of plain text files. You can sync your notebook by Git or other means.
Joplin might do what you want, but it's not exactly light, and it's intended for markdown.
If you really want just plain text, Fossil might be your best choice. Literally no setup, comes with a wiki, supports hyperlinking and wiki-style page creation, and you can use the minimalist wiki syntax described here: https://fossil-scm.org/home/wiki_rules And you can create pages in a text editor and add them to the wiki at the command line if you want.
Org-mode is extensive, but each constituent part is not necessarily complex. You can also use use emacs to edit markdown in a quasi-org-mode style. Meaning you can collapse headings globally with shift-tab (which cycles through all hidden, outline visible, all visible), or locally with tab (which similarly cycles through all hidden, outline, all visible).
Edit: looks like markdown-mode also supports wiki-links between files. That should give you more or less what you want.
