Atom Text Editor Being Retired

Ted LeRoy

Dec 17, 2022 • 1 min read

Atom Text Editor losing support as of December 15, 2022

I was getting back into my Atom text editor after not using it for some time and was greeted by an unwelcome site.

Screen capture of Atom sunsetting message. — Atom Sunsetting Message

It appears the maintainers and developers for Atom have decided to pull the plug.

This isn't new. There are articles about the announcement in June of 2022. It's just news to me because I hadn't kept up on developments.

The team said their decision is based on its decline in popularity and desire to support newer projects like Microsoft Visual Studio Code and GitHub CodeSpaces.

Hmm... Microsoft owns GitHub and GitHub is sunsetting a competing product? Gets my spidey senses up.

I'll look at GitHub Desktop, which is mentioned by name in the Atom blog post announcing its demise.

Alternative, popular text editors are Sublime Text and Notepad ++, with Visual Studio Code being more of a full-fledged, very popular Integrated Development Environment (IDE).

I'm sad to see Atom go. Although its popularity waned with the years, it had features I liked.

I thank them for all their hard work and for creating a Text Editor I liked!