The announcement is not new, but we missed it last June: Atom will disappear, in favor of Visual Studio Code. This complete code editor and project manager was purchased by Microsoft along with GitHub. The company has maintained the development of these two competing apps for several years, but VSCode has always had its favors, where Atom has evolved little. The announcement of his cessation is not a surprise in this regard and it will be effective on December 15.
The two apps are very similar, especially in their general philosophy. They both bet on web technologies as a foundation, with underlying code in JavaScript and an interface coded in HTML and CSS, all working thanks to the Electron framework… which was also created at the origin for Atom’s needs. Both also rely on add-ons and advanced customization. VSCode was largely inspired by its competitor and the creation of Microsoft is in this respect its direct heir.
Even if Atom kept its peculiarities and probably fans, the absence of a major update has weighed on its future for several years already. VSCode has notably evolved from a strictly local code editor to a development environment that can run on a computer as well as on a server, which has notably enabled GitHub to launch its Codespaces, online instances of VSCode that can be launched from its website. Faced with this major change in approach, Atom remained a local app that only received bug fixes.
Microsoft has thus announced the end of Atom for December 15, 2022. The source code of the project, distributed on GitHub of course, will then be archived, which means that it will no longer receive any changes, even if it will remain readable and can always serve as a basis for a new forking “, variant. This is the advantage of open-source, anyone can pick up the torch and continue to maintain Atom in good working order, even if it will undoubtedly be difficult to evolve such a large project without important means.
For its part, Microsoft has released a final update that fixes known bugs, leaving Atom in a good state. The current version should continue to function normally for a few years, even without receiving updates.
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