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Comment by franciscop | Hacker News Reader

Totally understandable, but the justification in the first paragraph of "Why are we doing this now?" seems a bit self-inflicted:

• Atom has not had significant feature development for the past several years

• (thus) Atom community involvement has declined significantly

• (thus) we’ve decided to sunset Atom

Feels a bit weird in that sequence to blame the community. Just say that YOU have abandoned the project since Microsoft acquired Github and get done with it, no need to sugarcoat it or others in the way.

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I checked back regularly for years to look for signs of life in Atom. There weren't any.

Last blog? 2019.

None of the releases did anything interesting. I work in Vue.js and needed that toolchain to work well, it never did with Atom.

So they're blaming the community for something they decided years ago and kept deciding every week when no resources were allocated.

Also, Zed isn't filling the void Atom left. Rust is interesting. Collaborative editing, not so much. Electron's lack of speed doesn't prevent VS code from fading into my workflow and being the most popular editor. I would still like an alternative because I don't think Microsoft should have the whole market.

> I would still like an alternative because I don't think Microsoft should have the whole market.

Asking genuinely, why not Sublime Text? (I haven't tried it or Atom in several years, but used both back in the day).

I'm probably going to give Sublime another try.

For one, I'm finicky about colors and VS code makes it easy to tweak one or two colors of a theme without getting involved in forking and creating a whole new theme. I may just do it, though.

Also, I recall having some issues getting linting to work and the editor highlighting lint errors in not-very-visible ways (like the first character of the line had a red underline).

Again, it's been a while and these could be issues I had with ST3 and/or I missed the way to fix it.

This. I might as well try Spacemacs now as Emacs isn't getting 'sunsetted' anytime soon, plus it runs in Lisp. Vim user. It's just that Vim on a GUI doesn't make a lot of sense to me. So I went from Sublime Text to Atom just because Atom was open source. Tried VS Code several times and ditched it, as it was full of MS-isms. It had a bloody Twitter react button in the status bar and telemetry.

VSCodium exists which is VS Code without the Microsoft "added features" (telemetry etc.) which sounds like more what you want.

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