Atom editor is not dead, but is now Pulsar (viva OSS) | Hacker News Reader

Atom editor is not dead, but is now Pulsar (viva OSS)

13 pointssrevenant9 comments

With Microsoft shortly bringing the axe to Atom, in favor of their in-house VS Code, that leaves a lot of people wondering what's next? There is a reincarnation, however!

Much like how MariaDB came from the ashes of Oracle's MySQL squash, and we now have Rocky from IBM/Redhat nerfing CentOS, soon we should have pulsar from Microsoft's similar attempt to squeeze an OSS project into oblivion.

Love it or hate it, Atom is a popular OSS editor with many great features, and having it continue as Pulsar is great for the community.

Keep an eye on https://pulsar-edit.dev for the new release (not yet ready).

The project team would like more time to polish things up, but I also think it's good for people to recognize the effort is underway.

Like any OSS project, they could use additional help.

Note: I'm not a part of the project, I'm just a fan of the editor who is excited to see it continue. So let those naysayers know that, in traditional OSS fashion, the big corporation's attempt to kill it in lieu of their in-house product will not succeed.

And there are many posts and blogs asserting that it IS dead, so I'd like to get the correct word out there.

Good luck to whoever is working on it but if the original devs couldn't keep it alive because of VSC, I don't think anyone else will.

I think both editors play in the same league and VSC has the community which is was matters.

To start: VSC is made by Microsoft and not the community. That's all that needs to be said.

But to continue on your logic path...

You are right in that the original devs couldn't keep it alive because of VSC, but your correlating that this is because of a lack of community interest, which I think is far from the truth.

The reality is Microsoft owns Github, and they own VSC. Why pay to support two editors? Between the two VSC is more clearly "their" product, so they try to kill Atom to further help their product.

But VSC is dangerous, imho. Not only does it watch all sorts of things you are doing, it's just locking you into the same hegemony that brought you the frightening CoPilot AI that is scanning everybody's code on Github, creating all sorts of problems. https://thenextweb.com/news/github-copilot-works-so-well-bec...

Whereas one of the first things the Pulsar group did was remove "telemetry" from the code base, making it more of a free "no strings attached" community editor.

However, to each their own, as I suggested :) Not everybody likes Atom, but MANY people do. It certainly is not a minor editor by ANY count.

Just because it's #2 or #3 compared to VSC? That's a pretty lofty position.

And if you enjoy suckling from teat of Microsoft on VSC, by all means continue to do so. I am not a fan of their sins of the past and present, so I avoid them when possible.

And personally, I like the configurability of Atom far more than VSC, which I've tried it from time to time—but it's just a different experience, not to my liking.

You took my comment the wrong way.

I don't trust Microsoft and I don't really like VSC.

VSC is made by Microsoft but they have the community who make plugins, report bugs, contribute, spread the word, etc. They have the critical mass to make something like this work while Atom doesn't.

Atom did not die because Microsoft killed it. They didn't have to. They only had to push VSC. Now the original Atom devs are working on another editor (zed.dev) because even they know Atom is done.

Very naive question: Why would I use Atom/Pulsar over Vscode(/Vscodium)?

Because you want a slow, laggy coding experience?

My, aren't you a bundle of joy and hope.

No, I've just actually tried to use Atom before moving to vscode. It was night and day

Well the main one would be if you already used Atom and didn't want to migrate to VSC. The plan is to build upon the "hackable" nature of Atom and really run with it. It should be easy to customise it yourself however you want, the (lofty) ambition would be to think of it something like an Electron based version "Emacs" where anything you can think of writing or changing in Javascript (or anything that can be transpiled to it) can be reflected in the editor.

I'm done with these slow editors. Switched to Sublime from VsCode a month ago. Much more responsive.

(Still use the bloated Jetbrains for editing projects, but its functionality is regrettably unrivaled.)

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