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Comment by bearon | Hacker News Reader

Make no mistake... This project, Atom. Provided the runway that others copied, then improved upon (and on and on... with plenty of funding).

Atom provided the seed, excitement and vision for what is possible on this platform, and should be proud of that fact.

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People started focussing on text editors again after Atom came out.

I'd credit Sublime Text with that.

I second that, Sublime raised the bar and set the new standard, the only advantage VScode now has over sublime is it's open source license.

VS Code is not really open source.

https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4288/is-micro...

https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/supporting/faq#_why-does-...

Though you can just use Codium or the OSS version if you don't need remote magic.

Or the vast amount of plugins and community support. Using atom over vscode hasn’t really made sense for a few years now , and I loved atom

... and the fact that I don't have to pay for it. Never understood why anyone would spend money on a text editor.

It's a tool most of us use for many thousands of hours a year. Buying a better one, even if it was only a bit easier to use, or a bit faster, makes a lot of sense.

Also, many developers (not all) make a lot of money. Even Sublime's steep 60 bucks, which when I discovered Sublime as a student was crazy to me, is reasonable when compared to our salaries.

I don't think anyone would be surprised if a woodworker said "Yeah my drill works fine but I'm going to spend 60 bucks on a slighly better one; I use it a lot and mine's ergonomics aren't great."

TextMate might have a word here.

Yes.

Few of my friends were using Macs and used TextMate. That was years before Sublime was even released.

To me it Sublime was a fast, but clunky alternative to TextMate that ran on PC.

Then came Atom, Brackets, and finally VSCode.

I love this take, this is software in escence, build something, influence is something every developer should strive for

I wonder if it played a part in Microsofts purchase of Github. When you look at things like code spaces, co-pilot and how VSC can now work directly on Github/Azure repositories without moving the code to "your machine", it seems like they found a good way to make Github (and Azure DevOps) more profitable through Atoms successor.

That is how we all will remember Atom.

> Atom provided the seed, excitement and vision for what is possible on this platform, and should be proud of that fact.

Atom provided the seed, excitement and vision for bloated Electron apps, and shouldn't be very proud of that fact.

I believe it was the first electron app and to be fair, there are some great electron apps out there (VSCode, Obsidian, Discord, Slack).

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