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Comment by sjm | Hacker News Reader

No mention of extensibility is a big red flag, and if it isn't open-source it presents the same risk as anyone adopting Atom originally ended up getting burned by.

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I felt burned by the loss of Atom. Why is this project going to be different?

I'm so angry about Atom, I haven't been able to move on. I'm using Pulsar out of spite. I'd like to move to emacs (for all its faults, it will never do what Atom did) but I can't be arsed to learn to configure it so it works exactly the way I want it to. I don't have the energy to learn an entirely new tool, I don't know what to do.

I'm trying to learn emacs too - last night I kept ChatGPT open and asked it any questions I had ("what's the hotkey to open up a new window below the current one") and I'm getting better really quickly.

You all should check out the community Atom fork or Pulsar Editor (from some of the OG Atom dev team)

https://pulsar-edit.dev/ https://github.com/atom-community/atom/

Yes, I just said I'm using Pulsar. I don't think it has a future though, since the community seems to be gone (so all the extensions are unmaintained). Hopefully I'm wrong. For now I'll just keep using it until I run into something too broken to work around.

I'm so angry about Atom, I haven't been able to move on.

You'll not even remember Atom when you get to college.

I used to be a big Atom fan, made a PR for them, my whole end-of-school project was an Atom plugin... but then one day I bit the bullet and tried VsCode and, then I never looked back.

Everything that Atom did, VsCode does better. The theming is different, the extensions are slightly different, but otherwise it's just incredibly good. I get why they shuttered Atom after a while.

Yeah but it's made by Microsoft. I knew they were going to kill Atom the day of the Github acquisition. Right now vscode is good, but I have no guarantees that in 5 years they won't pull an asshole move and I'll have to go through all of this again. In fact, depending on who you ask, it's already happening with the C# extension[1], and nothing promises me that the same won't happen with other parts of the editor.

[1] https://github.com/omnisharp/omnisharp-vscode/issues/5276

I know you wrote about emacs in your other post. If you are looking for something that doesn't change, try emacs (1985), vi/vim (1978), or sublime (2008). Microsoft's Visual Studio has been around since 1997, so Visual Code has a more likely chance of longevity in my opinion.

They are building a per-user recurring revenue stream along with very strong lock-in features (embedded communications, limited/paid extensions). They won't need lot of traction if they're able to boil the early adopter and enterprise frogs.

Great business model but the editor is designed around it first and foremost.

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