Why GitHub Is Killing Atom Text Editor

Farewell, sweet Atom. GitHub's editor had many admirers, but its legacy will live on.

GitHub will officially kill off the Atom text editor in December 2022, due to declining community engagement. The announcement comes six months before the sunsetting date to give users time to migrate to other platforms.

The Microsoft-owned company is shifting its focus to cloud-based tools, which it considers the future of software development.

GitHub Is Sunsetting Atom Text Editor

GitHub is sunsetting Atom, according to an official announcement on the company's blog. "We are sunsetting Atom and will archive all projects under the organization on December 15, 2022," GitHub wrote in a blog post.

As a free and open-source text editor that debuted in 2011, Atom has been one of the go-to options for plain text editing and software development. But developers may remember it best for laying the foundation of the Electron framework. The platform has enabled the development of many cross-platform apps like GitHub Desktop, Slack, and Discord.

Why Is GitHub Killing Atom?

GitHub states, "Atom has not had significant feature development for the past several years." The company has been solely focusing on maintenance and security updates.

They also cite a significant decline in engagement from Atom's community. This is partly due to the success of new cloud-based tools including a whole host of browser IDEs. Stack Overflow's annual developer surveys paint a similar picture about Atom's usage.

Atom has been used by over 10% of software developers around the globe since 2013, according to StackOverflow's surveys. The 2021 StackOverflow Developer Survey reported that Atom was used by 12.94% of software developers from over 82,000 responses. In that survey, Visual Studio Code (developed by Microsoft, the current owner of GitHub) commanded the highest market share at 71.06%.

Despite its minimal usage, Atom has been one of the best text editors on the market. But in light of the new reality, GitHub is embracing the cloud by shifting its resources to GitHub Codespaces and Visual Studio Code.

What Happens Next?

With Atom's demise imminent, you might be wondering what impact the move will have. Well, as the statistics show, not many people use Atom. But, despite that, this move is unlikely to signal the end for the text editor. Max Brunsfeld, a core contributor of Atom, is working on a potential successor called Zed.

Zed is described as a "lightning-fast, collaborative code editor." Before Zed hits the market, you can always try an alternative text editor like Notepad++ or Sublime Text.