GitHub to Shutdown Atom - The Popular Code Editor

Coding with a comfortable code editor may help you for better productivity. With the word “comfortable” I meant an easy-to-use interface, that runs smoothly, supports the languages that you are familiar with, easy to customize to fits you, and has many other features and functionalities.

For that, Atom managed to become the favorite of the users by allowing them to deeply customize the text editor and being easy to use. Unfortunately, it coming to an end. GitHub announced the retirement of its popular code editor on December 15, 2022, which debuted in 2011.

Atom is an open-source code editor developed with Electron like the other cross-platform desktop apps which are Discord, Slask, Zoom, Signal, and more. By having the functionalities like syntax highlighting, snippets for auto-completion, and Git & GitHub connectivity, Atom managed to fit user needs, even for beginner programmers.

The reason behind the Shutdown

According to the GitHub blog post, Atom has not had any new features introduced for the past few years except the maintenance and security updates. They believe the Atom community involvement has declined significantly as how the new cloud-based tools have emerged and evolved over the years. With that, they came to the decision to shut down Atom and focus to improve the developer experience in the cloud with their new product, GitHub Codespaces.

Furthermore, they mentioned that they are aware of how Atom is still used by the community. Since it’s not easy to change your comfortable code editor, they decided to keep it for the next six months and continue to inform the Atom users about the shutdown. On the 15th of December 2022, they will archive the Atom and all the other repositories remaining under the Atom organization.

What to do next?

Since the Atom is still here for the next 6 months, you still have the chance to enjoy it during that time. But programming is something that evolves every day so, it’s not a good choice to stick with a code editor which does not get any updates.

You can go with the most popular code editor, Visual Studio Code which is developed by GitHub's parent company, Microsoft. But, if you want to switch to a more powerful and professional IDE, we would like to recommend the JetBrains IntelliJ. Perhaps, someone may come up with a new editor by forking the Atom source code since it’s open-source. It’s up to you to find a suitable code editor so it’s worth giving a try a few different editors.