3.5 KiB
layout, title, description, tags
| layout | title | description | tags |
|---|---|---|---|
| post | Farewell, Atom. Hello Pulsar! | The awesome community behind the Atom text editor has stepped up and given us a replacement: Pulsar | pulsar text-editors programming foss |
About a year ago on June 8th of 2022, GitHub announced that it set an end-of-life of December 15th, 2022 for the Atom text editor. What was once a super popular text editor in the mid-2010s that has since fallen behind the times a bit, is now a relic of the past to later be forgotten. This wasn't too surprising of a move, considering Microsoft purchased GitHub and they already had their own text editor in Visual Studio Code that was stealing Atom's thunder. Honestly it took Microsoft a LOT longer to make this move than I expected, but either way it kinda sucked seeing such a monumental piece of software (remember Electron? That came from Atom!) be put to bed.
The Community is Awesome.
But the open-source community has a habit of not letting go, and for better or worse, a lot of times will put great effort into preserving old experiences. This is one of those such instances, and now we have Pulsar! This is a fork on Atom that seems to have some steam behind it, not only re-branding it and keeping up the extensions installer, but also actively working on bug fixes and making it better!
It's pretty much a drop-in replacement for Atom, even down to the extensions and settings that you once used. Things can get a little hairy at times but we'll get to that in a bit.
It's going to take some time...
Now like I alluded to a moment ago, it's a little rough around the edges right now. Just to name a few things:
- Automatic updates aren't a thing yet, so you need to check back for new releases - about once per month for the stable releases.
- Installing it on Linux is kinda lame since you just get a raw DEB or RPM file to install manually instead of using a repo or something like Flatpak.
- The Atom codebase had been left to rot for a bit, so there is a lot of API changes and supporting software upgrades to churn through.
The Community is Awesome.
You see, the beauty of open-source software isn't necessarily that it's going to be developed better by having more eyeballs on it, nor that you can see exactly what a piece of software is doing. Those can definitely be good things, don't get me wrong, but where open-source really shines is when a company or some organization have had enough of developing a piece of software - I want to be clear I see no wrongdoing in this, sometimes good things just don't make sense - and instead of it just being left to rot, someone in the community can step up and take over. That really is an amazing thing.
Signing off
There's not really much at this point, other than if you haven't yet I'd highly recommend you give Pulsar a try. Like I said it's still wonky in some spots - one thing in particular that I'm noticing as I write this is there's a permanent deprecation warning for an extension since an API changed it needs patched - but for the most part it kinda just works. I would honestly love to see this thing come to fruition with a full-blown community that's actively developing extensions and contributing code to kinda recreate what we once had, and give us a proper text editor that's competitive with VS Code like Atom was.
And yes I know Zed is a thing from the original Atom devs, but it seems to be moving really slow and is currently only available on Mac, so I can't really use it or recommend it at this time.