GitHub Shuts Down Atom Text Editor

GitHub's focus on Visual Studio Code

GitHub states that Atom did not witness any significant feature development in the last few years, except for maintenance and security updates. This is due to the booming evolution of cloud-based tools in past years and the shift of focus toward them. GitHub says in this regard:

... While that goal of growing the software creator community remains, we’ve decided to retire Atom in order to further our commitment to bringing fast and reliable software development to the cloud via Microsoft Visual Studio Code and GitHub Codespaces.

It was just a matter of time until GitHub announces the termination of Atom.

The Atom Sunsetting Process

GitHub recognizes that Atom still has a significant user base that invested years on it, which renders migration to an alternative solution (VS Code, as they hope) quite the process. As such, they announced the shutdown 6 months prior to the designated date. GitHub will also keep informing Atom users of the shutdown through the application itself and by emails, if applicable.

What does this mean for Atom Users?

Unless they are fine using outdated software, Atom users have no other choice than migrating to an alternative text editor or IDE.

• Visual Studio Code, being the direct competitor and the reason behind Atom's shutdown makes it the best alternative. The software is completely free, highly extensible, endorsed by industry leaders and loved by the vaste majority of developers.
• JetBrains provide enterprise essential tools for software developers and teams that streamline the whole software development lifecycle. Their IDEs are exceptional with powerful tools like intellisense, automatic imports, code generators and many more features baked-in. WebStorm is considered the direct competitor to Atom and VS Code. However, the software is subscribtion-based.
• Sublime Text3 is a text editor loved by many developers in the world. This lightiweight editor is extensible through its package manager, and offers a list of powerful features such as regex find-and-replace, multiline editing, text snippets and other features that are otherwise absent in other lightweight editors.