community

Okay, so recently I wrote about the Atom editor and how the community took efforts to revive the editor after the sunset announcement from Microsoft.

By now, things have changed a little bit. There was some disagreement on how the project should be handled from the atom-community maintainers: few people that were on the leadership decided that we should make “graceful changes” – things that do not disrupt too much the editor, small PRs that can be reviewed, and lots of stability. And I actually agree – that’s the way a project should be handled!

Except there’s a big catch: for me, this only works when the project is alive. The Atom editor is dead, for better or for worse. It’s announced already, so there’s no way “graceful changes” will be able to keep the editor alive or even relevant than, for example, VSCode – even for people that want a lightweight alternative or have want a different approach on handling code.

There were other disagreements on the roadmap – for some people, they wanted Atom to have the same functionality that it have today. And, speaking for me, I don’t agree – I think there are functionalities on the the Atom editor that are simply too much: for example, native support for CoffeeScript and TypeScript. I firmly believe that all Atom/Pulsar plug-ins should be transpiled – and that’s not only because the editor should only run JavaScript, it because it’s more reliable that way (the native support can fail between different tooling, language versions, etc. As an example, Atom supports plug-ins written in CoffeeScript 1.12 – and the current version is 2.7.0). Also, if a plug-in is bundled in a single JavaScript file, it’s actually more efficient both in terms of memory and performance for the editor.
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