Community effort to keep Atom alive after GitHub discontinued it.
Atom (and Pulsar) is an Electron-based text editor featuring a package ecosystem, Git integration, and deep customizability through web technologies (HTML, CSS, JavaScript). Its "hackable" philosophy means nearly every aspect of the editor can be modified through community packages. The Electron framework itself was originally created for Atom before becoming widely adopted.
Atom was the text editor that changed everything — and then got killed by its own sibling. When GitHub launched Atom in 2014, the "hackable text editor" pioneered the Electron framework and showed the world that web technologies could power desktop applications. It was beloved by developers who valued customization above all else. Then Microsoft acquired GitHub in 2018, and the writing was on the wall: Microsoft already had VS Code, also built on Electron, and maintaining two competing editors made no business sense.
On June 8, 2022, GitHub officially announced Atom's sunset, with all repositories to be archived by December 15, 2022. The stated reason was the need to "prioritize technologies that enable the future of software development" — corporate-speak for "VS Code won, Atom lost, let's move on." The community, however, was not ready to move on.
The initial community response was the Atom-Community fork, but disagreements about long-term goals led to a split, and Pulsar was born as a separate effort. Version 1.0 launched on December 15, 2022 — the exact day Atom was officially archived, a deliberate act of symbolic defiance. The project positioned itself as not merely preserving Atom but modernizing it.
Under maintainers like Mauricio Szabo, Pulsar has made significant technical progress. The project updated Electron to version 30, bringing better performance, improved Wayland support for Linux users, and modern Node compatibility. Every commit to master is treated as a beta release, maintaining a rapid development cadence.
Pulsar occupies an interesting niche: it's the editor for people who loved Atom's hackability but refused to surrender to the VS Code monoculture. It's a small but dedicated community keeping the flame alive, proving that sometimes the most important forks are the ones that preserve choice itself.
GitHub launches Atom, the 'hackable text editor' built on Electron
Microsoft acquires GitHub; Atom's future becomes uncertain
GitHub announces Atom will be discontinued and archived
Pulsar v1.108.0 released as the earliest verifiable GitHub release
Pulsar updates Electron to v30, modernizing the platform significantly
Pulsar's impact is less about market share and more about preserving an alternative in an increasingly monocultural editor landscape. VS Code dominates with over 70% market share among developers, and Pulsar ensures that the Atom ecosystem — its packages, themes, and hackable philosophy — doesn't simply vanish.
The project also serves as a case study in what happens when a corporate parent kills an open-source project: if the community cares enough, the code survives. It may never rival VS Code's dominance, but that was never the point.