As most of you have probably heard by now, the Atom editor is being discontinued in December. That’s sad, of course, especially for Atom users but there are some lessons to be drawn.
Eric Fraga has the TL;DR:
This is arguably one of the key reasons I continue to use #Emacs. And a strong vote for truly free software. @fsf https://t.co/wMAtPny8O2
#FBPE (@ericsfraga) June 9, 2022
For me, it’s not so much that #Emacs can do anything (it pretty much can) but that I am in control and can completely customise it to work how I want it to. And knowing that it won’t disappear out from under me means my investment in time is not lost.
#FBPE (@ericsfraga) June 9, 2022
It’s a good point. You devote considerable effort into mastering an editor and perhaps
writing extensions for it only to have it jerked out from under you. Fraga says that with Emacs he doesn’t have to worry about that. Bozhidar Batsov explains why that is in his Forever Emacs post. The short version is that Emacs is a community driven open source project1.
The demise of Atom shows that open source is not enough. After all, Atom was open source too but it wasn’t community driven. It was, rather, commercially driven by GitHub and GitHub, like every commercial entity, is mostly concerned with pursuing projects that they perceive will benefit them. Apparently, they no longer felt that Atom was a worthwhile investment in time and resources.
Now for the red meat. As the post title suggests, a natural question to ask is, “Which editor is next?” A reasonable candidate is VS Code. Like Atom, it’s an open source, commercially driven product. Furthermore, Microsoft has historically shown itself more than willing to dump any product that they felt was no longer meeting their needs.
If your PDF reader is discontinued it might be a little annoying but, really, who cares? There are plenty of them out there and they all work pretty much the same. If your editor goes away, it’s a much bigger deal. Most of us have put considerable effort into mastering our editor and making it an integral part of our workflow. If Microsoft does decided to sunset VS Code, what will all those users who flocked to it do?
Footnotes:
Yes, yes. Of course I know that Emacs is Free software. I’m merely making the point that the same principal applies to the larger universe of open software.