In 2015, Atom 1.0 launched as a revolutionary free, open-source code editor built entirely on web technologies. It was the first of its kind—a hackable editor that anyone could customize using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

But buried deep in its codebase was something that would change software development forever and ultimately destroy Atom itself...

What started as a simple way to get Atom running on desktop became Electron, a framework now powering some of the most widely used applications on the planet: Slack, Discord, Microsoft Teams, Figma, Notion, and ironically, the very editor that killed Atom... Visual Studio Code.

This is the story of how a passion project accidentally created a billion-dollar framework, got acquired by its biggest competitor, and died so that its code could live on in everything.

By: @CodingWithLewis & @cocoasulphur 

---
MY 12K+ DISCORD 💬 https://discord.gg/GkrFX4zT2C

CONNECT WITH ME ON SOCIAL
📸 Instagram: https://instagram.com/lewismenelaws

🎚TikTok:https://tiktok.com/@lewismenelaws

🐣 Twitter: https://twitter.com/LewisMenelaws

My gear 💻 https://liinks.co/lewismenelaws
---

TIMESTAMPS
0:00 - Intro
0:37 - The Bar That Started GitHub
2:01 - Chris's Dream: A Hackable Editor
4:25 - The Birth of Atom Shell
6:22 - "It Was Just Built to Build Atom"
6:30 - The Learn to Code Boom
7:06 - Atom's Perfect Timing
8:13 - The Open Source Controversy
9:52 - Why Atom Shell Was Revolutionary
11:47 - Electron Is Born
12:07 - Electron's Fatal Flaw
13:16 - Microsoft Enters the Chat
17:04 - The $7.5 Billion Acquisition
18:23 - A Broken Promise
19:07 - Atom's Death
20:05 - The Ghost in Every Cursor

Coding with Lewis

Atom was a revolutionary open-source code editor built on web technologies that pioneered the Electron framework. Created by GitHub's Chris Wanstrath in 2015, Atom democratized code editor customization using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. However, Electron's architecture caused performance issues. Microsoft leveraged the same Electron framework to build Visual Studio Code, which proved significantly faster through better optimization. After Microsoft acquired GitHub in 2018, Atom development stalled despite promises of continued support. The editor was officially sunset in 2022, but its legacy lives on—Electron now powers billions of daily interactions in applications like Slack, Discord, and VS Code itself.

Atom: The Editor That Accidentally Built Its Own Killer

A guy from GitHub creates Atom with Electron
<ul>
<li>In response Microsoft starts to create VsCode with Electron</li>
<li>Coding in JS is a mess, Microsoft creates TypeScript</li>
<li>They decide to go open source on GitHub with those projects</li>
<li>They buy GitHub</li>
<li>Atom dies</li>
</ul>
This is without the whole Google’s Angular adopting Microsoft’s TypeScript making TypeScript very popular and decreasing the popularity of Angular because of the hard migration from JS to TS

Electron is kind of superseded by Zed, which is maintained by Atom devs