Requiem for a Text Editor

I’ve written various places before about how much better it is in so many ways to write in simple plaintext format. My primary tool for doing so for the last decade or so has become a trusted friend across Mac, Linux, and Windows. Its always-on icon looks like this.

Now it seems that a sad day is soon arriving, Atom, the beloved cross-platform text editor and developer framework is being sunset on December 15th, 2022.

After that date, the app will still work for a while, but only kinda:

• Pre-built Atom binaries can continue to downloaded from the atom repository releases
• Atom package management will stop working
• No more security updates
• Teletype will no longer work
• Deprecated redirects that supported downloading Electron symbols and headers will no longer work

I’ve been moving more towards Obsidian in the past few months, as it is a better markdown editor and much better place to build a second brain. But it’s nowhere near the text editor that Atom has been, so I’ve often found myself defaulting back to what is most familiar instead. No more.

I guess I’ll have to find another cross-platform text wrangling engine for all my mad science needs. Probably Komodo Edit, which I’ve used before for coding projects.

But it won’t be the same! (sniffle)