Atom The IDE That Accidentally Built its Own Killer
On June 25, 2015, Chris Wanstrath celebrated Atom 1.0’s stable release—a free, open-source code editor built on web technologies that promised to democratize development. What started as a passion project in 2007, sparked by a chance meeting at a Ruby meetup where Wanstrath encountered Tom Preston-Werner demoing an early GitHub prototype called Grit, evolved into a hackable editor inspired by Emacs but powered by HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
Atom’s journey wasn’t smooth. Shelved amid GitHub duties, it revived in 2011 using the ACE editor in a WebView, then pivoted to Chromium Embedded Framework and Node.js via Node-WebKit in 2012. This fusion birthed “Atom Shell”—a tool so potent it was rebranded Electron in 2015, decoupling it from Atom to fuel cross-platform desktop apps.
Electron’s appeal was immediate: leverage familiar web stacks for native-like apps, sidestep C++ hurdles of frameworks like Qt, enable rapid iterations, and reuse web codebases. Developers flocked to it for projects beyond editing, and giants followed—Slack, Discord, Microsoft Teams all run on Electron today, powering billions of interactions.
Atom’s 2014 beta exploded in popularity amid a surge in new programmers, its lightweight design and package ecosystem outshining bloated incumbents like Visual Studio. Backlash over its initial closed-source status echoed Wanstrath’s open-source advocacy, but relicensing under MIT quelled critics, growing its user base to over 1.1 million.
Yet Electron’s bloat—bundling full Chromium and Node.js per app—haunted performance. Atom took seconds to open small files, guzzling 400MB RAM. Enter Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code (VS Code) in 2015, built on Monaco (evolved from their browser editor) and Electron. Skeptics dismissed it, but optimizations shone: isolated extension processes, pre-optimized Monaco, binary encoding. VS Code launched 4x faster, went fully open-source, and birthed a thriving marketplace.
The 2018 Microsoft-GitHub acquisition for $7.5B raised alarms. New CEO Nat Friedman promised dual support on Reddit, but reality diverged—VS Code iterated monthly while Atom stagnated, commits plummeting 76% in six months. By 2022, Atom sunsetted, repositories archived by late 2022, with Microsoft pivoting to cloud tools like GitHub Codespaces. Community forks like Pulsar emerged, but Atom’s era ended.
Atom’s legacy? Electron endures. VS Code dominates 2025 surveys—15-54% market share per PYPL and Stack Overflow data—holding off AI challengers despite Cursor’s 18% adoption and Zed’s buzz. Cursor, a VS Code fork with AI-native features like Composer and Visual Editor, hit $500M ARR by mid-2025, serving half the Fortune 500 with real-time collaboration and agent workflows. Zed, Rust-powered by ex-Atom contributors, gained Windows support in October 2025, previewing Dev Containers and AI commits, amassing momentum.
Electron powers it all: VS Code’s blinking cursors carry Atom’s ghost. In open source, death spawns successors—Zed’s 70K+ stars, Cursor’s explosive growth. As 2025 Stack Overflow data shows developers craving AI tools atop proven editors, Atom didn’t lose; its killer became the industry standard, forked eternally.
The Human Continuity
Section titled “The Human Continuity”But there’s a deeper story here than just software genealogy. Zed isn’t just a spiritual successor; it’s a personal redemption. Nathan Sobo, the original creator of Atom, is also the architect behind Zed. For him, the pivot from Electron (which he helped pioneer) to Rust wasn’t just a technical decision—it was a correction of his own legacy’s greatest flaw: performance. In an industry obsessed with “new,” there’s profound poetry in a creator returning to fix what he broke, proving that open source isn’t just about codebases, but about the people who learn, fail, and build again.