Pulsar is born as a fork of Atom and VS Code
The launch of Pulsar has been announced which is the successor to Atom which which according to the previously announced plan, on December 15, GitHub ended support for the Atom code editor and moved the project repository to read-only file mode.
It should be remembered that in the middle of this year (in June) GitHub announced the end of development of the Atom code editor and that on December 15 of this year, all projects in the Atom repositories would be converted to archive mode and will be read-only.
The decision to end Atom support it was because GitHub intends to focus on Microsoft Visual Studio Code (VS Code) which is open source and more popular, which was created as an Atom plugin, and GitHub Codespaces, a cloud-based development environment based on VS Code.
We can point out that, despite the fact that the latest version of Atom 1.60 was released in March, in recent years development has been carried out according to the residual principle and no significant new features have been introduced into the project for a long time.
In addition to that recently, new cloud-based code tools that can run in the browser have advanced, and the number of users of the standalone Atom app has decreased remarkably. The Electron framework, based on developments created on Atom, has long been a separate project and will continue to be developed without changes.
It should be noted that the Atom editor code is released under the MIT license, and a fork of the Atom Community (GitHub) was founded a few years before Atom was shut down, with the goal of providing alternative builds generated by the independent community and including components additional tools to build an integrated development environment.
After the collapse of the main project, some developers independent joined the work on Atom Community, but the conservative goals and development model of this product did not suit everyone.
The result was the creation of another fork which has the name Press, which included some of the founders of the Atom Community.
The new fork the goal has been set of not only providing an editor that mimics Atom functionality, but also update the architecture and promote important new features, like a new API to interact with the server and support for smart search.
Another fundamental difference between Pulsar and the Atom Community was a different policy for accepting changes and the intention to minimize the barrier for new developers to enter the project and to simplify the promotion of innovations (anyone has the opportunity to suggest an improvement that they consider necessary).
When making decisions important in the Pulsar community, it is proposed to use a general vote in which everyone can participate. When accepting minor improvements, it is proposed to use feedback based on the discussion and review of pull requests, in which everyone can also participate.
The day Atom support ended, the first test version of Pulsar was released, in which, in addition to the rebranding, the backend was replaced to work with the extension repository: the proprietary Package Backend was replaced with an open analogue, and existing packages were ported and transferred to the Pulsar Package Repository.
The new version also provides support for installing Git plugin packages, updated the Electron 12 platform and Node.js 14 framework, removed deprecated experimental features and telemetry collection code, and added builds for the ARM architecture for Linux and macOS.
Finally it is worth mentioning that about Atom, the editor code is distributed under the MIT license and those who wish to continue development can take the opportunity to create a fork.
As for those interested in being able to learn more about Pulsar, as well as consult its code, documentation and installation instructions, you can do so. from the link below.