Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

The Atom code editor. It was good to have a mainstream alternative to VS Code, it's a pity it reached end-of-life.

iirc Atom was the original Electron project. Eventually VS Code came along and took all the good ideas - the modularity through extensions, and Electron / web based cross platform, but made it really fast and added IDE like language support through LSP. Atom may be dead now, but the idea lives on in VS Code and the new project by the original developers of Atom: Zed

> iirc Atom was the original Electron project.

Indeed (and the names are a clue). More specifically, Electron came out of the ideas in Atom, not the other way around.

Atom was by GitHub, and VS Code by Microsoft. As soon as Microsoft bought VS Code, Atom’s fate was sealed.

The creators went on to make Zed.

Checkout Zed or Pulsar. Made by people who worked on Atom.

Electron was originally named Atom Shell https://www.electronjs.org/blog/electron/

Atom Shell/Electron was from the very beginning something you could use separately from Atom as a framework for creating desktop apps using Chromium/Node.js.

You’re right, I misremembered that. Thank you for the correction.

> As soon as Microsoft bought VS Code

Correction: I meant “As soon as Microsoft bought GitHub”.