Atom: The Editor That Accidentally Built Its Own Killer

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

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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