Atom, Electron, and the Editor That Built Its Own Executioner

There is a particular kind of technological tragedy that only software can produce. Not the kind where something simply fails, but the kind where it succeeds so completely that it makes itself obsolete. Atom belongs squarely in that category.

If you took a forced hiatus from tech sometime around the late 2000s or early 2010s, you likely missed Atom entirely—and with it, Electron. That’s understandable. Atom wasn’t just a new editor. It was a philosophical pivot point. And Electron wasn’t just a framework. It was an accidental revolution that rewired how desktop software would be built for the next decade.

This is the story of how a code editor changed the industry, got eaten by its own invention, and still won anyway.

The Problem Atom Set Out to Solve

Before Atom, developer tools fell into two camps. On one side were venerable powerhouses like Emacs and Vim—infinitely extensible, brutally hostile. On the other were polished corporate IDEs—capable, bloated, and often overkill.

Customization existed, but it came at a price: proprietary scripting languages, steep learning curves, and communities that prized endurance over accessibility. Atom’s creator, Chris Wanstrath, saw this as unnecessary friction.

His core idea was disarmingly simple:

What if the people who already know HTML, CSS, and JavaScript could shape their tools without permission?

That idea mattered. It reframed extensibility not as a privilege for the initiated, but as a baseline expectation. Atom wasn’t just “hackable.” It was hackable using the most common languages on the planet.

That choice forced a technical reckoning.

The Accidental Birth of Electron

You can’t build a desktop application entirely in web technologies without confronting reality. Browsers are sandboxed. Desktop apps aren’t. Somewhere, something has to bridge that gap.

Atom’s early experiments relied on embedded browser views, but those approaches were fragile, platform-specific, and painful to maintain. The breakthrough came when Atom’s team combined three elements:

• Chromium, for rendering

• Node.js, for system access

• A glue layer that made them behave like a single runtime

This internal engine was called Atom Shell. It existed solely to make Atom possible.

Then someone noticed the obvious.

Atom Shell wasn’t just useful for Atom.

Renamed Electron, it escaped its original purpose and became a general-purpose framework for building desktop apps with web technologies.

Atom didn’t just ship a product. It created infrastructure.

The Faustian Bargain of Electron

Electron’s appeal was immediate and overwhelming.

One codebase. All platforms. Familiar languages. Rapid iteration. A massive pool of developers who didn’t need to learn C++, Qt, or platform-specific APIs.

The cost was equally real.

Every Electron app ships with:

• A full Chromium rendering engine

• A Node.js runtime

• The application itself

You don’t “run” an Electron app so much as you launch a small browser every time you open one.

The consequences were predictable. Memory usage ballooned. Startup times lagged. Performance complaints became folklore. The reputation stuck: Electron apps were heavy, sluggish, and wasteful.

Yet despite all of that, Electron spread. Because developer velocity won.

Atom vs. Its Own Descendant

Atom itself paid the price for its creation.

As Electron-powered applications proliferated, Atom’s weaknesses became impossible to ignore. Extension loading blocked the UI. Startup times dragged. Opening large files could feel absurdly slow.

And then came the moment that sealed its fate.

Microsoft entered the picture.

How Visual Studio Code Got It Right

Microsoft had been watching Atom carefully. They had their own browser-based editor core—Monaco—but it hadn’t found traction on its own.

When they adopted Electron for Visual Studio Code, skepticism was immediate. Electron already had a reputation, and Microsoft didn’t exactly have a reputation for lightweight tools.

Then VS Code launched.

And it was fast.

The difference wasn’t the framework. It was the engineering discipline applied on top of it:

• Extensions ran in isolated processes

• The UI loaded immediately, extensions later

• Core editor functionality was aggressively optimized

• Data was encoded efficiently, not lazily

VS Code demonstrated something crucial:

Electron wasn’t doomed to be slow. Bad architecture was.

That distinction mattered.

The Acquisition That Ended the Story

When Microsoft acquired GitHub, Atom’s future became an open question. Reassurances were given. Promises were made. Communities were asked to trust.

Then reality set in.

VS Code shipped monthly. Atom stagnated. Contributors left. Plugin developers hedged or migrated outright. Within a year, Atom’s development cadence collapsed.

In 2022, Atom was officially sunset.

The language was polite. Corporate. Sanitized.

For the developers who had poured unpaid labor into Atom’s ecosystem, it felt familiar. Build value. Create community. Watch priorities shift. Get left behind.

Why Atom Still Won

Atom died.

Electron didn’t.

Slack, Discord, Microsoft Teams, and countless other applications run on the framework Atom created. Billions of daily interactions trace back to the same architectural gamble.

Even the backlash—performance-focused editors written in Rust, experimental forks, AI-enhanced descendants—exists because Atom proved the model viable.

Open source doesn’t die cleanly. It mutates.

Atom’s code lives on in its competitors, its successors, and in the very editor that replaced it.

Every blinking cursor in VS Code carries Atom’s ghost.

And when VS Code eventually falls—and it will—someone will fork it, too.

That’s not failure.

That’s how software history actually works.