Atom Alternatives After GitHub Retired the Editor

Atom is dead. GitHub announced on June 8, 2022 that it would archive Atom and every repository in the Atom organization on December 15, 2022, and it did. The sunset post lists what that means in practice: Atom package management stops working, there are no more security updates, and Teletype no longer works. Old binaries stay downloadable from the release pages, but nothing behind them is maintained.

GitHub's stated reason was that Atom had seen no significant feature work for years while the company put its effort into Visual Studio Code and Codespaces. So the replacements fall into three groups. Pulsar keeps Atom itself alive. Zed and Lapce rethink the editor in Rust. VS Code, VSCodium, Sublime Text and Kate are mature editors that took most of Atom's users.

Prices below are as of November 6, 2026. Our method is on How we review tools.

Quick comparison

Pulsar

Pulsar is what Atom became after GitHub walked away. A volunteer team forked the code, rebuilt the package backend and kept shipping. The project site calls it a community-led, hyper-hackable editor for macOS, Windows and Linux, and its own package repository replaces the atom.io registry that went dark in 2022.

It is still moving. The Pulsar blog lists 1.131.0 in February 2026 as the release that moved to Electron 30, then 1.132.0 in May with a new core terminal package built on XTerm.js. Version 1.133.0 followed on October 29, 2026 and moved to Electron 32.3.3, per the release notes. The latest is 1.133.1 from November 1, which fixes a Linux renderer crash. The ppm command takes the place of Atom's apm for installing packages from the terminal.

Best for: Atom users who want the same editor, the same UI and as many of their old packages as possible.

Pricing:

• Free and open source

Watch out for:

• The Electron 30 move broke some community packages. The blog post from December 2, 2025 warns that older packages may need updates, and many Atom-era packages have no active maintainer.
• Packaging still has rough edges. The 1.131.3 release notes warn that an rpm scriptlet in 1.131.0 and 1.131.1 could remove pulsar and ppm from /usr/bin during upgrades.

Official site: Pulsar.

Zed

Zed is the next editor from Nathan Sobo and the team that created Atom. This time they dropped Electron and wrote the editor in Rust on GPUI, their own GPU-accelerated UI framework, per zed.dev. The layout will feel familiar to Atom users: a file tree, tabs, a command palette and split panes.

The source opened in early 2024. InfoQ reports GPL for the editor, AGPL for the server parts and Apache 2 for GPUI. The AI features are optional, and the free plan works with your own API keys.

Best for: Former Atom users who want a modern, fast editor from the people who designed Atom.

Pricing:

• Personal: $0 forever, with your own API keys or external agents
• Pro: $10 per month, unlimited edit predictions and $5 of tokens included
• Business: $30 per seat per month

Watch out for:

• Zed needs a capable GPU. The docs require a DirectX 11 GPU on Windows, warn that VMs may run slowly, and require Vulkan on Linux.
• Atom packages do not run in Zed. Its extension catalogue is much smaller than Pulsar's or VS Code's, so check your must-have plugins first.

Official site: Zed.

Visual Studio Code

GitHub's sunset post names VS Code as one of the tools it chose to focus on instead of Atom. Both editors run on Electron, so the feel is familiar: a sidebar tree, a command palette, split panes and JSON settings. The FAQ says it is free for private and commercial use.

The pace is the main difference from late Atom. Version 1.145 shipped on November 3, 2026, and new releases now arrive every week, per the VS Code tags. Remote SSH, Dev Containers, WSL and a browser build at vscode.dev cover jobs Atom never handled well. If you later outgrow it, our VS Code alternatives guide picks up from there.

Best for: Most former Atom users, especially teams that want one editor with an extension for every language.

Pricing:

• Free for private and commercial use

Watch out for:

• Telemetry is on by default. You can set telemetry.telemetryLevel to off, but the FAQ notes that extensions can collect their own data.
• Memory use climbs with extensions. A GitHub issue reports 2.2 to 2.5 GB on a small Python project even with extensions disabled.

Official site: Visual Studio Code. Our listing: Visual Studio Code.

VSCodium

Atom was open source and asked for no account. VSCodium is the nearest thing in the VS Code family. It builds Microsoft's open source repository, publishes MIT-licensed binaries with telemetry disabled, and installs through WinGet, Homebrew, Chocolatey, Snap and Flatpak, per vscodium.com.

The latest build on GitHub is 1.143.17232 from October 28, 2026. It is based on VS Code 1.143.1, so it trails Microsoft's release by a version or two. Extensions come from the Open VSX Registry instead of Microsoft's Marketplace. Our VSCodium alternatives page covers other open source options.

Best for: Atom users who picked it partly because it was fully open source and want to keep it that way.

Pricing:

• Free and open source (MIT-licensed binaries)

Watch out for:

• The extensions doc says Microsoft's Remote Development extensions and the C# and C/C++ debuggers only work in the official VS Code build.

Official site: VSCodium. Our listing: VSCodium.

Sublime Text

Sublime Text was the editor Atom set out to replace, and it outlived Atom. Sublime is a native app, not an Electron web view, and build 4215 from September 25, 2026 runs on Windows 10 and later, macOS 10.13 and later, and Linux on x64 and ARM64, per the download page.

Multiple cursors, Goto Anything and the command palette are the same ideas Atom borrowed. Package Control provides plugins, though the catalogue is smaller than Atom's was at its peak. You can evaluate it for free, but continued use needs a licence.

Best for: People who left Atom because of speed and are happy to pay once for a native editor.

Pricing:

• Personal licence: $99 with 3 years of updates, one key for all your computers and operating systems
• Business: $65 per seat per year for 1 to 10 seats, falling to $50 per seat beyond 50 seats

Watch out for:

• Updates are tied to the licence window. A forum thread from August 2024 shows users hitting a LICENSE UPGRADE REQUIRED message after build 4180.

Official site: Sublime Text. Our listing: Sublime Text.

Lapce

Lapce is a younger Rust editor with a native GUI built on the Floem toolkit. The project page lists built-in LSP support, Tree-sitter highlighting, a terminal, a modal Vim-style mode and remote development that runs the heavy work on another machine. Plugins compile to WASI, so authors can write them in several languages instead of only JavaScript.

Downloads cover a Windows installer and portable zip, a universal macOS .dmg and Linux tarballs for x86 and ARM. The newest stable release on GitHub is v0.4.6 from January 21, 2026, with nightly builds in between.

Best for: Tinkerers who liked Atom's hackability and want to try a light Rust editor with remote editing built in.

Pricing:

• Free and open source

Watch out for:

• Lapce is still a 0.x project. The newest stable tag is v0.4.6 from January 2026, and the project page still advertises 0.4.2.
• The plugin list is short next to Pulsar or VS Code, so expect gaps for niche languages.

Official site: Lapce.

Kate

KDE's Kate is a good home for Linux users who used Atom as a lightweight IDE. The Kate site lists an embedded terminal, split views, a project sidebar, multi-cursor editing and LSP completion for more than 400 languages.

Kate is free software under LGPL and MIT terms, as Wikipedia summarises. Windows users can install it from the Microsoft Store.

Best for: Linux developers who want a free, fast editor with LSP and a terminal and no account or telemetry.

Pricing:

• Free and open source

Watch out for:

• The macOS builds on the download page are nightly builds recommended for testing, so Mac users should pick Zed or Sublime Text instead.
• There is no Atom-style package store. Kate's extra features come from the plugins it ships with.

Official site: Kate.

How to choose

When to stay with Atom

There is no safe way to stay on Atom itself. Its package manager stopped working in December 2022 and it gets no security fixes, so treat any remaining install as unpatched software. If you want to keep the Atom experience, move to Pulsar. It is the only option here that still installs Atom-format packages.

Frequently asked questions