Will the atom sunsetting result in a new influx of Emacs users? How can we facilitate them more?

Not likely - the most relevant replacement for Atom for them would be VSC or perhaps Sublime Text.

I switched from Atom to VSCode years ago, and I'm actually surprised that it took so long to sunset ;) Atom was slower and less stable than VSCode, in my experience. It was amazing back in the day, though.

I don't think so. Pretty much everyone that was using atom will go to vscode.

Both owned by Microsoft, this is as intended.

Anyone actually using Atom started way before Github was acquired by Msft. The reason vscode is the best choice for them is because it's the most similar FOSS editor that's also any good. The only other serious option is Sublime. So tell me, would you rather they use a proprietary editor over a FOSS one because the latter is made by msft?

Microsoft’s decision was made in the interests of Microsoft, not open-source, even if Nadella’s Microsoft is a very different place than its predecessors. If they thought Atom users would migrate en masse to Emacs, they wouldn’t have discontinued it, but some way to merge the products to keep the user base on board.

How is this any different from the maintainer of any other FOSS product stepping back from it? Because the product was no longer being used much or because they moved onto other things?

and you could even program Atom in ClojureScript, via a REPL, which was very promising, just like in LightTable... I wonder what caused the instabilities?... Is it the sprawling class hierarchy? Alan Kay proved that you can have extremely capable systems made up of the fraction of the code we have in our programs these days. Here is a great talk on this topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubaX1Smg6pY&t=2428s

Who cares, you do you

Atom already has a spiritual successor in private alpha: https://zed.dev made by the same people who started Atom, so I would think they might get a lot of the attention, alongside VSCode.

Thanks for the link. What a fantastic talk!

Not likely, most ppl who i know use Emacs where because they were introduced by someone and it stuck with them, most ppl will get the first out of the box editor and stick with it, maybe a couple will get to play with Spacemacs or Doom Emacs though .

Most FOSS products not backed by a corporation are not in service to a larger strategy.

And yet a larger company abandoning a FOSS product and a small group of maintainers abandoning a FOSS product are two functionally identical events with the same impact on the community.

Corporations' strategies change far more often than individuals' interests. How many other FOSS editors do you know of that are abandoned?

Xi Remacs Lime Text Are three that immediately come to mind that I was personally interested in.

I don’t think so. Someone who still uses atom is most likely going to switch to vs code

I reckon they'll go to VSCode or Sublime. If Emacs had worked better for them they would have been using it already. Emacs, at least in my settings (Common Lisp, Clojure) is closer to VSCode than Sublime or Atom. Atom was't a good replacement for Emacs. It was a replacement for Vim or Sublime. VSCode is closer to Emacs. However the jump Atom -> VSCode isn't that big of a shock than Anything -> Emacs. Atom was modern editor targeted at hipsters. If someone told me that GNU Emacs is younger than me (1987) I wouldn't believe it. We use VSCode at work for programming Python. Even non-programmers (I'm the only member of the dev team who has a Master's from CS) were able to pick both VSCode and Python quickly and with enough guidance write useable code. Can't imagine that with Emacs. The upfront time investment is a huge barrier of entry.

Everything the community needs to do anyway. Focus harder on Elisp. Gut the default bindings. Improve the flow of code and configuration from individual to curated to core.

I don't think that many users of Atom will switch to GNU Emacs. My guess is that Atom users do have little to none switching costs to a very similar IDE such as Visual Studio Code. And they don't have "The Emacs Lock-In Effect" as I've described on https://karl-voit.at/2021/07/23/emacs-lock-in/ Emacs users typically do have tinkered with their setup, invested many hours for customization of all sorts and they are using Emacs not only as an IDE. This is not how a typical Atom user was using his/her Atom. And if this Emacs Lock-In-Effect is not an issue, you can switch to the next best IDE without much effort any time. The typical business project run-time is much shorter than the typical life-time of any software solution and therefore, you're free to choose your tools for short- or medium-time projects. Only if you focus on the long-run, tools like GNU Emacs do provide substantial benefits. *Ceterum autem censeo* [*don't contribute anything relevant in web forums like Reddit only*](https://karl-voit.at/2020/10/23/avoid-web-forums)