Atom editor
Ranked 23 of 56 text editors by recommenders
Free, clean-looking editor that longtime users loved and still use. Critics most often cite poor performance, slower than VS Code.
Free, clean-looking editor that longtime users loved and still use. Critics most often cite poor performance, slower than VS Code.
36 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 16
- criticize it
- 20
- approval share
- 44%
Recommended in 8 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: not recommended
- February 2026: not recommended
- March 2026: not recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: not recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 16 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 0.8 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, not met.
- Recommended in 8 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Loved by longtime users
“I will never have to worry about cursor or vs changing getting bought and moth balled like Atom (my favorite ide).”
Comment from 11 May 2026 in “Local AI needs to be the norm” “I just went back to Atom (rather Pulsar, the last good fork).”
Comment from 26 Jun 2026 in “We All Depend on Open Source. We Will Defend It Together” “Atom changed the way I use text editors”
Comment from 29 Apr 2026 in “Zed is 1.0” - Comment from 13 May 2026 in “Local AI needs to be the norm”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Poor performance, slower than rivals
“Despite attempts to make Atom—an Electron application—more responsive, it never reached the performance standards the team yearned for.”
Comment from 13 Nov 2025 in “Zed is our office” “atom was objectively worse on performance and a few other things i forget, but it felt so good to use”
Comment from 11 Dec 2025 in “Craft software that makes people feel something” “VSCode is another Electron application that ended up having better performance than Atom”
Comment from 13 Nov 2025 in “Zed is our office” - Comment from 2 Apr 2026 in “Cursor 3”
- Comment from 20 Nov 2025 in “Google Antigravity”
- Comment from 5 Jan 2026 in “I switched from VSCode to Zed”
- Comment from 20 Nov 2025 in “Google Antigravity”
- Comment from 22 Jan 2026 in “Threat Actors Expand Abuse of Microsoft Visual Studio Code”
Built on Electron, ships Chrome
“Despite attempts to make Atom—an Electron application—more responsive, it never reached the performance standards the team yearned for.”
Comment from 13 Nov 2025 in “Zed is our office” “The Atom editor spawned an entire class of app: Electron apps”
Comment from 9 Dec 2025 in “Damn Small Linux” “Atom started trend to ship Chrome alongside every single”
Comment from 7 Mar 2026 in “Helix: A post-modern text editor”
Other text editors people recommend
The four most recommended other text editors, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Zed | 700 | 430 | 62% | 13 | 6 mo57 owners | — |
| GNU Emacs | 648 | 207 | 76% | 13 | 20 yrs158 owners | Approved |
| Vim | 513 | 127 | 80% | 13 | 20 yrs55 owners | Approved |
| Visual Studio Code | 485 | 547 | 47% | 12 | 2 yrs13 owners | — |
| Atom editorThis page | 16 | 20 | 44% | 8 | — | — |
What people said
33 of the 39 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“16ms latency. And locally run.”
“VScode was objectively better than Atom”
“It's fair to say most of them are AI generated nowadays.”
“has similar concepts to what you're looking for”
“My biggest disappointment with Atom is that text constructs are single-type-only.”
“It is XML, so not all HTML5 is allowed.”
“2:1 is completely useless”
“the better format (atom) isn't used nearly as much”
“Thank you; that was a fun read! I had read that Atom was generally regarded as the technically superior format”
“I created Atom based on current research on agentic systems”
“everyone realized what hot shit Atom was and jumped ship”
“I just went back to Atom (rather Pulsar, the last good fork).”
“I'm throwing in my harness. Please support”
“the Atom ide which I loved”
“I will never have to worry about cursor or vs changing getting bought and moth balled like Atom (my favorite ide).”
“it's still more error-prone than Atom”
“This ended up being a much better spec.”
“I liked Atom's clean design”
“I like Zed for the same reason I liked Atom: it's very light.”
“Atom changed the way I use text editors”
“Atom was far slower than VS Code, despite both of them being built on Electron.”
“Atom started trend to ship Chrome alongside every single”
“I bounced off atom immediately”
“Atom's horrible performance issues”
“Atom and VSCode do not care about speed or snappiness”
“atom was objectively worse on performance and a few other things i forget, but it felt so good to use”
“The Atom editor spawned an entire class of app: Electron apps”
“Atom had performance and stability problems continuously through that period”
“the poor loading performance of Atom”
“Atom had already good and a lot of extensions.”
“I see stuff like Atom and VSCode as just vastly inferior forms of Emacs”
“Despite attempts to make Atom—an Electron application—more responsive, it never reached the performance standards the team yearned for.”
“VSCode is another Electron application that ended up having better performance than Atom”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.