Why a new fork?

[ottok]

Hi!

I am a huge Atom fan and glad to see more people working on it.

But why did you create a new fork? Why don't you contribute to https://github.com/pulsar-edit/pulsar?

[iahung3]

How could he know there was already an active fork?

[ottok]

Well, at least now you know 😁

[Alex313031]

@ottok @iahung3 Cuz I don't like Pulsar, wanted to add my own packages and branding, and updated to Electron 12.

[Alex313031]

@ottok @iahung3 I already knew about Pulsar, as well as Atom-Community, and have used patches from both in this fork. Atom-Community is out of date. Pulsar is very good, but I wanted a vanilla Atom experience (and update to Electron 12).

[ottok]

Thanks for the information. Pulsar devs are already testing Electron 28: https://pulsar-edit.dev/blog/20240124-mauricioszabo-the-quest-for-electron-lts.html#things-work-fine-juuuust-kidding

Upstream Electron will soon release version 30: https://releases.electronjs.org/

I am a bit of an open source idealist, so naturally I would wish that everyone who enjoyed Atom and wants to keep that legacy going could collaborate and work on one strong and widely used fork, which right now seems to be Pulsar.

[rubyFeedback]

ottok wrote:

I am a bit of an open source idealist, so naturally I would wish that everyone who enjoyed Atom and wants to keep that legacy going could collaborate and work on one strong and widely used fork, which right now seems to be Pulsar.

I think you need not worry. In a few years things may change and then it becomes more clear which fork or code base is going to prevail - both, none, or one. It's all possible.

An example for this is libui versus libui-ng. libui is just about totally inactive: https://github.com/andlabs/libui however had andlabs said he may resume work one day, perhaps with a different code base. (libui is about a cross-platform GUI layer ultimately). Meanwhile libui-ng has been forked to add patches to the libui code base: https://github.com/libui-ng/libui-ng

The latter is semi-active - not super-active but semi-active. Patches and pull requests are accepted, but it is very slow-going overall. I think this is the case with many open source projects; sometimes they are more active, sometimes less. I think with regard to pulsar versus atom-ng, let's revisit this in a year or two and see how active these are. Ultimately the question for the end user is whether these allow for useful applications and a nice ecosystem (electron, atom etc... and associated issues, in particular in regards to execution speed but also efficiency and development speed). The future will show us the path!