+
+Before we go into that we would like to take the opportunity to yet again thank our wonderful community and everyone who contributes to Pulsar. By that we don't just mean those contributing to the code base but everyone, those people creating issues on GitHub, people taking part in conversations on our various social platforms, our generous financial donors and anyone who has helped promote Pulsar by any means - upvoting, boosting toots, social media comments and, of course, starring on GitHub.
+
+We know that the stars aren't everything but it does give us a good idea about our general growth and community awareness, you can see from the graph that we are still on a steady upwards trajectory and we don't have plans on slowing down just yet!
+
+## History of Pulsar
+
+### Creation of Atom
+
+
+
+Atom started out in 2008 being developed by GitHub's co-founder and then CEO Chris Wanstrath, but it wasn't until 2014 with the addition of Corey Johnson and Nathan Sobo to the team that things really got moving and we first saw the beta being released to the public. You can view the [original announcement ](https://web.archive.org/web/20140302005920/http://blog.atom.io/2014/02/26/introducing-atom.html) but the gist is that Atom was designed from the ground up to be a no-compromise mix of usability and hackability. They had realised there was a gap in the market between the former (Sublime, Textmate) and the latter (Vim, Emacs) and wanted to fill it. Initially the editor wasn't fully open source, but there were a bunch of libraries and packages which were. If you want to see what these early versions of Atom were like, these are still available in the original [atom/atom releases](https://github.com/atom/atom/releases). Back then it looked a little different to what we are used to today but you can still use that original theme in Pulsar! (Settings > Themes > UI Theme > Atom Dark/Light).
+
+
+
+Of course the thing that made Atom, Atom, was its underlying framework, something developed specifically for Atom called "Atom Shell", a cross-platform framework designed to allow web technologies to be used in a desktop application. You might know it better these days as [Electron](https://www.electronjs.org/blog/electron/). So yes, if you weren't aware before, this means that the Atom editor is directly responsible for the framework that allows a whole host of popular applications to exist - Discord, VSCode, Joplin, Slack and [far, far, more](https://www.electronjs.org/apps).
+
+Later in 2014 [GitHub announced](https://web.archive.org/web/20140506163807/http://blog.atom.io/2014/05/06/atom-is-now-open-source.html) that Atom would become fully open sourced under the MIT licence and invited the community to actively contribute to its development; it is under this licence that Pulsar is still developed.
+
+In 2015 [Atom 1.0](https://github.com/atom/atom/releases/tag/v1.0.0) was released and came with a [fantastic retro-futurisitic launch video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7aEiVwBAdk) to accompany it:
+
+
+
+### Microsoft acquires GitHub
+
+
+
+In June of 2018, Microsoft announced that they were [acquiring GitHub](https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2018/06/04/microsoft-github-empowering-developers/). This immediately raised concerns from the Atom user base because Microsoft had released their own Electron based text editor back in 2015 - Visual Studio Code. The concerns were that Atom would shut down development of Atom in favor of their own product as the two products were competing in very similar areas. To help alleviate the Atom community's worries, Microsoft CEO said in a [Reddit AMA](https://www.reddit.com/r/AMA/comments/8pc8mf/im_nat_friedman_future_ceo_of_github_ama/e0a2b2e/) that Atom was safe and development would continue on both products.
+
+### Tree-sitter lands in Atom
+
+
+
+You may have read our [series of blog posts](https://pulsar-edit.dev/tag/tree-sitter/) from [@savetheclocktower] and [@maurício szabo] that detail the huge amount of work that has been going on to upgrade our Tree-sitter implementation. This all goes back to 2018 when [Max Brunsfeld announced](https://github.blog/2018-10-31-atoms-new-parsing-system/) that Atom 1.32 would be shipping with a brand new parsing system that promised to be better and understanding your code and making it easier to write - Tree-sitter. Like how Atom Shell was created for Atom and was then widely used elsewhere, the same can be said of Tree-sitter which now sits at the heart of a number of other projects - Helix, Zed and even Github's own [Linguist](https://github.com/github-linguist/linguist) library.
+
+### GitHub sunsets Atom
+
+
+
+So, having just mentioned how Microsoft had promised that Atom and VS Code would both see active development and support, it became clear that interest in Atom development was decreasing, new features weren't forthcoming and issues were being left unresolved. The Atom.io blog page saw its last update in 2019 with the announcement of Atom 1.39 and all most releases after that featured fixes and updates but little in the way of exciting new features. The old Atom forum was shut down (but still browsable via the [Wayback Machine](https://web.archive.org/web/20210622052601/https://discuss.atom.io/) and moved to the, then new, [GitHub Discussions](https://github.com/atom/atom/discussions) page but there was little interaction from the original developers. The original package website was becoming unmaintained and hadn't had the "Featured" or "Trending" packages updated in a long time.
+
+Finally on the 8th of June 2022, GitHub made an announcement that Atom would be [sunset](https://github.blog/2022-06-08-sunsetting-atom/) in favour of VS Code and gave 6 months warning before the various services that make up the Atom ecosystem would go offline forever. The software itself and its source code would of course still be available via the archived repository but the package backend and Teletype services would no longer be available.
+
+### Atom Community
+
+
+
+As soon as the news hit there was a ton of activity. Some were looking for direct replacements for Atom, some were looking for active forks or continuations of the project. [Atom Community](https://atom-community.github.io/) was the logical place for these discussions. This was a community that had taken on the maintenance of a bunch of Atom packages (originally for the Abandoned Facebook [Nuclide](https://nuclide.io/) project to turn Atom into an IDE) and had since taken on other packages from the original Atom maintainers.
+
+At this time the Atom Community Discord server was rather active with discussions about what could be done. Could the community keep Atom alive? Could they take ownership of any of the original repos? Would a community project be allowed to use the original name? However, it became clear there was somewhat of a split in the goals of the group, some wanted to take Atom and radically change it, upgrade it and take it into the future, get it into a state it might have been in had development not slowed to a crawl. Others wanted to be a little more conservative, keep the Atom they knew and loved, make sure it was kept up to date with patches and fixes.
+
+With no real ability to reconcile and with such different goals in mind it was clear that the projects needed to go their own way. The group that wanted to see Atom reach its full potential split off and started work on what would, after a [community poll](https://discord.com/channels/737254137690980372/803109315480125514/990452760661098557), become Pulsar. Pulsar was chosen to represent the rebirth of the project, something that almost died entirely but that still emits pulses of energy and can feed on energy pumped into it.
+
+A new Discord server was created for the new community as well as a GitHub organisation in order to organise for the work to come.
+
+### Salvage operations begin
+
+
+
+One of the biggest problems was that time was not on our side. In under six months we would be losing the original Atom.io website and, most importantly, the package registry. The Atom.io package backend was not an open source project like the rest of the editor but was essential in keeping a list of published packages for Atom and serving them to its inbuilt package manager, APM. This is where [@confused-techie] was particularly instrumental in not only the creation of [a tool](https://github.com/confused-Techie/AtomPackagesArchive) to archive the entire package backend from Atom.io but the, from scratch, re-implementation of the backend service needed to serve the reborn editor.
+
+This was no mean feat and is too much to go into in this blog but, thankfully, this is all details in our [first ever blog post](https://pulsar-edit.dev/blog/20221127-confused-Techie-SunsetMisadventureBackend.html) if you really want to understand the full scale of the undertaking that was the archival and re-implementation of the Atom backend to turn it into the Pulsar Package Registry.
+
+Of course there was the main technical challenge here but this wasn't the only one, we had other things that had to be taken into account like what to do about packages with [no licence](https://pulsar-edit.dev/blog/20230319-confused-Techie-HowLicenseNoneDeletedPackages.html), or custom licences specific for Atom.io? We also had to deal with a huge amount of spam from Vietnamese and Thai gambling sites that had been hammering the original backend. To indicate the scale of the issue, 12k packages were archived compared to 405k just before atom.io finally shut down.
+
+### Modernizing the editor
+
+
+
+We had some big tasks ahead of us, changes needed to be made to get some traction on the project. We desperately wanted to keep the community alive but with the announcement people were fleeing. We had to get the project up and running to show that Pulsar was a serious continuation of the project and not just a fork on GitHub with a renamed readme.
+
+- **Building from source** - Atom had a rather complicated and now rather fragile way of [bootstrapping](https://atom-flight-manual-archive.github.io/hacking-atom/sections/hacking-on-atom-core/#cloning-and-bootstrapping) itself for development. One of the first tasks was to simplify this to a process much familiar to those using node.js and Electron which is far more robust and makes it much easier to get involved with Pulsar development.
+- **Rebranding** - We had to start removing Atom references and replacing with Pulsar. This is not an easy "find and replace" job as `atom` is used extensively within the APIs and therefore something we had to be careful of. We also had to decide on a new logo for the project and add it to the application along with updates to GitHub, Forum etc. links.
+- **Decaffeination** - Atom was originally written mostly in [CoffeeScript](https://coffeescript.org/), a great language at the time that compiles to JavaScript. With more and more functionality being introduced into JavaScript, CoffeeScript was quickly becoming obsolete and creating a barrier to entry for contribution. The original Atom team had started this process but over time we were able to achieve the goal of complete decaffeination by Pulsar 1.109 and in PPM in 1.110.
+- **CI and build** - We needed an automated platform to build our binaries and run tests. For this we went with [CirrusCI](https://cirrus-ci.org/) which had a more than generous free tier and reliably built our binaries and ran our tests for over a year. We have since had to [move away](https://pulsar-edit.dev/blog/20230903-confused-Techie-pulsars-ci.html) from CirrusCI.
+- **Versioning** - Atom's last (at the time) release was Atom 1.60 which left us with some issues. We wanted to stay with [Semantic Versioning](https://semver.org/) as Atom had but what should our first full release be? We could reset the counter back to 1.0 but that would cause packages looking for a minimum version of Atom to break. We could move to 2.0 but again there was an issue with packages, which were specifically looking only for 1.x versions but this time as a *maximum* version. We could continue the numbering from Atom but this seemed like we weren't getting a clean break as a new project. In the end we decided to jump from 1.60 to 1.100 - a number that would give us a clean start whilst avoiding the issues with package version limits.
+- **Electron updates** - This was, and still is, one of our biggest goals for Pulsar. When development slowed in Atom it caused the Electron version to get further and further behind. At the time Pulsar was born it was using Electron 9 which went EOL in early 2021. We managed to get Pulsar onto Electron 12 but to go further required some rather extensive changes which are still being worked on. Read our blog post on [The Quest for Electron LTS](https://pulsar-edit.dev/blog/20240124-mauricioszabo-the-quest-for-electron-lts.html) for more info on the topic.
+
+With this work either complete or underway we made our first tagged release of Pulsar - [1.100.0](https://github.com/pulsar-edit/pulsar/releases/tag/v1.100.0-beta) on the same day that Atom was finally sunset.
+
+### Website, documentation and socials
+
+
+
+As mentioned, we needed to make Pulsar seem like a serious project in order to make sure people looking for Atom alternatives (and those looking for VS Code alternatives) knew we were around. To this end we created the [pulsar-edit.dev](https://pulsar-edit.dev) website to serve as a hub for our download links, news & blog posts, documentation and links for social platforms for people to get help.
+
+We archived a copy of the original Atom flight manual as well as creating an edited, rebranded and updated version of it to work with our website framework to make sure that we had documentation we could link to. We made a download page for people to find the latest releases easily rather than relying purely on a GitHub release link and added. This was a substantial amount of work that was split between multiple people and took a while to complete. Could we have *technically* got by without this? Probably, but we wanted to show the whole community we were deadly serious about out commitment to the project and wanted to make sure that it came across this way to anyone who stumbled upon us.
+
+We also wanted to make sure that we were catering to as many avenues of social communication as possible. We already had the Discord server but we didn't have anywhere that catered for longer form or asynchronous content. To this end we set up a [subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/pulsaredit/), [forum](https://github.com/orgs/pulsar-edit/discussions) and [Mastodon account](https://fosstodon.org/@pulsaredit) to try to cover as many avenues as possible to make sure people could use their preferred method of contact (where reasonable). We later added [Lemmy](https://lemmy.ml/c/pulsaredit) as a Reddit-style option for those who like the format but would rather not use the Subreddit.
+
+## The future
+
+
+
+That just about covers the past and we hope this fills in some of the blanks in the project timeline up until this point. We also hope it clarifies where the project came from and how it came to be. We do not want to forget the past, Pulsar wouldn't exist without Atom but neither do we want to be tied to it forever, we are forging our own path for the project. We need to both recognise our past as well as be confident in our future direction.
+
+For details of what has been going on in the project since we got going in earnest you can refer to our collection of [blog posts](https://pulsar-edit.dev/blog/) but what can we expect for the future?
+
+The work to get us onto modern versions of the underlying technologies of Pulsar will continue. This is still progressing nicely and we hope to have a big announcement some time in the future when this has been achieved.
+
+We feel we have somewhat outgrown our current website. We needed to get things up and running as quickly as possible which, unfortunately meant using a rather opinionated framework and theme which has made it more difficult to do what we want with it. To this end we are planning to slowly introduce replacements for the various areas of the website, starting with our documentation, which will be much more flexible and allow us much greater control.
+
+We realise that more attention needs to be given to our [Pulsar Cooperative](https://github.com/pulsar-cooperative/) initiative. There are still plenty of packages out there in need of love that no single person is necessarily comfortable of maintaining alone. We want to make sure everyone knows this is an option to get changes made to the packages they can't do without. We achieved some initial success with this but we have since let things fall to the wayside a little so we just need to give some love to this area of the project.
+
+Of course if there is anything you think is missing from the project then make sure to let us know via our various [social channels](https://pulsar-edit.dev/community.html), we want to hear what we could be doing better.
+
+***
+
+We have already said it above but thank you so much to everyone in our wonderful community, this project simply wouldn't be where it is without your involvement and contribution, no matter how small. You really do make this project not only possible but rewarding. It is always a wonderful feeling seeing Pulsar recommended on various social platforms and blogs and it makes it all worth it.
+
+So thanks again and here is to the next 1000 stars!
+
+- The Pulsar Team
+
+[@savetheclocktower]: https://github.com/savetheclocktower
+[@maurício szabo]: https://github.com/mauricioszabo
+[@confused-techie]: https://github.com/confused-Techie
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