While the original team that was working on Atom-Community is now the team creating Pulsar, they are not the same.
They are two separate forks of Atom. They have separate goals, separate contributors, and separate editors.
Now of course any open source developer knows that teamwork across organizations and repos is essential to succeed, so in that vein Pulsar-Edit uses contributions from Atom-Community, and hopefully in the future that reverses to let Atom-Community use the wins of Pulsar.
So with the above said if you have questions about Pulsar, or for the team working on it, please contact us on our GitHub Discussions, the affected Repo, or on our Discord Server.
While more effort on a single project is correct, since we are all volunteers here, effort on a project you believe in is most important.
Due to management, and goal differences a split was needed, since otherwise the team working on a successor of Atom would no longer be working together on any successor.
The goal of Pulsar is the same as many others, to create a successor of Atom, once it's sunset.
And for this successor of Atom, we have some hard beliefs on how this is accomplished, mainly through modernizing everything, making the barrier to entry of contributing as low as possible, to allow anyone to make the changes they want to see.
Well nobody, and everyone. Pulsar is a volunteer and community driven project. While there are members that have administrative rights for the organization, or administrative rights for the repos within a team, a large consideration has been placed on feedback and teamwork. Where any large decisions use polls, allowing everyone to have a voice. And more minor decisions use Pull Requests that can be reviewed by everyone to provide feedback in the functionality or message of new contributions, ensuring that adequate feedback or time is utilized before committing changes.
There are many ways, of course the classical Issues or Pull Requests on Repos is fine and well, additionally there are discussions org wide if needed. We are also all pretty active and responsive on our Discord Server, and messages there are always welcome. Additionally feel free to contact us through any of the below resources, or check out our Org Wide Readme as it's most up to date.
At this time, here is our current stance:
Firstly, moving away from Node and Electron would mean a complete rewrite of the whole editor, something we do not have the manpower to do.
Additionally moving away from these technologies will break every single package we have. The ecosystem of Atom and its community packages is a huge reason we wanted to keep it alive, rendering these completely useless removes one of the biggest advantages of the editor as a whole, and asking every single package author to rewrite their packages is not realistic.
Our own packages would have to be rewritten along with all of our Native Packages (which are already some of the most cumbersome to maintain) which would no longer function in this new environment.
Lastly, Atom is the editor that created Electron, while it may have its idiosyncrasies, we feel that it seems almost wrong to ditch it for some hot new thing.
The focus of our team as seen by our mission statement is to modernize and improve Atom, bringing it up to date, and create a proud sucessor of Atom called Pulsar. It is not to create a brand new editor from scratch.
At this time we simply believe it would be counter-productive to do so. Pulsar (and Atom before it) is still reliant on GitHub.
For example:
- Our build tools and pipeline have strict compatibility with GitHub.
- Our testing suite has been written specifically for GitHub.
- Our Package Backend (As was the way of Atom's Package Registry) has been written only for GitHub.
As one of the very first goals of the project was to get Pulsar up and running as fast possible and GitHub simply made the most sense from a tooling perspective as well as it being the biggest community to get both exposure and contributions.
We aren't ruling out anything for the future, we may decide to mirror this repo or migrate entirely but this isn't high on our current priorities as it simply doesn't provide any significant benefit to the project at this time.