Is Atom good for Git? Atom can be used as your Git commit editor and ships with the language-git package which adds syntax highlighting to edited commit, merge, and rebase messages. The language-git package will help remind you to be brief by colorizing the first lines of commit messages when they're longer than 50 or 65 characters. When Microsoft acquired GitHub, there was speculation (and fear on my behalf) that GitHub would end up axing Atom in favor of Visual Studio Code. Taking a look at the commit activity for Atom on github.com shows that since the end of June 2019, development has basically stopped completely. Atom is a free and open-source text and source code editor for macOS, Linux, and Microsoft Windows with support for plug-ins written in JavaScript, and embedded Git Control. Developed by GitHub, Atom is a desktop application built using web technologies. Most of the extending packages have free software licenses and are community-built and maintained.Atom is based on Electron (formerly known as Atom Shell), a framework that enables cross-platform desktop applications using Chromium and Node.js. Atom is written in CoffeeScript and Less, but much of it has been converted to JavaScript. Atom was released from beta, as version 1.0, on 25 June 2015. Its developers call it a "hackable text editor for the 21st Century", as it is fully customizable in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.