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GitHub’s Atom text editor picks up 750K downloads in its first year, with 300K monthly users

Atom's Astronomical theme.
Image Credit: Atom

Source code repository company GitHub today shared usage statistics for the open-source Atom text editor that the company released last year. The numbers suggest surprisingly speedy adoption.

Atom has been downloaded 750,000 times, with 300,000 monthly users and 56,000 contributions in the year since it’s been available, according to the new figures.

And version 1.0 of the text editor will ship next month, GitHubber Daniel Hengeveld wrote in a blog post on the news.

Atom is just one option out there for developers to write and commit code and perform version control. It’s not as popular as Sublime Text or Notepad++, for instance, according to Stack Overflow’s latest annual developer survey. And just last week Microsoft announced Visual Studio Code, a free Linux, Mac, and Windows-compatible editor. But hey, Atom is still young.


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Most people are using Atom on Mac OS X, with Windows and Linux trailing behind, according to the figures. The project has picked up more than 800 contributors.

The community around Atom contains some 1,631 authors, with 1,861 packages and 596 themes created, GitHub said.