I haven’t looked into it in about a month, but there are people on the atom team working on an experimental text editor engine written in rust rather than electron.

Maybe it's Xray? https://github.com/atom/xray (I'm personally super-excited to see how Xray turns out!)

That’s it! I’m on mobile, so I didn’t take the time to post a link. I’m excited to see how it turns out as well

It won't be going away. Microsoft and GitHub have both independently said they see a place for Atom and they're not getting rid of it.

Let's also not forget that the deal isn't done yet. They still have 5-ish months to go before it's done. It'll probably still go through but until then they're separate companies (and even after then GitHub is becoming a subsidiary).

Plus, it's open source, MIT licensed, so it would be difficult at best to make it just ¡poof! disappear.

Maybe it makes sense for MS to use one to keep the other honest. Maybe the negative PR from shutting down Atom isn't worth it. Etc.

“Apache Atom”