I tried that but it didn't seem to help.

Yes, that sounds right.

I vaguely recall that this was due to ECMAScript modules being stabilized surprisingly recently in Node.

This https://nodejs.org/api/esm.html says ECMAScript modules were marked experimental (thus needing a runtime flag on node to be enabled, I'm pretty sure) until 12.20.0, and "stabilized" in 12.22.0, whatever that distinction means.

And Atom gets its version of Node from Electron. Efforts to upgrade to newer Electron and therefore newer Node are ongoing, but slow. See: #22687

This is not encouraging for official support in Electron: electron/electron#21457
There is a workaround, apparently?: https://gist.github.com/sindresorhus/a39789f98801d908bbc7ff3ecc99d99c#how-can-i-import-esm-in-electron. (For example, using the esm package).

@DeeDeeG thanks for your help in the past. Is there any update on the current situation in Atom 1.60?

Hi again @ioquatix. I am not a huge expert in this, so I checked the electron issue for this again: electron/electron#21457 Seems like people are saying it's still not supported in any version of Electron.

So that leaves workarounds, polyfills, translation layers or build pipelines to convert the code before running it, etc.

I have seen these following workarounds, but I have no idea how good a solution they are. It's a bit over my head honestly.

• https://github.com/standard-things/esm / https://gist.github.com/sindresorhus/a39789f98801d908bbc7ff3ecc99d99c#how-can-i-import-esm-in-electron
• https://github.com/mifi/build-electron

Also, disclaimer: I'm just a contributor to Atom from time to time, so I don't speak as a member of or officially affiliated with the official Atom team. But I'm happy to help out the community and the project here and there when I can!

Thanks for your help. I tried the esm module but ran into other issues unfortunately. I rolled back everything to use commonjs and pinned all the package versions on commonjs compatible releases, which works.