Atom comes with five themes by default, in both light and dark variations, but via it's packages manager, you can add more to suit your taste: Personalizing an editor is one of the first things any program does, especially the theme since it's what you'll look at every day.
In Atom, it looks like all settings are available and customizable via a settings panel, giving you the ability to update things such as:Īs well as easily disable packages that you've installed. One of the things that still irks me about Sublime (even v3), is that many of the configuration settings need to be adjusted manually. Products like TextExpander and other editors have done these for some time, so it's good to see GitHub including it day one.
Atom also supports syntax shortcuts (called snippets) that allow you to quickly create code blocks with minimal typing.įor example, if I type in ife followed by a tab, I'll get the following:Īnd simply typing in a lower case "f" followed by a tab gives me a skeleton for an anonymous function: The breadth of coverage is very comprehensive and on par with any editor I've seen.īut it's more than just supporting languages. Not only does it support Ruby syntax but also the Rails framework along with: While I primarily work in JavaScript, I have a burning desire to get into Ruby on Rails so ensuring broad language support. One of the first things I wanted to check was language support. When you first drop into Atom, it looks strikingly similar to Sublime, making it easy from a visual perspective to slide into it. We're excited to dig deeper into its toolbox. Native UI technologies come and go, but the web is a standard that can only becomes more capable and ubiquitous with every passing year. With the entire industry pushing web technology forward, we're confident that we're building Atom on fertile ground. Ultimately, this statement explains best why they leveraged web technologies: They also leveraged Node.js to allow for file system access and provide tremendous flexibility and extensibility in their packaging system basically making Atom highly customizable and giving it incredible access to a ton of npms. It's pretty freaky to be able to modify the code within my editor with the Chrome DevTools, but it goes to show that the underlying engine is web-based. Yep, that's the Chromium Developer Tools running within the editor and I'm highlighting an element with it. Why didn't they just build it as a browser-based IDE like Cloud9IDE? Because, despite a lot of progress in file APIs for the browser, there are still limitations in terms of file system access, so building it as a desktop app made a lot of sense. For example, the underlying architecture relies on Chromium (yes the basis for Google Chrome), making every window a locally-rendered web page.
The next thing to bring up is that this editor was created completely with web technology. It's not ideal, but I'm also being realistic about the status of the product. For example, I didn't find a way to create a project out of a directory, which is kind of important to me. The first thing to keep in mind is that this is a beta version things are going to change and some things aren't going to be in this release. A Hackable Text Editor for the 21st Century One thing to note is that the documentation is a bit sparse, so it was tough trying to determine what every feature did, but I'll be touching on the important aspects below. I got my hands on a beta and wanted to give you a rundown of what it offers. Well, GitHub is looking to shake things up with the beta launch of a new editor called Atom. The last big splash was made by Sublime Text which took the web development community by storm, especially once Package Control came around to serve as the package manager for the editor. It's been awhile since we've seen any updates in the editor space.