I'm always on the look out for a good text editor, especially one that makes it easy to create and publish content for the web. Recently I learned about the Atom editor from a random guy at Target. We were talking about ladders and somehow we figured out we were both nerds and started talking about Emacs versus Vim. I was on the Vim side and he was on the Emacs side, and then he said "But now I mainly use Atom, which is the hot editor these days." I asked him if it was open source,1 cross-platform,2 and had some of the other features that I look for in an app. It sounded interesting, especially when he said I could set it up to use Vim commands. So I looked at the Atom.io site, read some of the discussion group messages, searched the web for Atom.io and Atom editor to get a sense of what other people think about it, and decided to try it. My verdict: I like it!
I installed it on my Windows and OS X devices, along with these packages:
I made these customizations:
Disabled the Metrics package so Google Analytics won't know about my Atom use
Set the Vim Mode package to "Start in Insert Mode"
Fiddled with the Bracket Matcher package's Settings
I'll probably install these packages at some point:
One of the five SFTP packages
Atom is highly customizable and there are many more customizations that I'm thinking about making.
I'm using Atom right now to write and preview this Tumblr post. At the moment, the main thing I'm wishing is that the Markdown Preview package, which is bundled with Atom, supported previewing Markdown footnotes and abbreviations, both of which I'm using in this post.
So my first wish is that:
Markdown Preview supported a flavor of Markdown, such as Markdown Extra or kramdown, that supports footnotes and abbreviations. Markdown Preview currently supports GitHub Flavored Markdown, which is a superset of CommonMark.
I also wish it were easy to do the following within Atom:
Open recent files or folders. This could be done with a Recent... submenu on the File menu.
Write and preview mathematical equations. This could be implemented with LaTeX, MathML, or another equation markup language, and MathJax.
Insert Unicode characters in the Windows version of Atom. The Mac OS X version supports this through the Edit > Special Characters menu item.
Encrypt and decrypt a file using Blowfish. I like to use Blowfish because Vim 7.3+ can encrypt and decrypt Blowfish-encrypted files.
Email a file or part of a file
My last three wishes make me think of Zawinski's Law3:
Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.
It's been about 20 years since JWZ stated his software law and I think it's time to update it to:
Every app4 attempts to expand until it can connect to social networking systems. Those apps which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.
I hope Atom expands to satisfy my wishes and that a lot of talented open-source software developers use and contribute to its expansion. I'm dreaming of an editor I won't need to replace for a long time so I can focus on writing rather than searching for the perfect editor.
Thank you random guy at Target for telling me about Atom! Thank you GitHub for creating this great IDE and making it free (in both senses of the word5).
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_(text_editor)
stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/atom-editor
By: NM
Last Updated: 2014-10-28
URL: nancym.tumblr.com/post/100938088785/atom-editor
Atom is MIT licensed and is FLOSS (Free/Libre Open Source Software). ↩︎
Atom is cross-platform and pre-built versions are available for Debian Linux (Ubuntu), OS X 10.8+, and Windows 7+. ↩︎
For more about JWZ and his law, see jwzhacks and Wikipedia: Jamie Zawinski. ↩︎
I use the word "app" in my revision of Zawinski's Law because the words "program" and "software" seem to have been replaced by the words "app" and "application" in 2014. ↩︎
The word "free" can mean gratis or libre. Atom is both gratis and libre. ↩︎