Atom - A Fully Customisable Text Editor for Coders

Written by Kevin Liew on 08 May 2014
33,837 Views • Web Development

Code editor/IDE is like a garage for web developers. We have tools to help us code faster such as parser, validator, code snippet library, code expander, syntax highlighter etc. There all built to assist the developer code more efficiently and track/fix issues quickly.

Personally, I have been using Panic Coda for years, haven't really bothered me to change to other editors because I like its simple UI, not so heavyweight but in the same time it has the basic tool such as built-in FTP client. There are some good editors out there, and there is one just added to the big family.

Introducing Atom, an editor created by the popular GitHub.

At GitHub, we're building the text editor we've always wanted. A tool you can customize to do anything, but also use productively on the first day without ever touching a config file. Atom is modern, approachable, and hackable to the core. We can't wait to see what you build with it.

Atom is a desktop application based on web technologies. It has the look and capabilities of normal desktop application, but in the same time, because it's web based, you can tweak the look of Atom's interface just like editing website!

How does a web app can access OS filesystem you may ask? Atom integrated with Node.js, seamless integration allows you to freely mix usage of Node and browser APIs. Manipulate the file system and write to the DOM, all from a single JavaScript function.

Features

Atom is no joking around. With its first release, it's packed with many useful features:

  • File system browser
  • Fuzzy finder for quickly opening files
  • Fast project-wide search and replace
  • Multiple cursors and selections
  • Multiple panes
  • Snippets
  • Code folding
  • A clean preferences UI
  • Import TextMate grammars and themes

Join the discussion

Comments will be moderated and rel="nofollow" will be added to all links. You can wrap your coding with [code][/code] to make use of built-in syntax highlighter.

1 comment
paul 11 years ago
please tell your audience that this software is for OSX only :|
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