Atom Text Editor For Mac
Written in CoffeeScript and Less, Atom is a completely free and open-source text editor with support for plugins written in Node.js — referred to by its creators as “A hackable text editor for the 21st Century”.
- Installing Atom. To get started with Atom, we'll need to get it on your system. This section will go over installing Atom on your system as well as the basics of how to build it from source.
- I use my text editor for that specific task: editing text. It complements my preferred professional integrated development environment (IDE), i.e. In this episode, let’s install Atom and get it setup.
It’s been awhile since Github’s Text editor, Atom, was announced and users with invites got the chance to try the 21st Century text editor. Yesterday, they open sourced the editor, and it is now available for everyone. I was one of those who got the chance to try Atom while it was invite only, and it was just like yet another code editor for me. At first, it looked more like a Sublime Text clone with almost similar functionality.
Atom is a modern code editor with apart from the ability to handle code nicely, also gives users the option to customize the editor just as they want. Unlike Sublime Text which makes you change the Config file for customization, Atom gives you a nice Interface to deal with preferences and customization.
The front-end is basically the same as most text editors have, tabs on top, a big workspace area where you write your code, line numbering on the left. There’s a status bar in the bottom in Atom editor which shows the current position of cursor, the file name and the file type. If you’re a user of Sublime Text, you must be knowing that it comes with Package Control, which lets you install packages to extend the power of the editor. Atom also comes with Package Control and some useful Packages come pre-installed with the editor. Atom also supports themes for the Editor Interface and the Syntax. Users can also override key bindings through Settings.
Atom Editor Download For Windows 10
The best thing about Atom is that it comes with lots of customization options and it gives you a nice, clean interface for changing Preferences, which Sublime Text doesn’t. In terms of performance, I found it a bit slower than Sublime Text. And since it is created by Github, it will be useful for those who use Github for their projects, and it already comes with a Github Package and I am sure that they’ll be adding more Github related features in the future.
Atom text editor is currently available for Mac only and you can grab it from here.
The MacBook Touch Bar has been notoriously labelled as a useless feature... however, it may have found a home with the Atom Text Editor. Check out these different packages that extend touch bar functionality to Atom.
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Join For FreeSix weeks ago, I took the plunge into the wacky world of USB-C and Touch Bars and ordered a shiny new MacBook Pro. I have been a Mac user since about 1997, following the company through the dark days, CPU changes, and OS changes. But this recent wave of machines seemed to spark more outcry than anything before, I think mostly because a lot of users felt that Apple showed strong signs of abandoning its 'pro' user base. I will get around to a full MacBook Pro review eventually, but in this article, I wanted to focus on a particular hardware feature used with a particular application.
Critics and customers have generally labeled the touch bar adorning the top of some new MacbBook Pro models as a dumb and failed idea, but like so many new features, when done right, it has its uses. As the number of applications that support it grows, its use also grows, and there are a handful of applications I use on a daily basis that I am still waiting on to support it.
There’s one application I use on a regular basis for a lot of my work, Atom, the text editor from GitHub, built on the Electron framework. Recent versions of the framework introduced support for the touch bar, and version 1.19 of Atom brought that support to Atom. A couple of intrepid developers have released packages that add functionality to the touch bar, so I decided to take a look.
Touchbar Registry
I’ll start with this package as it’s a dependency of one other package, abstracting the Electron APIs into Atom. You include it in your package package.json file, and add buttons like the below:
Which would (unhelpfully) add a button with the label ‘Hello Dzone’ that when clicked logs a message to Atom’s console. There are of course far more useful use cases for the package and I think the author hopes other developers will use it for their packages, but so far, few do.
Linter UI
I love the Atom linter package, and all the linters it supports. In one pane, I can see a wide variety of problems with my code & text and can work my way through fixing them. This package adds a summary of the warning types to the touch bar, but pressing the buttons does nothing at the moment.
Dig into the touchbarUI.js file to see how this works.
Touch Bar Utility
This package allows you to add a series of buttons, labels, and Atom actions in an array, so for example, by default this is:
The first does nothing apart from display a label with an icon, the second assigns an emoji icon with a colored background that when clicked runs the ‘beautify’ action, and the third toggles comments in code. It also lets you assign files for icons, popups, sliders, spacers and more. I changed mine to create more useful shortcuts for me:
So far, this is the most useful package to me, but I’d like to be able to add utility buttons, like the word count for example.
Touchbar
This works in a similar way to the last package, adds a toggle keyboard shortcut (ctrl-alt-o) and lacks a settings pane at the moment, moving configuration to a lib/config.json file, which means you need to find it directly in the ~/.atom/packages/touchbar folder, and I’m not sure how package updates will work. Once inside the options are similar, but slightly clearer and the default file gives more examples of what’s possible. To create something similar to what I created above I used the following JSON which also adds a emoji slider and a color picker.
Atoms touchbar
Another package that follows similar ideas tot the previous two, but less documented, defines actions in ~/.atom/packages/atoms-touchbar/lib/touchbars/action.js and requires code and JSON configuration. This gives more flexibility (and better functionality), but requires far more initial knowledge of what you’re doing. I get the impression from the documentation that the setup allows you to add different 'bars' and call them dynamically based on context, this is the only package that allows this and is more in fitting with the ethos of the touch bar, but will need a way for other packages to implement this to make it truly useful.
Atom touchbar
This package makes no claim to be configurable and you should treat it more as an example of how to create your own custom package (though as you can see, there are enough Atom touch bar packages already). It provides buttons for toggling the command palette, fuzzy finder, the linter panel, the Git panel, and commenting/uncommenting selections. If you don’t have any of those features enabled, then the button won’t work.
Touchbar Git
Adds git information to the touch bar, but it wouldn’t work for me, if this is something you want, watch the repository.
Raising the Bar
The main point of the touch bar is to be context sensitive, and so far all the packages, aside from atoms-touchbar (as far as I can tell) fix the buttons based on a particular use case, and not on dynamic uses cases. The logical next steps would be for package developers to all leverage one dependency package and add functionality to their packages, then allowing users to toggle the buttons they want to use from settings panes. As text editor users are typically heavy keyboard users, in theory, the touch bar could be useful, but their highly customizable nature means it remains to be seen how true this will be.
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