Atom Editor
I have been using the Atom Editor by GitHub as my primary programming text editor for a few months.
Here’s a list of packages that I use, and would recommend if you want to try it out.
Seti UI and Seti Syntax
Seti UI is technically not a package, it’s a theme. It changes the file icons in the file viewer to match your file content. It makes it easier to locate files and identify their type at a glance.
Seti Syntax is a subtle dark coloured syntax that goes well with the Seti UI.
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Minimap places a Sublime Text style map on the right of your editor. You may feel like you miss it if you come from Sublime.
Autocomplete+ and Autocomplete+ Snippets.
These 2 packages are an absolute must for any sort of programmer. They make coding so much easier. Try it and you’ll know.
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If you work in the web like I do, Emmet is a tool to help you write and edit HTML and CSS extremely quickly. Together with the 2 Autocomplete+ packages, your cursor will fly like a speeding bullet.
These are not Atom specific packages. Most other text editors have them too. It makes for a better experience compared to using the Atom without any packages.
As an editor, Atom is still rough around the edges. The start up time is slow, opening and closing Atom multiple times for quick file edits is not feasible.
Overall, I’ve been happy with it so far and don’t see myself switching to another editor any time soon.
Context for 2014
Atom arrived in 2014 from GitHub as the hackable editor, built out of web technology: Chromium rendered the UI, Node ran the packages, and everything in the window was inspectable and scriptable in CoffeeScript and later JavaScript. That was the pitch that pulled people over from Sublime Text, and the package list above is what that openness looked like in practice: themes and extensions you could write in an afternoon because the extension language was the language you already used for the web.
The same machinery that made it hackable made it heavy. A Chromium instance per window is a browser pretending to be a text editor, which is why the startup complaint in the paragraph above exists, and why my resource story a year later moved to Spacemacs for the small machines.
What happened to it
GitHub kept Atom alive after the Microsoft acquisition, but the momentum had moved. Atom Shell, the Chromium packaging that came out of Atom’s build, was renamed Electron in 2016 and became the substrate for a thousand desktop apps, most visibly VS Code, which ran the same hackable-web-editor idea on a faster core. GitHub archived Atom in December 2022 and the project closed. The packages in the list above all have descendants: minimaps, fuzzy finders and snippet engines now ship as defaults in every editor, which is as close to a legacy as an editor gets.
Published on by Stanley