A text editor is an important tool for developers, since they spend a lot of time using one. This article is about Atom, a cool modern editor.

Atom is a free and open source text editor developed in 2015 by Github. Its developer calls it “the hackable text-editor for the 21st century.” It offers vast language support, and easy customization. It also works as an integrated development environment, or IDE. It comes with some built-in packages, but you can install other packages too. Most of these are freely licensed and maintained by community. Of course, it’s also free of cost.

Installing Atom on Fedora

Go to the Atom homepage from your web browser and click to download the RPM version. You can also download the

atom.x86_64.rpm

file directly from the releases page. Then install it using this command:

sudo dnf install ./atom.x86_64.rpm

To launch, run this command at the terminal:

atom

After installing

Once you launch, you’ll see the screen below.

You’re now ready to go. One of the most important commands to remember is Ctrl+Shift+P, which opens the Command Palette.

Use the Palette to search through various available commands.

Installing packages

The editor comes with a large number of packages that add functionality. To install any package, follow these steps:

Press Ctrl and click on Install.

Type the name of package to install.

Hit Install to install the package.

Here is a preview of the installation:

Here are some packages you might find useful to start with:

Minimap

Beautify

Git Plus

Color Picker

File Icons

Themes

The Settings view allows you to change the theme to suit your preferences. The default installation comes with four UI themes and eight syntax themes. To modify your theme or install new themes, click the Themes tab on the Settings view.

Once you customize the editor to suit your needs, enjoy this cool, modern development tool!

Image courtesy of Giorgio Galeotti — originally uploaded to Flickr as Atomium.