This past weekend, we had the great surprise to see Atom 1.6, the next major version of GitHub's powerful, cross-platform and open-source hackable text editor exit the devel channel and enter the stable one.

Yes, you're reading it right, Atom 1.6 has been promoted to the stable channel, and you can download it right now for your GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, or Microsoft Windows box from its official website, or via ours. At the same time, the next major version, Atom 1.7, has entered the Beta channel.

It looks like more and more developers are moving to Atom as their favorite editor, which means that its developers have accelerated the development cycle of the project, bringing lots of new features and fixing as many bugs as possible. Therefore, Atom 1.6 is here to prove just that.

"Atom 1.6 and 1.7-beta are out. Atom 1.6 comes with pending pane items, improvements to pane management, and new APIs," said the Atom developers in the release announcement. "If you want to see every PR that went into Atom 1.6, check out the Atom 1.6.0 release notes."

Highlights of Atom 1.6, and what's coming in Atom 1.7

Prominent features of Atom 1.6 include the ability to see the contents of a file without the need of opening it in a dedicated tab (check out the first gif below for a preview), a significant amount of improvements to the multi-pane API, as well as support for inserting DOM nodes in between lines thanks to block decorations.

Atom now comes bundled with NodeGit, the native node bindings to Git, the world's most popular source code management system, and there's a new top and bottom bar API that lets package authors add a user interface that spans the entire width of the software.

In the coming weeks, Atom 1.7 will be released and it promises to introduce more new features and improvements, such as crash recovery, support for switching between most recently used tabs (see the second gif below for a preview), lots of improvements for the Microsoft Windows platform, a new version of Electron, and environment patching on Mac OS X.