A couple of days ago, we were in for a great surprise: we saw the release of Atom 1.8, a new milestone of GitHub's open-source, cross-platform and powerful hackable text editor, bringing various new features and many bug fixes.

Atom 1.8 entered the Beta channel a couple of months ago, on April 12, 2016. It was also then when the 1.7 update of the hackable text editor hit the streets with features like support for opening and managing files from the Tree View, the ability to add project folders from the command-line, crash recovery support, and async Git support.

A month ago, on May 6, the Atom editor celebrated two years of being an Open Source project. Now, the Atom 1.8 release is here, implementing the ability to move selected text left or right, which users can access via the Alt+Shift+Left and Alt+Shift+Right keyboard shortcuts (have a look at the gif below to see it in action).

Another interesting change implemented in Atom 1.8 is called better environment handling by the project's developers, which means that Atom window's environment will now be automatically updated with the most recent environment variables when launching Atom from the command-line.

Lastly, Atom 1.8 introduces the "core.restorePreviousWindowsOnStart" setting to allow the automatic restore of the previously used windows when starting the editor, fixes an issue with bad emoji rendering on Mac OS X, various Git-related bugs, unexpected interface zooming issues, and wrong block decoration measurements.

What's coming to Atom 1.9

Now that Atom 1.8 is out as the most stable and advanced version of the hackable text editor many programmers and developers use for their unique projects, the next major version, Atom 1.9, has taken its place as the latest Beta offering. And it looks like it will bring various exciting new features.

Among the ones that have already been revealed are better compatibility with Cygwin and MSYS/MinGW environments on Microsoft Windows OSes, a file recovery service that promises to save your most precious work when something bad happens, Electron 0.37.8, drag and drop layout management for tabs, and a major revamp of the editor display layer.

You can download Atom 1.8 and Atom 1.9 Beta for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows operating systems right now via our website. For more details about the features implemented in these new releases, please take a look at the gallery below, as well as the official release announcement.