GitHub is busy working on their new editor named atom. As of now it’s available as part of an invite-only beta program. But the coders were felt GaGa after the beta launch.

A text editor specially designed for programmers, project that they have been working for more than six years. Atom is completely open source and the company is encouraging developers to extend it as much as they want.

Atom said it in detail, indicating that they have worked to get the best of TextMate and Sublime (ease of use) and best of Emacs and Vim (extreme flexibility), allowing us to offer an editor that is simple to set up and use, without losing the power to program productively, both for primary and experienced hackers.

One of the main reasons for building Atom was that the company wanted an editor that “will be welcoming to an elementary school student on their first day learning to code, but also a tool they won’t outgrow as they develop into seasoned hackers.”

Atom is a variant of chrome designed to be a text editor instead of a web browser, so defined. File system browser, search engine to quickly open files, system-wide search project search and replace option, multiple panels, multiple cursors, clean user interface and dozens of features already listed on the project website.

Node.js support makes it trivial to access the file system, spawn sub-processes, and even start servers directly from within your editor. Need a library? Choose from over 50 thousand in Node’s package repository. Need to call into C or C++? That’s possible, too.

It looks to use CSS / LESS for highlighting, and CoffeeScript for client-side programming, or the auto completion. It doesn’t seem to be a fork of either Ace or CodeMirror. There seem to be Vim shortcuts and even theming.

There are a few plugins already out for it;

– Vim-mode – Fuzzy-finder – Emmet (aka Zen Coding) – Solarized-dark-syntax – Snippets (check) – Timecop (tracking where time is spent in the editor) – Editor-stats (graph your mouse / keyboard activity)

Overall, there is great expectation for the “Official” release of the editor, but no word yet on when that might be.

They will be sending out invitations in the coming weeks, making it clear that there is still much work to do. If you are interested you can ask for the invitation atom.io, although it seems that the first version for Mac will only.

Finally,

“A hackable text editor for the 21st century”!

Let us know whether you would like to test the new editor from GitHub in the comments section below.