Are you lost which Editor you need to choose? Well my answer would be Atom.io. I would be explaining about Atom in depth in this Blog so that it’s easy for you to choose.

What is Atom?

Atom is a free and open source text and source editor that’s modern, approachable, yet hack-able to the core i.e. a tool that you can customize to do anything but also use productively without ever touching a config file.

Editors like Sublime and TextMate offer convenience but only limited extensibility. On the other end of the spectrum, Emacs and Vim offer extreme flexibility, but they aren’t very approachable and can only be customized with special-purpose scripting languages.

Main Advantages of Atom

Below mentioned are the main advantages of Atom:

1. Cross-platform editing – Atom works across different operating systems. You can use it on OS-X, Windows, or Linux.

2. Built-in package manager – Search for and install new packages or start creating your own – all from within Atom.

3. Smart auto-completion – Atom helps you write code faster with a smart, flexible autocomplete.

4. Multiple panes – Split your Atom interface into multiple panes to compare and edit code across files.

5. Find and replace – Find, preview, and replace text as you type in a file or across all your projects.

Installing ATOM

Atom comes with a windows installer. You can download the installer from:

https://atom.io

Features of Atom

Now let’s move ahead with some of the cool features of Atom:

1. Atom comes pre-installed with four UI and eight syntax themes in both dark and light colors. If you can’t find what you’re looking for, then you can also install themes created by the Atom community or create your own.

Here is a screenshot of how you can set themes in Atom.



2.We can access Atom through command prompt. We can open Atom screen by just typing Atom from your command prompt.

3. It also gives an apm command to install the default packages in Atom via command prompt. You can also uninstall the packages.

The Nucleus of Atom

Atom is a specialized variant of Chromium (Chromium is the open-source web browser project from which Google Chrome draws its source code) designed to work as a text editor rather as a web browser. Every Atom window is essentially a locally-rendered web page. Everything is local in atom and you need not worry about asset pipelines, script concatenation and asynchronous module definitions. If you want to load some code, just bring it to the top of your file. Node’s module system makes it easy to break the system down into several small, focused packages.

Some of the shortcuts in ATOM

There are a handful of cool key bindings for basic text manipulation that might come in handy. These range from moving around lines of text and duplicating lines to changing the case. Some of the shortcuts are:

⦁ CTRL-T – Transpose characters. This is used to swap two characters on either side of the cursor.

⦁ CMD-J – Join the next line to the end of the current line.

⦁ CMD-K, CMD-U – Upper case the current word.

⦁ CMD-K, CMD-L – Lower case the current word.

⦁ CMD-ALT-Q – You can format the current selection to have lines no longer than 80 characters using. If nothing is selected, the flow will be as per the current paragraph.

You can also delete or cut text out of your buffer with some shortcuts.

⦁ CTRL-SHIFT-K – Delete current line

⦁ CMD-DELETE – Delete to end of line

⦁ CTRL-K – Cut to end of line

⦁ ALT-BACKSPACE, ALT-H – Delete to beginning of word

⦁ ALT-DELETE, ALT-D – Delete to end of word

⦁ CMD-F – Search within a buffer

⦁ CMD-SHIFT-F – Search the entire project

Steps to Add your Project folder to Atom

After installing Atom, you have to add your project folder to Atom. Follow these steps:

1.File menu  Click on Add Project Folder menu option or (ALT+CTRL+O).

2.Specify the path of your folder and select it.

3.Now create the file: File menu option  Click on New file menu option.

Shown below is a screenshot of a file opened in Atom:



Running a file in Atom is similar to the way you run in Sublime or Eclipse.

1.To run a HTML file in Atom: Right click the file and open it with the required web browser.

Here, I would like to mention about a package – script-runner.

Script-runner runs scripts inside Atom just like from a terminal. This package will run various script files inside Atom. It currently supports JavaScript, CoffeeScript, Ruby, Python and Bash.

Usage

Command Mac OS X Linux/Windows Run: Script ctrl-x alt-x Run: Terminate ctrl-c alt-c

Conclusion:

Hope these features of Atom that I have explained in the Blog above made it a cool and different editor from others. Hope you liked this editor and its features and will start using it.

If you have any other query you can write to us at [email protected]

Keep visiting our website Acadgild for more updates on Atom and other technologies. Click here to learn Android App Development.



