Today I want to share something awesome! I will talk about Atom text editor, a hackable text editor for the 21st Century as named in the official website.

A text editor is a simple program we use to write and edit plain text. In the development world, a text editor is a little bit more than that. When you write code, a text editor can be a very helpful tool, with more feautures helping you code faster, with built-in extensions giving you extra functionality and improved UI/UX that makes your work more efficient and accurate. We have a long list and variety of text editors in the development world because there are some editors out there focused on different markerts. Generally you can use any editor you want and get the job done easily.

Personally I was (ok still am) a fan of Brackets “A modern, open source text editor that understands web design” as described in the official website. It is modern, light and made for web designers and front-end developers(like me!). Brackets provide a fun tool called live preview and comes with preprocessor support. I have been using it for a long time now and this article here almost feels like I am cheating my favourite editor because today I want to talk about Atom.

So Atom was released back in 2014, but I started playing around with it around the mid 2017 partly because of work schedule and of course my undying love for Brackets. What got me intrigued was their tag line “a hackable text editor”. So I downloaded (it is completely free) and started my exploration. Like Brackets, it is open-source and has a community that supports and improves it. It has open source packages that add new features and functionality (Brackets call them extensions), a different layout much more appealing at least to my eyes and of course there are themes etc. The great thing about Atom is that there is in the file menu there is access to the config, keymaps, scripts, stylesheets for the editor itself. I played around with this for 10 minutes and I already had “hacked” a bit my editor. Taking a deeper look there is a ton of possibilities that Atom offers you when you are developing a project. And for this I have been using both Brackets and Atom for a period of time.

However lately I find myself using Atom more and now it is my default editor. I find it a little bit slower than Brackets but I really enjoy the interface and confort I get from it. This is not in any way an advertisment for Atom, but I recommend that you download it and explore it yourself. It is a really cool editor and it keeps getting better and better. I have not uninstalled Brackets and I occasionally still use it but Atom is my goto choice and I really felt the need to share this with the internet and spread the word!

Fun fact: Atom colour palette is similar to my own! Happy coincidence there. 🙂