My first week with Atom editor

In my previous post I summed up my favorite packages for the Sublime Text editor. I use the editor for minor edits in front end development (mostly in JavaScript). Atom is a new promising editor developed and maintained by Github. The first major version of Atom was released more than a half year ago and I thought now is the right time to try this editor.

From the beginning of using Atom, it impressed me. I felt like it is a very intuitive editor with great usability. I like that Atom has active community with often updates and improvements. I also really like Atom’s UI and how Atom visualizes errors, diffs, etc.

Atom’s startup was extremely slow and I didn’t find out how to open files from different projects in current window in previous versions. Fortunately, these downsides are fixed in new version and I replaced Sublime editor with Atom. In one week of using Atom I used this list of packages.

General packages

Open-recent – open recent files in the current window

Minimap – a preview of source code

Split-diff – shows diff between two split panes

Minimap-split-diff – a minimap plugin for split-diff package

Editorconfig – plugin for EditorConfig, which helps developers define and maintain consistent coding styles between different editors and IDEs

Tool-bar – provides extensible tool bar

Tool-bar-almighty – adds many commonly used actions in the tool-bar

Highlight-selected – highlights selected text in opened file

Minimap-highlight-selected – a minimap plugin for highlight-selected package

Set-syntax – setting the syntax of the current file

Todo-show – finds all the TODO, FIXME, CHANGED, XXX, IDEA, HACK, NOTE, REVIEW comments in your project

Pigments – highlights color values

Minimap-pigments – minimap plugin for pigments package

Jumpy – jump between characters without using a mouse

Autoclose-html – automates closing of HTML Tags

Emmet – web development toolkit which greatly improves HTML & CSS workflow

Atom-terminal – Launches terminal from the current file

Terminal-plus – You can open the terminal in Atom editor

Linter packages

Atom editor provides all fundamental linters for front-end web development. Linter-eslint, linter-tidy, linter-bootlint, linter-xmllint, jsonlint, linter-csslint, linter-scss-lint, …

JavaScript packages

Language-babel – syntax definitions for ES6 JavaScript with React JSX extensions

Atom-ternjs – plugin for TernJS, which analyses your JS code on-the-fly and provides autocompletion, function argument hints, jump-to-definition, and various automatic refactoring operations

Hyperclick – Open variable’s definition

Prettier-atom – formatting JavaScript using prettier

Console-log – places your selected variable in console.log

Aligner – Align multiple lines and blocks