I want to take the time to give my opinion on Atom, the text editor. As a developer, I can choose between a plethora of options for text editors, including but not limited to vim, emacs, Sublime, and Atom. As a developer that prefers GUI and using a mouse, I'm going to casually ignore any terminal(ly ill) related editors. Why? I think this sums it up pretty nicely:

IamDevloper's tweet about vim

Probably much like every Rails developer that taught themselves, I learned Rails using Sublime. And, quite frankly, Sublime is great! It has a ton of functionality, packages to add more functionality, and a fairly decent default colour scheme. But, teaching yourself how to learn how to install new packages for whatever new functionality was a pain in the butt.

Then came Atom. At first, I thought, "Not another editor! What makes it so much better than Sublime??" and thought nothing of it. I continued to use Sublime. But then I started to write a lot in Markdown. In particular, Github markdown because of support docs.

A colleague of mine mentioned an app that displayed a file in markdown, some app that started with a big teal M. I have no idea what it was, but having to use another app to view Markdown format was a pain.

Another colleague suggested Atom. Atom had this thing called "Markdown preview", done with a keyboard shortcut of cntl-shift-m. Boom! To my left was my .md file I was working on and to my right was the preview version. Fantastic!

But, after my stint at that particular job was over, I stopped using Atom and went back to Sublime. It wasn't until about a month later when that very same colleague mentioned in a tweet that Atom had gotten to be considerably better than Sublime and that he himself completely switched. I decided to give Atom another go, mostly after Yet Another Popup(tm) happened on Sublime. (Yeah I didn't want to shell out $70 for it, mostly because I don't use all those packages they have.)

I haven't looked back. Admittedly I haven't really added extra functionality or anything; I've added a few extra packages (such as particular syntax highlighting) and themes but outside of that, no major changes.

Here are some of Atom's functionalities that I enjoy fully. It's the little things!

  • I can change the theme and syntax highlighting super quickly and easily.
  • It tells me which branch I'm currently on, how many package/theme updates are available, and if there's anything wrong with the editor (like something was deprecated) at the very bottom.
  • It changes the colours of my files in my document tree based on whether it's new or modified (this might be because of a theme, but I loooove it!)
  • Atom tells me how much added time a plugin or theme will cause Atom's startup time to slow down.
  • Adding new themes/plugins/functionality is super simple.
  • If writing in markdown, typing code then pressing tab autocompletes it to the ` triple tick marks, then you can add ruby to the end of that to get ruby syntax highlighting in your .md's.
  • Typing pry then hitting tab autocompletes it to binding.pry
  • Markdown preview seriously needs a lot more love.

As a heads up, I currently use One Dark / Seti as my theme/syntax highlight.

Note though, that the functionalities I was used to in Sublime still worked in Atom, and that was a huge relief and made the transition much smoother.

Sublime is created by crazy Aussies. Atom is created by Github (aka, crazy SFers).

Level up +0. It's an opinionated piece, what did you expect?

Questions? Comments? Hit me up at risaonrails !