Atom
A text editor I seemed to be using
June 19, 2017 — November 6, 2018
Atom — a code editor made by GitHub, is easily extensible because, much like Emacs, it’s mostly written in a dynamic language (JavaScript) and is open source. Unlike Emacs, it’s not currently in an apparent evolutionary cul-de-sac. Powerful. Slow and RAM-hungry. I have given it up for VS Code.
See also intent-specific workflow tips at, e.g. latex, academic writing.
1 Incoming
1.1 What scope is my current document?
I don’t know. Run Editor: Log Cursor Scope.
2 Notable extensions
- symbol-tree-view for bearable navigation between definitions.
- remote-atom allows you to edit files on remote servers that you don’t want to use
vimon. - teletype enables generic live collaborative document editing
3 Panes
tl;dr if a pane has an italic header, double-click on it to keep it. Be aware the pending pane feature is handy but will confuse the crap out of you if you expect Atom not to try to guess whether you want to look at a file temporarily or permanently.
4 Atom as a platform
People can and do build whole IDEs in Atom.
4.1 jupyter
hydrogen turns Atom into an interface to jupyter kernels, for live code inspection and execution.
4.2 julia
Juno is an IDE for julia which I personally don’t particularly like because a single-window IDE is claustrophobic.
4.3 other
Nuclide is Facebook’s extension to Atom for web-centric development. I don’t use it because I’ve served my webdev time, but web people might care about it.