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What is Atom?

At GitHub, we're building the text editor we've always wanted. A tool you can customize to do anything, but also use productively on the first day without ever touching a config file. Atom is modern, approachable, and hackable to the core. We can't wait to see what you build with it.
Atom is a tool in the Text Editor category of a tech stack.
Atom is an open source tool with 59.9K GitHub stars and 17.4K GitHub forks. Here’s a link to Atom's open source repository on GitHub

Who uses Atom?

Companies
1204 companies reportedly use Atom in their tech stacks, including Lyft, GitHub, and Glovo.

Developers
15267 developers on StackShare have stated that they use Atom.

Atom Integrations

GitHub, TSLint, Kite, WakaTime, and Jsonnet are some of the popular tools that integrate with Atom. Here's a list of all 26 tools that integrate with Atom.
Pros of Atom
529
Free
449
Open source
343
Modular design
321
Hackable
316
Beautiful UI
170
Github integration
147
Backed by github
119
Built with node.js
113
Web native
107
Community
35
Packages
18
Cross platform
5
Multicursor support
5
Nice UI
5
TypeScript editor
3
Snippets
3
Simple but powerful
3
Open source, lots of packages, and so configurable
3
cli start
3
Chrome Inspector works IN EDITOR
2
Awesome
2
Smart TypeScript code completion
2
Well documented
2
It's powerful
2
Code readability
1
works with GitLab
1
User friendly
1
full support
1
vim support
1
Split-Tab Layout
1
"Free", "Hackable", "Open Source", The Awesomness
1
Apm publish minor
1
Hackable and Open Source
1
Consistent UI on all platforms
0
Publish
Decisions about Atom

Here are some stack decisions, common use cases and reviews by companies and developers who chose Atom in their tech stack.

Rogério R. Alcântara
Needs advice
on
NeovimNeovim
and
VimVim

For a Visual Studio Code/Atom developer that works mostly with Node.js/TypeScript/Ruby/Go and wants to get rid of graphic-text-editors-IDE-like at once, which one is worthy of investing time to pick up?

I'm a total n00b on the subject, but I've read good things about Neovim's Lua support, and I wonder what would be the VIM response/approach for it?

See more
Needs advice
on
AtomAtomPyCharmPyCharm
and
Sublime TextSublime Text

I am a beginner in Python. I don't have a reliable internet connection and I own a weak hardware in my laptop. I want to go to data security after learning python. Confused between PyCharm, Sublime Text and Atom. I want to stick to one. Which should I make habit of?

See more
Felix Hungenberg
Graphic Designer & Web Developer at hosting.de GmbH · | 2 upvotes · 110.5K views

I use Visual Studio Code every day, it was very refreshing coming from Atom to get a lightweight, all i need setup right out of the box.

After working with Atom for around 2 years I switch to VSCode.

Here is why:

  1. Color display of variables in code. This may now sound much, but it improve the display of scss variables and its a core feature.
  2. Out of the box features.
  3. Automation! VSCode suggests usefull things to you.
  4. Integraded console. I love the console in VSCode. It is faster than my 'default' cmd on Windows. For Atom you would have to install a package, that doesn't work so well on Windows.
  5. Output logging per Plugin.
  6. Setup time. In VSCode I can set up my workspace in under 5 minutes. For Atom I need
  7. Plugins work perfect out of the box. This is a mayor one for me. For example: In order to set up Editorconfig you have to adjust mutliple values and plugins to get it work. Plugin creators of Editorconfig for Atom are not to blame: They include a linter, that verifies whether the settings are correct or not.
  8. Git implementation. VSCode ships with Git and even if the git packet of vscode doesn't look like much, theres a lot to it. For example you can watch changes inline.
  9. Minimap and vertical scrollbar. This feature is much better implementet in VSCode and you don't need an extra plugin.
  10. Auto completion. Sass mixins example: @include and you press CTRL+SPACE and VSCode shows you every Sass mixin.
  11. Copy paths from open file tab. In VSCode you can copy the path of an file directly when you have it open. In atom you need to select 'show in tree view' and than copy the path or relative path.
  12. Tree view. The tree view VSCode automaticly brings you to the current open file by default. This helps when working with components.
  13. File search. The file search supports the asterisk so you can search for eg molecule-*.ts.
  14. Tasks support. Tasks are integrated in VSCode so eg. for Typescript you can CTRL + SHIFT + B and select tsc: watch - tsconfig.ts.
  15. Short waiting time. For example when deleting files or beautifying 20.000 lines of json (Atom hangs up).
  16. More releases. Faster feature implementation. Active community.
See more

Atom's Features

  • Atom is a desktop application based on web technologies
  • Node.js integration
  • Modular Design- composed of over 50 open-source packages that integrate around a minimal core
  • File system browser
  • Fuzzy finder for quickly opening files
  • Fast project-wide search and replace
  • Multiple cursors and selections
  • Multiple panes
  • Snippets
  • Code folding
  • A clean preferences UI
  • Import TextMate grammars and themes

Atom Alternatives & Comparisons

What are some alternatives to Atom?
Sublime Text
Sublime Text is available for OS X, Windows and Linux. One license is all you need to use Sublime Text on every computer you own, no matter what operating system it uses. Sublime Text uses a custom UI toolkit, optimized for speed and beauty, while taking advantage of native functionality on each platform.
Visual Studio Code
Build and debug modern web and cloud applications. Code is free and available on your favorite platform - Linux, Mac OSX, and Windows.
Brackets
With focused visual tools and preprocessor support, it is a modern text editor that makes it easy to design in the browser.
cell
cell is a self-constructing web app framework powered by a self-driving DOM. Learning cell is mostly about understanding how cell works, and not about how to use and memorize some API methods, because there is no API.
Element
Element is a Vue 2.0 based component library for developers, designers and product managers, with a set of design resources.
See all alternatives

Atom's Followers
14339 developers follow Atom to keep up with related blogs and decisions.